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whew !!!

IN THIS ISSUE

• Don Henderson writes about bird banding at Long Point
• The editor has been having technical problems, in case you hadn´t noticed
• Bruce Galway forwards a story about a memorable show-and-tell
• Catherine Green claims men are not often published in Dear Abby
• Marilyn Magid forwards examples of courtroom bloopers
• Anita Henderson, Burke Dykes, and Jack Peaker suggest websites

Don Henderson writes about

BIRD BANDING

We live at the base of Long Point, on the North shore of Lake Erie. It is basically a sand spit, 33 kms long, stretching almost half way across the lake. It is also the busiest water fowl migration route in Eastern North America, as well as hundreds of other species.

We have two organizations here. One is called Bird Studies Canada, a non-profit, non governmental group, that study anything to do with birds. The other is a small group of dedicated biologists and many volunteers who run the Long Point Bird Observatory.

Twice a year, for two months in the Spring and three in the Fall, they set up nets to capture and band the migrating birds. They encourage everyone to visit and watch the process, and I can tell you that it is magic to watch these tiny creatures. We have been taking all of our visitors the last two months to the banding station.

Warbler

Young Grosbeaks

The way they handle and treat our tiny feathered friends is terrific. All birds must be released within one hour of capture. The nets are cleared every 15 minutes and the birds brought back in tiny cloth bags, to keep them quiet. They are measured, sexed, aged, checked for fitness, banded, weighed, and released. The nets look like giant volleyball nets, made with a very fine mesh the birds can´t see when they fly.

You can learn more than I know by going to your search engines, and typing "Long Point Bird Observatory". That will give you links to many sites, including Bird Studies Canada.

Varied Thrush

Don has just forwarded this: On Thursday of this week, the Long Point Bird Observatory banded their very first Varied Thrush in the 40-odd-year history of the Banding Station. This bird lives on the West coast of North America, from B.C. to California. It is seen very rarely in the East. It caused great excitement amongst the volunteers and biologists. The banding station on Old Cut Road is a magical place to visit. To see these tiny creatures up close and to watch how the staff handle them is great fun. Twice a year for two months in the Spring and three in the Fall you can watch, from 7:00 am to noon, 7 days a week. This year the banding ends on Nov. 13th. Many residents of the Villages volunteer to be hosts and guides at the station.

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS WITH THE TALE SPINNER

Many readers found their last copy filled with question marks, and some of you wrote to tell me about it. The copies I send to myself were the same as usual, but people with Microsoft products had problems. After a number of complaints, I experimented with another editing system, which produced a copy that had no extra characters. I will use that system in future, and hope the problem will not recur.

However, here is another solution that may appeal to you:

Dick Chenot was another unhappy reader whose last Spinner was riddled with question marks. He makes a suggestion:

Maybe, just maybe, some of your readers would prefer to read The Tale Spinner in its classier form, i.e., this newsletter online at http://members.shaw.ca/vjsansum/and http://www.nw-seniorsonline.org/stories.html. Personally, I would, but I need the weekly reminder that it is available, okay?

~~~~~

In discussing his story about bird banding, I asked if Don Henderson had problems with the last issue, and what he thought about Dick´s idea. He replied: My copy was full of question marks. I thought you were just very unsure of yourself! Please don´t go to an online edition only. Most of us old folks (I almost said, old farts) love to get e-mail. One genealogly newsletter I received went online, and I found I just didn´t bother going to the web site to read it.

Ed. Note: There you have it - two opinions on the option of having The Tale Spinner appear only on the two websites mentioned, with a weekly reminder that it is available. What is your reaction? Please let me know.

~~~~~

Burke Dykes, webmaster of http://www.nw-seniorsonline.org, which originates in Seattle, had a lot of trouble removing the question marks from the last issue before he could put it on his site. He writes:

...Noting the presence of question marks, I began to wonder - and do a little experimenting. The default encoding for Microsoft´s Outlook Express is Unicode (UPF-8). By switching to Western European (either ISO or Windows) encoding, the extra characters disappear. Apparently we were just using different encoding. So, the problem is solved as far as I am concerned.

Another Ed. Note: Acting on this information, I found a similar text encoding program on this machine, so I have switched to it in the hope that readers will no longer be plagued with questions.

Bruce Galway forwards this story by an anonymous second grade teacher:

THE MIDDLE WIFE

I´ve been teaching now for about fifteen years. I have two kids myself, but the best birth story I know is the one I saw in my own second-grade classroom a few years back.

When I was a kid, I loved show-and-tel, so I always have a few sessions with my students. It helps them get over shyness and usually show-and-tell is pretty tame. Kids bring in pet turtles, model airplanes, pictures of fish they catch, stuff like that. And I never, ever place any boundaries or limitations on them. If they want to lug it in to school and talk about it, they´re welcome.

Well, one day this little girl, Erica, a very bright, very outgoing kid, takes her turn and waddles up to the front of the class with a pillow stuffed under her sweater. She holds up a snapshot of an infant. "This is Luke, my baby brother, and I´m going to tell you about his birthday."

"First, Mom and Dad made him as a symbol of their love, and then Dad put a seed in my Mom´s stomach, and Luke grew in there. He ate for nine months through an umbrella cord." She´s standing there with her hands on the pillow, and I´m trying not to laugh. The kids are watching her in amazement. "Then, about two Saturdays ago, my Mom starts saying, ´Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!´" Erica puts a hand behind her back and groans. "She walked around the house for, like an hour, ´Oh, oh, oh!´" Now this kid is doing a hysterical duck walk and groaning.

"My Dad called the middle wife. She delivers babies, but she doesn´t have a sign on the car like the Domino´s man. They got my Mom to lie down in bed like this." Then Erica lies down with her back against the wall. "And then, pop! My Mom had this bag of water she kept in there in case he got thirsty, and it just blew up and spilled all over the bed, like psshhheew!" The kid has her legs spread with her little hands miming water flowing away. It was too much!

"Then the middle wife starts saying ´Push, push,´ and ´Breathe breathe.´ They started counting, but never even got past ten. Then, all of a sudden, out comes my brother.

"He was covered in yucky stuff that they all said it was from Mom´s play-center, so there must be a lot of toys inside there."

Then Erica stands up, takes a big theatrical bow, and returns to her seat. I´m sure I applauded the loudest.

Ever since then, when it´s show-and-tell day, I bring my camcorder, just in case another "Middle Wife" comes along.

Catherine Green sends this illustration of

WHY MEN ARE RARELY PUBLISHED IN DEAR ABBY

I´ve never written to you before, but I really need your advice on what could be a crucial decision. I´ve suspected for some time now that my wife has been cheating on me.

The usual signs ... phone rings but if I answer, the caller hangs up. My wife has been going out with the girls a lot recently although when I ask their names she always says, "Just some friends from work; you don´t know them."

I always stay awake to look out for her taxi coming home, but she always walks down the drive. Although I can hear a car driving off, as if she has gotten out of the car round the corner. Why? Maybe she wasn´t in a taxi? I once picked her cell phone up just to see what time it was and she went berserk and screamed that I should never touch her phone again and why was I checking up on her.

Anyway, I have never approached the subject with my wife. I think deep down I just didn´t want to know the truth, but last night she went out again and I decided to really check on her.

I decided I was going to park my Harley Davidson motorcycle next to the garage and then hide behind it so I could get a good view of the whole street when she came home. It was at that moment, crouching behind my Harley, that I noticed that the valve covers on my engine seemed to be leaking a little oil.

Is this something I can fix myself or should I take it back to the dealer?

Thanks,??Bob

Marilyn Magid forwards these examples of things people actually said in court, as recorded in "Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History", by Charles M. Sevilla:

DISORDER IN THE COURT

Attorney: Are you sexually active?
Witness: No, I just lie there.

Attorney: What is your date of birth?
Witness: July 18th.
Attorney: What year?
Witness: Every year.

Attorney: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
Witness: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.

Attorney: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
Witness: Yes.
Attorney: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
Witness: I forget.
Attorney: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

Attorney: How old is your son, the one living with you?
Witness: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can´t remember which.
Attorney: How long has he lived with you?
Witness: Forty-five years.

Attorney: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
Witness: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Attorney: And why did that upset you?
Witness: My name is Susan.

Attorney: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
Witness: We both do.
Attorney: Voodoo?
Witness: We do.
Attorney: You do?
Witness: Yes, voodoo.

Attorney: Now doctor, isn´t it true that when a person dies in his sleep,
Witness: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

Attorney: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
Witness: Uh, he´s twenty-one.

Attorney: Were you present when your picture was taken?
Witness: Would you repeat the question?

Attorney: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
Witness: Yes.
Attorney: And what were you doing at that time?
Witness: Uh....

Attorney: She had three children, right?
Witness: Yes.
Attorney: How many were boys?
Witness: None.
Attorney: Were there any girls?

Attorney: How was your first marriage terminated?
Witness: By death.
Attorney: And by whose death was it terminated?

Attorney: Can you describe the individual?
Witness: He was about medium height and had a beard.
Attorney: Was this a male or a female?
Attorney: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
Witness: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.

Attorney: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
Witness: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.

Attorney: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
Witness: Oral.

Attorney: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
Witness: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Attorney: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
Witness: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him!

Attorney: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
Witness: Huh?

And the best for last:

Attorney: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
Witness: No.
Attorney: Did you check for blood pressure?
Witness: No.
Attorney: Did you check for breathing?
Witness: No.
Attorney: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
Witness: No.
Attorney: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
Witness: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Attorney: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
Witness: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practising law.

THIS WEEK´S RECOMMENDED WEBSITES

Anita Henderson forwards this from Volunteer Canada:??It is now four weeks since the federal government announced the elimination of the Canada Volunteerism Initiative. Volunteer Canada, with its partners across the country, has been working hard to try to ensure that the gains of the last five years will not be lost on March 31 2007, when funding ends.... We encourage the public to continue to share with us their views and ideas for the future. You can e-mail us at info@volunteer.ca or call 1-800-670-0401. If you have an opinion about the role of the Government, contact your member of parliament.

Burke Dykes says he knows this is an old one, but we both like it: http://dingo.care-mail.com/cards/flash/5409/galaxy.swf

This site, forwarded by Catherine Green, shows a man who believes he knows how Stonehenge was built:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0

Jack Peaker recommends these sites:

Pumpkin carving: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/timages/page/pumpkin_sim.html
Geology: http://www.3dmuseum.org/
Calculate: http://www.taxtips.ca/calculators.htm#
Signs: http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Humor/Workshop/Signs.htm
Words: http://www.wordiq.com/

Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most impractical. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagory. Yet democracy is the only form of social order admissable, because it is the only one consistent with justice. - Robert Briffault (1876-1948)