I'm of the opinion that the decline in budgie ownership is due, not to the decline in dead tree readership, but rather to the loss by our nation of the venerable retailer Woolworth's. Used to be that the back wall of those stores was lined with parakeets and goldfish, all available at a very reasonable price. My sister and I both had our first pet ownership experience thanks to FW's aviary.

That being said, my opinion is that any pet that needs to stay in a cage or a tank isn't really worth having. I stick with dogs now.

It's partly becasue birds are more expensive now, since we don't allow wholesale importation. Everything has to be captive bred. Which is a good thing.

I just can't get used to the idea that a bird cna be happy in a cage. Seems wrong.

I keep fish, as do something like 15 million Americans - have since I was 11 or 12. It's a pain sometimes, but I am down to one nice tank (from a high of 8 or 10). The marine (saltwater) fish hobby is under a lot of mostly justified attack, because the fish and "live rock" are mostly collected from the wild, which has had a devastating effect on natural stocks in some places. Freshwater fish, OTOH, are grown in big fish farms in Florida. You can't get tropical fish at Woolworth's any more, but just about every community has a PetSmart or PetCo. With the Internet, good information about fish care is more available than ever before, and equipment is cheaper.

Does anyone remember the aquarium Jean-Luc Picard had in his quarters (or was that in the conference room)? A small spherical bubble with a huge lionfish in it? That made every aquariast shudder.

When I go to the pet store, it seems to me the parrots are always shrieking. That, coupled with the knowledge that they can out-live me, has killed any desire I've ever had to keep a parrot.

Seems like this topic shouldn't attract the irate and indignant mouth-foamers we got yesterday. I remember when the weather was the most innocuous of conversational topics.

"aquarist"

One upon a time, a friend asked me come over to his condo (Calhoun Towers, next to the Beach Club) to see his fish. I walked in the door, turned to my left where the tank was, and actually stepped back because I was both surprised and scared.

The tank was something like 500 gallons... about 10 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet. The fish were up to 3 feet long, and they were staring at me.

His second bedroom contained a "smaller" tank... only 2.5 feet by 2.5 feet by 8 feet, with fish under 2 feet long.

A year later, his company transfered him to Chicago, and he asked my assistance. We moved the smaller tank to my house, where we kept all the fish until he was able to set up and stabilize the larger tank in Chicago. Then I had to figure out how to get five huge fish to Chicago. Alive. No easy task. (Basically, you buy them each an airline ticket. It helps if you're intimately involved with a flight attendant who knows who to talk to.)

My reward for this? He gave me the (huge) smaller tank.

So, for years, I had a tank with fish from the Amazon. The Red-Tailed Black Catfish cruised the bottom. The 20 inch Gar named "Teri" cruised the mid-depths. The 24 inch Arrowana cruised the top 8 inches. The Pacu, basically a vegetarian Piranha the size of a large Domino's pizza, would come when I called him and liked to hover at one end of the tank watching TV.

There were others in the tank over the years, but these were my core group.

I used to feed them 100 goldfish once a week... a remarkable sight in itself.

Now I have a cat.

Holy smoke! I have always been fascinated by those tank monsters, but never crazy enough to try to keep them. I particularly like the red-tailed catfish - they seem to have a lot of personality. It p*sses me off when they sell 3-inch versions in pet stores without warning the potential buyers of the adult size.

I have three parrots, two of which are never in their cages when at least one of us is home.  The two are heavy bodied birds of species that don't fly much in the wild except as an escape mechanism.  (We have hanging climbing "trees" with a cheap disposable drop cloth underneath in case you were wondering.)  The third is a cockatiel who likes to fly and we have to cage him from time to time throughout the day for his own safety. He does make more mess but the hassle of having him loose a lot of the time is outweighed by his pretty whistles and his uncanny speaking ability especially when he says "I love you" and "such a pretty boy" right after he's been naughty.  Watching him fly around the living room when he's happy is kind of cool too.  If you have to have birds in a cage, the tiny birds like finches are the best.  The more the merrier.Kind of like having fish, only cuter and faster.

