ALL THE REST —  August 9
  

For The Birds
The Bower Bird (no relation)

The Bowerbird is the common name for several birds of the bowerbird family. These birds are from the Ptilonorhynchidae family. They are found in New Guinea and Australia. Bowerbirds are most noted for their courtship practices. There are 19 species of bowerbirds, each having their own unique, complex courtship display.

The males live apart from the female birds for most of the year. During the breeding season the males gather together to compete for female mates. Each male bird will clear an area of the forest floor, creating a "court" to which he tries to attract females. The male will decorate this "court" with displays of inanimate objects to impress his mate. The items may be shells, flowers, brightly colored berries, or even man-made objects such as pieces of glass.

Some males will even build various structures, or "bowers," to attract a mate. Some species will construct "maypoles" of sticks around a tree trunk. Then they will decorate these sticks with lichens and flowers. The gardener bowerbird is about 10 inches in height. The male of this species will build a tepeelike structure as much as 63 inches across, with a low entranceway in front of which is a "garden" of bright objects and flowers that are regularly replaced as soon as they fade. The male satin bowerbird is common in parts of

Australia. It is a silky, blue-black bird, about 7.8 inches long, with bright blue eyes. He will build a stick mat. Down the middle of this mat he places two walls of vertical sticks that may reach 16 inches high. He then displays one of the rare known instances of birds using a tool. He mixes a blue or green fruit juice with his saliva and "paints" this on the bower with a wad of bark. This is done in hopes to entice the grayish-green female into the painted bower to mate. Other species of the Ptilonorhynchidae family also have elaborate method of attracting their mates.

Source: Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia.
 

A cheerful heart is good medicine,
but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
Proverbs 17:22 (NIV)

"What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable."

Joseph Addison

 

A nursery school teacher was delivering a station wagon full of kids home one day when a fire truck zoomed past. Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog.

The children fell to discussing the dog's duties.

"They use him to keep crowds back," said one youngster.

"No," said another, "he's just for good luck."

A third child brought the argument to a close. "They use the dogs," she said firmly, "to find the fire hydrant."

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A young man staggered into the small-town bakery at the crack of dawn on an extremely cold, wet, and stormy morning. "Thank heavens you are open," he gasped. "Do you have fresh double chocolate muffins?"

When the baker nodded , a huge smile broke out on the young man's face. "It's worth the trip, then - she'll be so happy. It will make her day!"

The baker nodded with understanding. "Are these for your mother, then?" he asked.

"Would my mother send me out on a day like this?" returned the young man with an incredulous look. "And would I go."

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A policeman pulls over a carload of women.

Policeman:  "Ma'am, this is a 65 MPH highway -- why are you going so slow?"
         
Woman: "Sir, I saw a lot of signs that said 22,  not 65."

Policeman:  "Oh, that's not the speed limit, that's the name of the highway you're on!"

Woman: "Oh!  Silly me!  Thanks for letting me know.  I'll be more careful."

The policeman then looks in the back-seat and sees two other  women shaking and trembling.

Policeman: "Excuse me, but, what's wrong with your friends back there?  They're shaking something terrible."

Woman:   "Oh, we just got off of Highway 121."

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Atheism: A non-prophet organization

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"City Zoo Semantics"

The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed the following sentence: "I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience."

He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word mongooses. Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence now read: "I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience."

Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the original one. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over. "Everyone knows no full - stocked zoo should be without a mongoose," he typed. "Please send us two of them."

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Two elderly ladies meet at the launderette after not seeing one another for some time. After inquiring about each other's health, one asked how the other's husband was doing.

"Oh! Ted died last week. He went out to the garden to dig up a cabbage for dinner, had a heart attack and dropped down dead right there in the middle of the vegetable patch!"

"Oh dear! I'm very sorry," replied her friend, "What did you do?"

"Opened a can of peas instead."

Submitted by: BruceGuthrie@erols.com Oracle Service Humor Mailing List

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Boy Scouts from the city were on a camping trip. The mosquitoes were so fierce, the boys had to hide under their blankets to avoid being bitten.

Then one of them saw some lightning bugs and said to his friends, "We might as well give up. They are coming after us with flashlights!"

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TRUE FACT ...

Humans begin laughing at two to three months of age. Six year olds laugh about 300 times per day, while adults laugh from 15 to 100 times per day.

SOURCE: NYT, Dr. William F. Fry, Stanford University

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson.
You find the present tense, and the past perfect.

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