PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

101 things about me and it seems i'm just scratching the surface 2003-03-13 - 7:00 p.m. I have bred Peachfront Conures, Canaries, Zebra Finches, Society Finches, Budgerigars, and Silver Button Quail. These days, I'm more into creating situations for wild birds to breed and letting them do all the work. My first bird was a Peachfront Conure named Arthur who was imported from Bolivia in 1982. The trappers used to take the babies from the nest and feed them chewed-up baby food from their mouths, causing these birds to be sweet and easy to tame, even though they were wild-caught. Arthur was loving, intelligent, and beautiful -- everything a pet should be. For years, he spent many hours a day on my shoulder, "assisting" me in my writing career. Unfortunately, he died at age 9 of malaria, a hidden protozoan disease that he brought from his home country. Arthur's mate Gwen was never crazy about me, and she was always a little jealous of our special relationship, so I had to keep my distance from Arthur when I first put him together with his future mate. Distancing myself from my sweetie was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was worth it when he and Gwen were able to raise some beautiful babies. In the 1980s, I had two small toucans, a female Saffron Toucanette and an Emerald Toucanette. The Saffron was beautiful but a little haughty. The Emerald was affectionate and was eating out of my fingers within five minutes of coming home. I have written 7 published books on pet birds, as well as many magazine articles and a few short stories. I don't like to talk about it much, and I don't like to encourage people to get into writing unless they are radical cheapskates like me. People who are looking for money and recognition are more likely to find heartache unless they are tireless self-promoters or they come from a background where getting into Bennington is a given. The day of the shy, retiring writer working out of his garret is done; such a person would not even be able to get his work read. If your attraction to writing is the freedom from dealing with people, you have the wrong career. You should have been born in 1900. Or 1800. Sorry. I love the game of tightwadding, cheapskatery, dumpster diving -- call it whatever you want -- but it is a game, not a religion. Once it becomes a cult, the fun is gone, and there is no point. For many years, my partner and I worked part-time. I still think we did the right thing. You may or may not ever get the opportunity to retire when you're old. You may or may not ever get old. Enjoy life while you're young. There will always be time to be a wage slave. Speaking of which, I didn't get the whole baggy jeans fad. There is plenty of time to have a fat ass when you're old. I like to collect mineral specimens and stone spheres. I have collected so many that I have instituted a new rule: As soon as I get a new and better one, the old one(s) go for sale on Ebay. I also sell cutting rough on Ebay. I have a lot, more than I can photograph and list. If you want something, let me know, and if I have it, I'll put it up for auction or even sell it to you directly. I love to cut cabs but I am the world's slowest stone cutter. When I was in 2nd grade, I read a book called Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert Heinlein, and my whole world rocked. I became an avid if not fanatic SF reader. Then I read Podkayne of Mars, the book where the heroine "settles," and I realized that maybe I was a little uneasy with Heinlein. I had never read a book where the protagonist "settled." It just wasn't done in children's books. I immediately felt as if I were being indoctrinated into accepting my "place" in society. Fuck my place in society, was my immediate reaction. And then in high school I read Time Enough for Love, where he's in the hot tub with his clones and goes back in time to nail his mother, and that's when I knew for certain that I'd had enough. I'm still a crazed wild-eyed Philip K. Dick fan but he sadly passed away much too young in 1982. One day in the 80s, a friend said, "If you read science fiction, you go to another world, but if you read a regular book, you can go anywhere," and I realized that she was right. Forget the labels. Follow the books you love anywhere. I don't want to collect books by another author as prolific as Dick -- I need room to turn around in my house! -- so I don't collect Joyce Carol Oates or Ruth Rendell. But if I had a reading room to devote just to them, I would. I'm also a big fan of Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Iain Banks, Kim Stanley Robinson, and the non-Wexford novels of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. I read the Wexford novels too but they are not in the same universe of blow-you-away as some of the non-series stuff. I appreciate Bret Easton Ellis much more now that I'm older, and I'm a fan of Chuck Palahniuk too, who I'm