Breana and Kamala and my iPhone

 

A few years ago I go a new cell phone.  And, as I suppose is bound to happen, at least one other person had the number before me.  And, as I suppose is bound to happen, I continue to get messages for that person or persons.

Some of the messages are intended for the parent or guardian of one of two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom have Turkish-sounding names, and who are presumably brother and sister. 

The messages concerning the boy are only rare texts from his healthcare provider, offering resources should he be having trouble navigating puberty or whatever.   

On the other hand, I get a surprising number texts and recorded phone calls from that Fairfax County Public School System about the girl having unexcused absences.  And since it is all automated, I can’t talk to a real person to explain that I have no connection to any of it.

And then there are the messages for a woman known only as Breana.

Is Breana the mother of the children with Turkish-sounding names?  I don’t know.  But I do know, thanks to the text messages intended for her, that her two major passions in life seem to be handbag fashion (there are many texts from the Coach outlet) and Democratic Party politics.

(I should note here that, although I have been deeply interested in politics since middle school, I do my best to keep any politics off the blog.  And, as I get older, I have mostly lost the desire to talk about politics even with my closest friends.  But now must bring in some political content in order to finish telling this stupid story that I have for some reason decided to put on my blog.)

As it is now the end days of a presidential campaign, I get text messages multiple times daily intended for Breana from the Kamala Harris campaign asking for money.  They are very annoying, yet I do get some entertainment out of the ones that sound as if they were written by some kind of unhinged stalker, for example:

[Failure to respond will result in an automatic “NO” answer] Are you voting for Kamala Harris? [URL]

Begging on my hands and knees: We need 1 more gift to boost turnout for Kamala! Donate $20=$200: [URL]

We’ve asked you SIX TIMES if you support Kamala Harris…but you still didn’t complete the poll?! Reply via personal link>[URL]

And then there is my personal favorite, which was sent not once but twice:

We asked you to sign Kamala Harris’s birthday card, but you ignored us. DON’T ABANDON HER: Sign LINK>>[URL]

The next logical step would seem to be a message stating that if Breana doesn’t donate $100 in the next hour Kamala Harris will commit suicide.

Another Pigeon

 

Here is another pigeon. I had a pigeon picture in June.  I find that pigeons are one of the few small birds that will stand still to be photographed. 

If you look closely, you will see that the pigeon is standing on a nail, which doesn’t look comfortable. 

A Sprite Can Reflecting the Sunlight

I took this picture many years ago.  At the time, one of my friends wrote a food blog, and I thought about sending the picture to him, but I don’t think that I ever did.  And I doubt that it was the kind of food that he would have been interested n anyway.  

Pictures from the Weekend

An Osprey sits on a piling in the river.

A Five-lined Skink hides under a board.

A Red-bellied Turtle looks kind of smug.

Dark Pigeon

 

(Don’t blink, or you might miss something.)

Paleontological Illustrations—Lystrosaurus

 

Today’s illustration comes from “Ontogenetic mechanisms of size change: implications for the Lilliput effect and beyond” in the journal Paleobiology.  The paper concerns such topics as ontogeny, phylogeny, heterochrony, allometry, and taphonomy, and can be viewed here or here. (The journal is subscription-only, but maybe you are one of the lucky few who has access!)

One of the examples considered in the study is an animal called Lystrosaurus, which lived during the Permian and Triassic.  It was once considered a reptile, but is now know to have been more closely related to the mammals.  

Although Lystrosaurus is not nearly as well known as some of the more charismatic prehistoric animals, it did gain a certain measure of fame because its fossils are found on what are now several separate continents, thus providing evidence for the theory of continental drift.

I never knew that Lystrosaurus looked like such a doofus. 

O. J. Simpson is Dead

 

I had been thinking about making my next blog post about another item of paleontological art, but then O. J. Simpson died.  And, as one of the few people left alive who is old enough to remember the Nineties, I felt obligated to comment.  (And then, of course, it took me a few weeks to actually do it.)

As I noted before, the O. J. trial gave Saturday Night Live its greatest Weekend Update moment ever.

Perhaps my most significant personal O. J. memory is that, during the trial, I had no idea that Simpson had been regarded as one of the best professional football players of all time.  I have never been a sports fan at all, and during his football career I was too young to be aware of popular culture in general.  Thus, though I had some vague knowledge that he had played football, I knew him mostly as an actor and rental car spokesman.  And I really didn’t understand why everyone was making such a big deal about a guy who was in The Naked Gun.  (If Leslie Nielsen had been accused of murdering two people, would that have been the Trial of the Century?)

And then there was a Hertz commercial that aired a few years before the murders, in which a line toward the end proved rather prescient:

“Brutal, Juice, brutal.”