Word: birding
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...touch it dear" pigeon guano. But London Lord Mayor Ken Livingstone has declared war on the square's infamous winged residents. Livingstone's plan is to starve them, and after months of legal wrangles and, ultimately, a lucrative settlement, the city evicted Bernard Rayner, Trafalgar's sole bird-feed vendor, from the square. Trafalgar's pigeons are so tame they would eat from children's hands?if children were clever enough to avoid the watchful patrolmen. One group has: the Pigeon Alliance. Week after week, a grandmotherly woman marches through the square with a bulging shoulder bag. From it pours...
...still hear the Wibbage jingle, with some Johnny Mann Singers-type ensemble perkily warbling, "W-IBG,/ Where your dial belongs the ev-en-ing through,/ W-IBG,/ Joe Niagara spins the hits for you." Known as the Rockin' Bird, Niagara had been with the station eight years before the music revolution, but the young pro fit smartly in any format. His shtick was to run the end of one sentence into the beginning of the next, then take a breath in the middle. It brought suspense to the simple craft of reading commercials you never knew. When he'd pause...
...theme. Glass once did three hours on chickens. The piece de resistance was a memoir of an Israeli chicken kibbutz. The experience not only revealed the storyteller's true sexual orientation, but showed that even immersion in the hell of the mass poultered won't turn one off the bird. "Oh no," he said. "You'll still eat chicken, and you'll chew real slow...
...exhibition closes with a focus on one of Hitchcock's last films, The Birds. The horizontal flight path of one of the birds in Georges Braque's Blackbirds is mirrored in the angle that Philippe Halsman, a still photographer on the film's set, uses in the photo of a bird flying past co-star Tippi Hedren. Despite the apparent tranquility of René Magritte's The Deep Waters, the proportionally larger-than-life bird resting next to a clothed statue of a woman is as menacing as the crow perched on Hedren's arm in another Halsman photo...
...characters are wildly sexual-it is their whole game, what with pistils and stamens and their frank, unblinking, scandalous fertility, and our salacious Italian bees stirring constantly among them, the messengers of love. A soap opera of many seasons goes on and on, starring characters like Blue-bird Violet, Motherwort, Spreading Dogbane, Lady's Thumb, and Spiked Lobelia...