pretty sure I would have brushed off when I was younger. This is no comment on these fine satirists, who obviously have a very strong appeal to younger people, but a comment on myself. I think maybe when I was younger I didn't have much feel for satire. I also like BF's novel much better than when I first read it. It gets better with time. However, I am not the reader of the original text who came back to complain, "It has been eight years. Where is my death jockey experience?" Hey, it has been 40 years. Where is my jet pack? Expecting satire to predict the future is about as realistic as expecting The Weekly Reader to predict the future. My friends are truly sick and tired of hearing about my jet pack. I am a bookworm. For most of my life, I read a book a day. Now I have the internet, and I am reading diaries and blogs, so I don't read quite as many books. But I still think of myself as a reader rather than a viewer or an audience. There are whole years of my life that went by without watching any TV programs. If we wanted to see something, we would rent a videotape. I don't feel I missed anything. However, there is no denying the fact that people perceive me as being a little different. Probably the most common quote that gets back to me from behind my back is, "She's a nice lady but she's a little strange." People also call me "petite" and "tiny," but I don't feel petite. I feel life-sized. When I was in college, I used to see three or more movies a week, but I haven't kept up, and I'm much less knowledgeable about film than I would like to be. I know enough to know that David Lynch makes more sense to me than 99.9 percent of what's out there. Before I picked up Mathematics of Gambling by Ed Thorp and read that Claude Shannon was involved in his adventures, I totally disrespected the friend who was trying to teach us about card counting. I was certain it was a hoax. My excuse for only believing it from Claude Shannon was that I was a physics major, OK? We need to see some math, not just so-called logic. I hate playing games. I am not a gaming type person. I didn't even play Dungeon and Dragons when everyone I knew was swept up in the frenzy. I don't like chess. I don't like poker. I don't like strip poker. I don't like freaking games, all right? This makes it really weird that I would become a card counter but, hey, I do like going out and getting money without asking someone's permission. How sick is it that people actually have to ask other people for a job? That to me is just totally strange. I would have to check my records again, but I think my all-time winning-est sucker casino is the Mirage/Las Vegas, sadly purchased by those paranoids from MGM. And for the longest, I couldn't lose at the Grand/Gulfport, now sadly purchased by those paranoids from Hilton. I would love to know how much advantage players took out of those two joints while they were live. I won a bit under 1 out of 8 dice tournaments that I competed in, but I tend to credit my wins to skill rather than luck, even though these tournaments are unfortunately planned to incorporate a disturbing amount of luck. When I was in 8th grade, I was invited to go on a 6 week hiking trip along the Appalachian trail. When I was in 10th grade, I was invited for a reprise 9 week trip to Alaska and the western United States. Today, schools are cutting out art and music classes. Can you imagine a public school arranging for kids to go on a hiking/camping trip? Maybe if they were real criminals, they could get a free trip to boot camp, but the quiet kids like me wouldn't get diddly. The world has definitely become significantly poorer since the 1970s, home computers or no home computers. Hell, if home computers were invented then, we'd have them, and we'd still have had the camping trips sponsored by public school systems. A designer pair of jeans was $75 then, and that's pre-late 1970s crazy/mad inflation. We didn't know what we had, but we were a very wealthy country then. We were going to save the freakin' world. Then, of course, "designer" meant Yves St. Laurent. Now it means...Tommy Hilfiger? OK, whatever. I will be the first to admit I don't see the difference between "designer" and "mass market" in this deluded modern era. My shoulder hurt from the time I was 12 to the time I was 38 or 39, when I found out that the pain was caused by caffeine, which is apparently a pretty rare reaction or it would have been discovered a lot sooner. Moral of the story: There is caffeine in those freaking soft drinks too, so it isn't enough to avoid coffee. I had a headache of such crushing severity in the two years of 3rd and 4th grade that I was convinced that I had a brain tumor and was going to drop dead any minute. Years later, I found out that my sister had the same headache, only of course she was in 2nd and 3rd grade at the time, since she was a year behind in school. Neither of us wanted to mention to our parents that we were dying. Lord only knows what