1LT Laura Margaret Walker Memorial Portrait, In Progress

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In Progress...

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The cardinals at our front door have a project in progress as well; a second brood of eggs. This is Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal's third nest in the same location. As you can see by the very solid construction in the photograph above, it looks as if this nest might be a success. The nest before this one was hastily built and collapsed on our porch in a flaming disaster. This was my fault, as I removed the first empty nest immediately upon discovering it (the nest is within three feet of our front door, and we have two cats) but the persistent cardinals quickly constructed a second nest which was so weak the eggs kept falling out and smashing on our front porch.

Even though my intentions were good (birds in cats) I felt pretty bad for screwing up the life of birds. I did my best one afternoon to plug up the holes in the nest, but I'm afraid I don't have much experience at constructing nests. Following an overnight thunderstorm a few days later, the entire enterprise was gone.

I discovered this most recent nest after finding a dead Baltimore oriole in our front garden. This particular Baltimore oriole, I suspect, was the same one I had found sitting on the middle of the road in a rainstorm one evening and had brought home for rehabilitation, placing it in a leaf barrel on our front porch, directly under the as-of-yet undiscovered third cardinal's nest. The oriole recovered and flew away the next morning, only to return and die for some reason in our front garden. It's too much of a coincidence to say these are two different Baltimore orioles, although they could be. But I don't think so.

I spent a few hours last night researching and working on a cartoon having to do with Connie Chung's farewell skit on her MSNBC show,which I was going to call MAD TV. It would have been a pretty good cartoon, especially as I was going to throw Dan Rather and Katie Couric in there as well, all singing badly and wearing evening gowns.

I've decided not to finish the cartoon, but I have one observation to offer which I hadn't come across in my reading of a number of other blogs on the same subject. Mrs. Chung revealed the motivation for her seemingly absurd performance in the very first stanza of her self-penned torchlight tune-

We came to do a show, for very little dough.
By little, I mean I could make more working on skid row.

In a media world where freakish news and entertainment receives the most attention, and where her own value as a professional new anchor had been reduced by changes in the marketplace to near zero, Mrs. Chung made a very calculated move to reinvent herself as a buzz worthy 59 year old media experienced nutcase.

A ringmaster, fired from the circus and about to be escorted from the tent, tries to retain the spotlight by changing into a clown. Clowns get paid much better than ringmasters these days anyway. A much better cartoon, that.