July 29, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 4:48 pm

Bird Species: house sparrow, northern cardinal, house finch, gray catbird, American robin, white-breasted nuthatch, song sparrow

Things I Thought About:

• One summer when I was very little, my dad and my uncle were both reading a book called Bored of the Rings, which was, as you might imagine, a Tolkien parody. Throughout the 70s one might find this book on the bookshelf at a lake house, or someone's older sister's boyfriend was reading it. It was a book that was around. It was absolute gibberish to me, a seven- or eight-year-old who had already read The Hobbit.
• I tried it again in my twenties and it was unbearable.
• You know, sometimes I slip and start thinking gray squirrels are cute and then I see one that looks like this, and no thank you to this at all.

• Bored of the Rings came to mind because a young person mentioned the poem Desiderata today, because it was printed on a poster on the ceiling at his dentist.
• This reminded me that around the same time there had been a parody of that poem called the Deteriorata, and it was easily as popular as Bored of the Rings ever was.
• Apparently in the 70s of my childhood, there was a thriving market for terrible faux-highbrow literary parodies of beloved and accessible literary properties, which grown-ups who were themselves of a literary bent would read and act as if it was the funniest fucking thing they ever read in their lives. They had to have been lying.
• That is a very punk rock cardinal.

• I went down a complete Wikipedia K-hole on this today and discovered that the Deteriorata became insanely popular for a time in the 70s because National Lampoon released it as a comedy single, in an additional and separate parody of a spoken-word album where Desiderata was the opening track.
• What was going on. Why was anyone up for all that. I am exhausted just thinking about it.
• Christopher Guest wrote the music they played under it on the parody single. I cannot believe how I spent my time today.
• I wonder if literally anyone who reads the bird blog has heard of either the Desiderata or Deteriorata, which, listen: just those titles side by side tells you the parody is dogshit.
• Leaving aside the issue of the parodies, Desiderata was popular on dorm posters all through the 60s and 70s. Wikipedia tells me that Morgan Freeman has spoken in interviews about how much he loves it, although I think we can agree he doesn't always make the classiest choices.
• I myself think it's quite nice, as prose poems that offer advice go. Beats the shit out of the "Wear Sunscreen" one, anyway.
• "Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence." I blog this literally every weekend.
• Not sure how well the sentiment goes with dentistry, though.

BOTD: American robin. I enjoyed this guy so much. You can tell he's young from his patchy coloring and the way that broken eye ring isn't all the way there yet, and he was being a little piggie. Disgusting. SO fun.

He had a worm in his mouth when I spotted him, and he had all the worms in his mouth at any given point. I kept thinking he'd have to drop one to get another one, but the worm wad kept getting bigger and bigger. At one point, some were curling around the top of his bill and I thought "Is this clown bird going to lose to a worm?" But he prevailed.

This king's feast was happening in someone's front yard, too, which must be very gratifying, to know you have such a healthy wormy lawn. I could not stop laughing at this bird.

This is not as big as it got.