poisonous chemicals the children of Shelby, North Carolina were exposed to in those years. Yes, that Shelby, North Carolina of the car crash movies. I don't know if they were making car crash movies back then though. I never heard anything about it if they did. As a grammar school child, I used to think that the most beautiful thing I could see was the blue sky, with snow-white clouds, with a deep dark green pine tree up against it, that we used to see as we were walking to school in Shelby, North Carolina. For many years, I was a road-tripping fan. Just get in the car and randomly drive around without plans or reservations. A few years back, I decided to get a little more purposeful and plan out a birding vacation each year. We've done south Texas, Arizona, Veracruz during the "river of raptors," Trinidad, and the Snake River raptor breeding grounds in the five years since I made that decision. We still like to hop in the car and drive around in circles though. Our friends and colleagues indulge in hysterical laughter when, once again, we vacation in Lake Charles, Louisiana? But it's a good bird-watching area. Once when I was 11 or 12, my family went to King's Mountain as a family, and it was a wet spring, and there were scadzillions of mushrooms of every color of the rainbow. My favorites were the red ones. I worked for a Seven Sisters big oil company, and I used to wonder, Just how the hell do they make any money? Years later, when they were unable to fend off a takeover bid, the answer became obvious: er, they don't. I was inclined toward libertarianism when I was younger, until I realized that all of the people who believed in the "invisible hand" that would maximize the greatest good for the greatest number were living in complete denial of reality. Show me someone who wants to run this country like big business, and I'll show you someone who has never worked for a big business. No one can do waste and inefficiency like a major corporation. I loved flying back in the day when a round-trip ticket to Houston was $49 on Southwest Airlines, and the stewardesses (and the odd steward in hot pants) would hustle to pour as many free vodka and orange juices down your throat as they could possibly pour in a 45 minute flight. I'm not sure when flying started to suck but it already sucked majorly in the late 1990s, when getting a hoity toity "flight attendant" to bring you one drink somehow became an act of Congress and even then you were expected to have, and I quote, "exact change." Hey. Keep in mind, that hour in the air might just be the last hour of everybody aboard's freakin' life. Is it really too much to expect a freakin' cocktail? Like everybody else, I'm well aware that there was no icing that day in Minnesota (I immediately checked the current weather report for that location) and that Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, and staff were most likely murdered. I don't remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, or when Oswald was shot, but I remember watching the funeral on our black-and-white TV - er, that would be JFK's funeral, not Oswald's. My mother was supposed to get an angioplasty on September 11. Needless to say, it didn't happen. They thought they would need the blood at the Pentagon. She was in Virginia. She was able to travel home and re-scheduled her surgery for the next week, when they discovered that she actually needed a quadruple bypass. I'm as pissed off as anyone would be whose mother's surgery was delayed, which could have put her at risk. I can only imagine the rage experienced by people whose family members were actually injured or killed. If I had been young enough, I would have signed up to kill me some Taliban that very day. I wore my flag pin for over a year, but I stopped after it became obvious that the administration was going for the good old-fashioned "bait and switch." I wouldn't want anyone to think I was a moron who figured it was OK to kill me some Iraqis because of what a group of Saudi Arabians did to this country. Like everyone else born in 1958, I've lived my whole life under the shadow of, "You could be annihilated in 15 minutes time" by nuclear war. Finally, under Bill Clinton, I slowly and suspiciously started to relax. I guess the market did too, since markets don't go crazy when the entire industrial infra-structure can be wiped out in a few hours. Now we're back to reality. It was damn nice not having to fear death out of the sky for those six years or so. But you don't know what you've got till it's gone. I have my house because of George I. My house is an RTC (Resolution Trust Corporation) house, which went into receivership because of some S&L (savings and loan) rip-off. They even put a new roof on it and gave it the first termite treatment (the thousand dollar one) on the termite contract before they sold it to us. No closing costs, either. So I can't say the freakin' thieves never did anything for me. When everybody loses their