For people who find birds costly, I'd like to point out that there is a healthy "used bird" market as lots of people get birds and find that they don't want them, are allergic etc. and given that birds live a long time.  2 of our three birds had previous owners for these sorts of reasons. http://www.parrothelp.org/ is one local group that helps place birds into new homes.  And the Midwest Avian Avian Adopotion & Rescue gets birds from bad situations and finds new homes for them. http://www.maars.org/  Usually there is some cost, but it's usually in relation to whatever care has been given to the birds while they've been waiting for adoption.

I do a lot of my job (tech support) over the phone, and it's amazing how a phone line can amplify high pitched background noises such as children or birds... to the point where I've almost asked the customer to move themselves of the bird(s) to another room for the sake of my ears.

A handy Petsmart is no way the same as the Woolworth experience. You went to Woolworth for the small necessities of your life, and the tacit message was that birds and other critters were any everyday part of your household. A big specialty store only says that your pets are, however beloved, "other," and require their own special-interest support building.

Also, wandering through Woolworth, you could become charmed by a little animal and find yourself contemplating for the first time the acquisition of a pet.

Aside to Mr Lileks, are you saying you've seen The Birds as an adult and still think it's a fine film?

Global warming not valid in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, or where prohibited by law.

Must be different parrots up north. The ones down here can remove paint when they screech!

The dog-face thing is really creeping me out. I'm gonna have nightmares about that picture.

The kite thing that has replaced it is equally disturbing. What the hell is wrong with you people??

In 1980 there was a tragically flawed linguistics book on the Woolworth remainders table, _Introductory Transformational Grammar of English_ by Mark Lester, for a dollar.

Well, taken right back to work, it was quickly programmed in to a random number generator and a computer typesetter, and faux memos from the boss were the result, as many as you want.

You'd leave them around, somebody would pick one up, and ask ``They _pay_ people to write this crap?''

Festoon was born.

Yes, they do.

People noticed that it wrote like their own boss, and started contributing phrases to the noun phrase database, which grew and grew.

Today it has power point versions. People who have had it with management kept adding presentation features to it, producing mindless prattle in the style of their own boss.

It turned out to be a handy test generator for text formatting software, and so survived on that slim justification.

Its tragic flaw is that English has very severe lexical restrictions on subject-verb pairing as to abstract-concrete and animate-inanimate, forcing Festoon to make up words to avoid them. Transformational grammar doesn't cover that.

But what do you want for a dollar.

I'm taking a home study course in Claims Adjusting. I've heard background bird chirping behind the narratorette a few times. I figure she must have recorded this cd at home.

I just saw "The Birds" for the first time last month.

What a lame excuse for suspense.

I'm sorry, but the idea of a bunch of birds doesn't scare me at all. Heck there are more seagulls in my mall parking lot than sat on the playground equipment in the film!

Okay, I screamed once and that was when Tippi went up the stairs to find the birds in the attic.

I screamed about ten times during "I Am Legend", just to compare. I definitely made an impression on the stranger sitting next to me.

I have read that Hitchcock wanted the ending to show the car rounding a bend onto a view of the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds, but the technology of the time either wasn't up to the task or it was too expensive.

Today the birds in San Francisco will come right up and try to panhandle.

Alas, it must be done with paper towels these days. They're more absorbent anyway.

I never fully appreciated The Birds until I lived in Austin TX and went to UT for a couple of years.  The place was infested with Grackles which are chief villain in The Birds.  Talk about nasty.  They are shiny black with huge beaks. They have the most ear piercing shrieks and are extremely gregarious at dusk when they congregate in huge flocks.  Each morning, the grounds people would have to spray the sidewalks with high pressure hoses to get rid of the vast piles of guano which were very slippery. I'll never forget that horrible smell of the wet grackle droppings. When people suggested more aggressive means of getting rid of them, (it being Texas) there was a huge ruckus about it. I always wondered what they ended up doing because it was getting exponentially worse by the time I left.  At least pigeons are relatively quiet.

Personally, I sleep better knowing that the Altamont Pass wind farm is between me and Bodega Bay.