job and their home, the cheapskater used to living on part-time dollars has a real advantage. I also bought some RTC jewelry but I was robbed a week later by someone who obviously had the auction list. He only stole stuff that was on the list and threw stuff on the floor -- including more valuable stuff -- that wasn't. They pinned it on some crackhead who didn't have the jewelry and who had nothing to do with it and who would have stolen the other small valuable stuff while he was at it, duh. But, hey, he was an easy mark. We were the victims of a drive-by shooting on Dec. 24, 1990. We were neighbors with a retarded couple accused and later convicted of deliberately starving their baby to death, which I'm confident didn't happen. The prosecutors claimed that the couple wouldn't feed the baby or take her to the doctor. Because "you have a right to an attorney" means nothing more than "you have a right to have someone you've seen for a total of 15 minutes stand up for you in court but you have NO right to an investigator," my BF and another friend tried to help out by going to the hospital and getting medical records which proved that this couple did seek help and they were told that there was nothing that could be done. I don't know why the medical records weren't produced in court, other than the fact that a public defender is basically no defender at all. I am now fully aware that if you weren't there when it happened, you don't know what happened. That stuff in the newspaper? Total fabrication. It might sound good, but don't be believing it, because it's fiction, science fiction. The people put forward as most evil might easily be the victims of some prosecutor out to get a name -- and that goes triple if poor, retarded people are involved. I was diagnosed as having chronic rhinitis, an allergy to dust mites, in my 20s, but I've largely outgrown it now. My doctor pointed out that most people who get allergy shots, and who think they were cured by the shots, simply outgrew their allergies as part of the natural aging process. And to think he told me this when I had full oil company health insurance! A dishonest doctor would have turned me into the human pincushion. As a child, I had scarlet fever twice because I relapsed. I had severe near-sightedness from age 8 until a few years ago when I had LASIK. Yay, LASIK. I still can't believe that I can sit in the tub and actually see my damn toes. If you are a candidate, by all means, do it. You will not be sorry. I had it done before it was approved by the FDA and still cost $4,000, and, even though I'm a diehard cheapskate, I don't care. Worth every penny. This is the surgery we used to read about in science fiction magazines. Maybe it was even mentioned in The Weekly Reader. I'm not letting them off the hook for the jet packs though. Think about it. We would have world peace. No cars, no gas stations, no roads defacing our wild areas, no ozone layer destruction, no run-over turtles and frogs and armadillos. No "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, Stinkin' to High, High Heaven." Where is my dad-blame jet-pack? I had mumps twice because, well, I don't know why I had it twice. The second time I had it, I was on my hiking trip to Alaska. Really all it did that second time was make my face swell, so I just shrugged it off and let people make jokes about it. No one else caught it. After all, they'd all either had mumps or shots, and you are not supposed to be able to get it twice, so why worry. I don't remember the first time I had it. I had to call home and get my medical history to be sure I'd had it before and that it would be an extremely mild case. I remember having chicken pox when I was 5 though. I itched and scratched and itched and scratched. I was a National Merit Scholar. Don't laugh. I also received additional scholarship cash from Chevron. We didn't do student loans back then. Thank Ronald Reagan. I often wonder why kids today don't just go on strike and refuse to go to college until there is some financial incentive, instead of a financial disincentive, to do so. But maybe that's the "nice lady but strange" speaking. When I was little, I was basically sick all the time except when I was outside. I am a Scorpio. In olden times, my planet was Mars. In these decadent modern times, it is Pluto. I feel much more in synch with Mars than with Pluto, though. I am not fully convinced that Pluto is even deserving of a full planetary status. But whatever. My rising sign is Taurus. I am too advanced in my study of gemstones to believe in the simple birthstone prescriptions offered by jewelry stores but, if you must, my birthstone is citrine or imperial topaz. I have a ring with a cognac tourmaline in it -- close enough for government work, right? The hoi polloi think my cognac tourmaline is amber. I have leather clothing in pretty much every color of the rainbow from gold metallic to deep maroon to lavender. I even have basic black. I didn't go my senior year in high school. I really didn't need to go my junior year either but my parents hadn't caught on yet. Back then, all you needed was an ACT over 27 to attend college, and mine was somewhere in the 30s. I still think if a person has the information needed to pass the tests, why sit in a classroom all day? You won't get that time back just because you played by the rules. I've seen Bob Dylan in concert several times. I can't remember if the first concert I attended was Bad Company or Bruce Springsteen but I'm pretty sure it was Bad Company. If I never heard a Bad Company cut again, it wouldn't bother me one bit. I'm a big Nirvana fan which is probably strange for someone my age. I like music which doesn't sound produced. My mother believed that a young girl should study piano for 6 years but for some reason I ended up getting stuck with 7. I was terrible and, once I was allowed to quit taking piano, I never touched a piano again. I am the only human being in America under age 50 who never dreamed of being in a rock band. And I'm glad. Being a musician is a sure road to misery, as far as I can tell. Have you ever heard of a musician who was both a) happy and b) halfway decent? Me neither. I feel I dodged a bullet. BF was locally famous when I first met him and, for about the first 8 years or so after we were first going out, everywhere we would go, people would ask him, "Are you Roger Williams?" Like, when we attended a Dylan concert at Audubon Zoo in the late 1980s or maybe 1990, and it was all muddy from a recent downpour, some Tulane kids said, "Are you Roger Williams?" and they invited us to use their blanket to get out of the mud and everything. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's the last time that his local fame flickered before dying out completely, because I don't remember anyone asking after that. But it used to be a freakishly regular thing whenever we would go anywhere. We got involved with some UFO/New Age type people for awhile, and we went to Hot Springs with them, but I chickened out on going to the place where you were "guaranteed" to see UFOs. I wouldn't mind seeing a UFO. I just don't want it to see me. I worked in the observatory when I was in college. One time, I looked up and I saw a perfect V of flying saucers. I felt a little ill. Then I heard them honk. Yeah, it was geese. The lights from the university reflected off their fat little bellies to make the saucer shapes. Whew. We used to go to Grand Isle all the time for camping and, one time, we saw a Russian satellite break up in low earth orbit. I cannot tell you the feeling of terror when I first saw those pieces, which were obviously not of natural origin, flying across the sky. But I can tell you that I didn't immediately realize that they were pieces of a satellite. Rather, I thought that they were several ships flying in formation in low orbit. Space Brothers! Oh my God! One time on Grand Isle, I woke late at night to see the shrimp boats perfectly lit up and perfectly spaced along the horizon as far as the eye could see like gulls on a wire who had their territories staked out down to the millimeter. One time, when I was 15 or so, I went on a camping trip to Horn Island during the August meteor showers. There were no cabins. We lay in our sleeping bags and looked up at the completely dark sky -- there was no development and no casinos across the way in Biloxi then -- and we could see thousands upon thousands of meteors raining down. The Veracruz "river of raptors" occurs in early October when millions of migrating raptors are funneled down over the town of Cardel on their way south to their winter territories. One day, we saw over 100,000 raptors. They dotted the sky like clouds of mosquitoes, except each mosquito was a hawk or a vulture. Once, on spring migration in South Texas, at the Santa Ana Refuge, we were standing near the Rio Grande when suddenly hundreds of Broad-Winged Hawks took off right over our heads to start migrating north. OK, so I still haven't organized my life list, and I don't know how many species I've seen. But I'm going to get it all organized and figured out real soon. You'll see. I have extremely vivid dreams and I am capable of lucid (self-directed) dreaming if I feel like it. Baby-fine blonde hair sucks. Trust me on this. Mensa tried to recruit me, my mom, and my sister as geniuses. Don't laugh. Actually, my sister may be a genius. She speaks just about every language there is. But I could be considered dizzy, although I prefer "absent-minded." See #99 for further elucidation of this topic. I am torn between the search for the gritty, dirty, grimy, slimy truth, and Paul's admonition to think on the good, the beautiful, and the pure. Sometimes truth is beauty, and beauty, truth, and sometimes it just isn't. I would prefer to see the beauty but I have an insatiable curiosity to see everything. Typical Scorpio/Taurus. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford