• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So many bastards, so little time.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

T R E 4 5 O N

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

In my day, never was longer.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

In after Baud. Damn.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Let there be snark.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Mobile Menu

  • Winnable VA House Races
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • War in Ukraine
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • 2021-22 Fundraising!
Roseate spoonbill and snowy egret wading in the Withlacoochee River

Nature & Respite

You are here: Home / Archives for Nature & Respite

Squishable Morning Thread

by Betty Cracker|  September 29, 20238:07 am| 38 Comments

This post is in: Birdwatching, Open Threads

As mentioned on the overnight thread, I’m off on a bird-spotting adventure today — heading up to the Big Bend and Panhandle areas of Florida in hopes of seeing (from a respectful distance) some of the flamingos that Hurricane Idalia distributed around the Gulf Coast.

An eBirder spotted a flamboyance off Cedar Key earlier this week, and Pinky, the famous winter resident who lives due south of Tallahassee, has allegedly been joined by some new pink friends.

The Cedar Key flamingos linked above are in a squad, but Tampa Bay’s Peaches (remember them?), now rehabbed and released, remains a solitary figure. That’s making some area residents sad. People are also up in arms about Peaches’ bulky tracking device:

Flamingo with bulky tracking device

It does look irritating, but in the linked Tampa Bay Times column, Jerry Lorenz, Audubon Florida’s state research director, explains that it “weighs almost nothing” and that researchers need the data birds like Peaches can provide to support efforts to repopulate Florida with wild flamingos. (Under a Democratic governor. He didn’t say that, but it’s true.)

Peaches is healthy, Lorenz said, eating, flying, preening and taking baths. Tracking animals “is backed up by literally thousands of years of research,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with that bird, but we do appreciate people being concerned. It’s good that people are out there keeping an eye on Peaches.”

Peaches is such a celebrity that they have their own Do Not Disturb sign courtesy of the DOT:

sign that warns people not to disturb flamingo

Anyhoo, I hope to see some of Peaches’ kin this weekend. I’ll be travelling solo but meeting up with some kin of my own at various points on my journey. I’m looking forward to discovering awful diners and drinking terrible coffee. Will try to post updates from the road.

Open thread!

Squishable Morning ThreadPost + Comments (38)

Cool Space Stuff Afternoon Respite

by Tom Levenson|  September 27, 20235:44 pm| 32 Comments

This post is in: Nature, Open Threads, Science & Technology

I got nothing to add to the daily parade of tragicomic horrors that constitutes our media diet these days. (Actually, I do, but can’t get to posting anything of much substance in my current state of work and life craziness.)

But this little video caught my eye and tweaked my “ooooh…space is cool” button:

.
Yup: an extraterrestrial has been brought down to earth. Admittedly, it’s not exactly sentient, but still, everything about this mission is satisfying. I love “slow” science. I don’t know how long the design and engineering of the spacecraft took, but it’s been 7 years since this little vehicle was sent on its way, and now it’s back. It takes a special kind of focus and deferring of gratification to enter into projects like this, and I admire and am grateful to those who do such work.

Cool Space Stuff Afternoon Respite

And damn! Chips from the port-planetary disk!  You just don’t get that every day, do you.

Totally open thread. Enjoy, my fellow space cadets.

Image: Vincent van Gogh (but you knew that), Starry night on the Rhone, 1888

Cool Space Stuff Afternoon RespitePost + Comments (32)

Saturday Afternoon Open Thread

by Betty Cracker|  September 23, 20234:00 pm| 121 Comments

This post is in: Birdwatching, Open Threads

It’s a beautiful day here, noticeably cooler though still a bit warm. I’m starting to see migratory birds in the area, but the hummies haven’t left yet. The spoonbills are still hanging around, hunting for crawdads and other fresh-water delicacies.

Open thread — everyone play nice!

Saturday Afternoon Open ThreadPost + Comments (121)

Acts of Kindness: What’s Life Without Whimsy

by TaMara|  September 22, 20236:00 pm| 74 Comments

This post is in: Make The World A Better Place, We All Need A Little Kindness

I had a vanity plate for years that read Whimsy. I miss that plate, but now my plate looks like this:

Electric Vehicle License Plate Bill Passes

So I’m okay with that.

Someone sent this to me this past spring, but it was WaPo link and didn’t have pictures. Cleaning up my files I was re-reading it and randomly clicked on a link in the pdf. It took me to the original article in Hometown.com

Michigan man searches for answers after ‘couple’ takes over custom mailbox

Laura Colvin
Hometownlife.com

Don Powell, an Orchard Lake resident and Farmington Hills business owner, shows off his custom mailbox, where a mystery "family" showed up last August.

Don Powell opened his mailbox one day last August and found, along with the usual mix of bills and pizza coupons, two small dolls sitting on a miniature couch near a tiny table.

The pair and their furniture came with a note: “We’ve decided to live here. Mary and Shelley.”

Powell first thought the homely wooden figurines – a man and a woman – were put in his mailbox by mistake. He wondered if someone in the neighborhood was playing a joke.

“I went around to the other homes on the cul-de-sac to see if anyone else had gotten dolls in their mailbox,” the 72-year-old said. “No one had. There’s a neighbor across the street named Shelly; I knocked on her door and asked if she had done it, but she said no.”

…….

He was amused, but his first thought was to evict the couple and their belongings into the garbage can. But then, struck by a change of heart, he pushed the couple and their belongings to the back of the mailbox and went about his business.

That was just the beginning of the story. When Powell wasn’t looking, someone dropped off a dog for the couple living in the mailbox, along with a rug and even some art for the wall. Then came a four-poster bed.

show full post on front page

Dolls and furniture have been swapped in out of Don Powell's custom mailbox since August 2022.

Read the rest here

The article is free to read, so click on over, because there’s so much more – Halloween costumes, Christmas decorations and hopefully a children’s book to come.  And if you sent this to me, please identify yourself in the comments. It brought me a lot of joy.

=============

These people belong in our tribe for sure:

If you need more of these cute kitties, there’s also a Dodo video here.

=========

This is so heartwarming:

=========

How about we finish up with some whales enjoying music:

Just a note: If you sent me any good news twitter links, most don’t work now, I found as I was cleaning out my email files. Maybe the change over to X or people just leaving in droves and deleting their accounts.

 

Hope that ends your week on a high note.  Share some good news in the comments

 

Acts of Kindness: What’s Life Without WhimsyPost + Comments (74)

Respite Open Thread: Get Paid To Sniff for Poop!… *

by Anne Laurie|  September 19, 20239:03 pm| 28 Comments

This post is in: Dog Blogging, Nature & Respite, Something Good Open Thread

These "conservation canines" help sniff out endangered species to save them. A heartwarming example of animals helping protect other animals. Love seeing the great work of @WD4C featured in @washingtonpost. https://t.co/Y6ckPjGfNV

— JG Collomb🐾 (@WildlifeJG) September 14, 2023

Of course not every dog is fit or focused enough, but this sounds like the canine equivalent of ‘grow up to be a paleontologist who is *also* a firefighter’.

From the Washington Post, “Once-abandoned dogs are now trained to sniff out environmental clues” [Unpaywalled gift link]:

The dogs were stranded on the streets or sitting in shelters, dropped off by owners who couldn’t handle the pups’ strong will and frenetic energy. Their temperaments were too volatile.

One of them, Tigee, was seized by animal control for being too aggressive. The 7-year-old shepherd mix spent several weeks in isolation in a four-foot kennel in Virginia.

But Tigee was smart and had an intense attachment to his toys, so he was a perfect fit to be a “conservation canine” — a dog trained to sniff out endangered species or other important environmental clues.

In 2017, Tigee was rescued by Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C), a conservation detection dog organization based in Turah, Mont. Tigee now lives in Zambia, where he uses his strong drive — and big black snout — to collect data in South Luangwa National Park and protect the region’s wildlife, including pangolins, a scaly-skinned mammal that is a threatened species.

After a successful session collecting data, he is rewarded with toys and treats…

Tobias, a 9-year-old Labrador retriever, was found wandering around alone in Helena, Mont., in 2016.

He had a hyper personality, a trait Coppolillo said often makes dogs unappealing as family pets. Instead, he was taken in by WD4C and now spends his days sniffing out invasive zebra and quagga mussels in Montana’s Glacier National Park. After a search, he also gets a toy and treats.

show full post on front page

Tobias’s co-worker Zoey, another 7-year-old shepherd mix, was a stray dog on the streets of Texas. She was rescued in 2017, and since then she’s been using her stellar sniffing skills to find wild cats in Missoula, Mont., and conduct ecological monitoring — locating and safeguarding threatened and endangered species of plants and animals…

WD4C dogs have different duties, but their roles in each are much the same, in that they focus on ecological monitoring. Their job is mostly snout-centric.

They are trained to target certain odors — and alert their human handlers when they’ve found them…

The target odor, in most cases, is feces.

Fecal matter is extremely valuable to conservationists, as it offers insights into an animal’s pedigree, what they are related to and where they came from. It can also shed light on an animal’s hormone levels and dietary patterns, as well as toxins in their bodies.

“The amount of information you can get from scat is always increasing because of fancier labs,” Coppolillo said…

*Insert your own Peter Baker / CNN / Meet the Press joke here

Respite Open Thread: <em>Get Paid To Sniff for Poop!… </em>*Post + Comments (28)

Packing That Parachute (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  September 19, 20231:29 pm| 164 Comments

This post is in: 2024 Elections, Birdwatching, Open Threads, Politics

First, this preening Roseate Spoonbill stopped by to charm and distract. It looks less pink in pixels than it does to the eye. The overcast sky kind of washes it out.

Packing That Parachute (Open Thread)

Now, onto the parachute.

Much to our irritation, the Beltway press keeps producing “Biden should step down” and “Biden should ditch Harris” pieces. Some of these steaming-load takes are from competent pundits who aren’t always terrible (Ignatius of WaPo, for example). But I can’t recall seeing one from an experienced and successful Democratic political operative, probably because such people understand the advantage of incumbency and how foolish it would be to squander it.

Josh Marshall at TPM has written a few posts debunking these Jenga towers of specious reasoning that pop up here and there. Sometimes his readers push back. Today, while Marshall was pushing back on the push-back, he used the best analogy I’ve seen yet for the situation:

Sometimes when I write these posts I’ll hear from readers who say things like ‘Oh, so we should just keep our mouths shut? Do what the party elders say we should, right?’ But it’s really not about should or what’s right or anything like that. It’s about understanding why these things actually never happen, the party and coalitional dynamics and public opinion that lock these things in place. There’s only so much it makes sense to worry about or second guess things that aren’t changing. You might as well start trying to remember if you packed your parachute correctly once you’ve already jumped out of the plane.

Exactly so. If fretting is your jam, fret away. There’s always plenty to fret about in U.S. politics. Hell, move to Florida if you really want to develop politics-related peptic ulcers. But like Marshall says, in the presidential race, we’re out of the plane already, so there’s no point in worrying about the parachute packing.

Open thread.

Packing That Parachute (Open Thread)Post + Comments (164)

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Never A Dull Moment Break

by Anne Laurie|  September 9, 20238:31 am| 138 Comments

This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Jan 6: Insurrection, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

As fall migration begins across the Northern Hemisphere, apps like Merlin, which is put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, have caught on among birders and non-birders alike. pic.twitter.com/kHYPhfXs5a

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 8, 2023


(I’m not a birder, but even I can identify blue jays: They’re the ones yelling Thief! Thief!… because, according to folklore, that’s what they are.)

Having mastered the Aspen
Ideas Festival and life of Steve Jobs, I would now like to explain how turning on Starlink would’ve have caused World War III just like Elon, I mean Mr. Musk, says…(1/87) https://t.co/Sf4N7q9GA9

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) September 9, 2023

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Never A <del>Dull Moment</del> Break 1

show full post on front page

I (also) approve this message / tactic:

The IRS is launching an effort to pursue 1,600 millionaires who owe hundreds of millions of dollars in past due taxes.

The agency's leader says a boost in federal funds and help from AI tools offer new means of targeting wealthy people who "cut corners." https://t.co/CrgZGDzzgU

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 8, 2023

once again, this town probably has been insanely woke since like 1824 and every church is flying an LGBT flag, https://t.co/5oNz1lXja5

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) September 7, 2023

There’s layers to this story…

New Jersey Dating Coach Gets 4 Years for Capitol Riots https://t.co/bKGUK7zLAf via @thedailybeast

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 8, 2023

someone should announce that you're only allowed to eat one lithium battery a week https://t.co/2CeAxxOHwh

— Sen. Lemon Gogurt (I – Podcastia) (@Ugarles) August 31, 2023

It's going to turn out that Ramaswamy is running because he bet someone that he could make RFK Jr look sane https://t.co/CQI7RD6uwX

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) September 8, 2023

In his defense: as an old person who is bad at technology, Senator Marshall has an easier time calling his usual drug dealer than navigating the Dominos app https://t.co/ncyiCcl1NI

— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) September 7, 2023

“Live long and prosper with health insurance!”

George Takei joined other striking “Star Trek” stars on picket lines outside Paramount Studios. pic.twitter.com/xYv5UDUuzi

— AP Entertainment (@APEntertainment) September 8, 2023

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Never A <del>Dull Moment</del> BreakPost + Comments (138)

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 135
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

VA Purple House Delegates

Donate

Political Action

Postcard Writing Information

Recent Comments

  • Baud on We Have the Best People (Sep 30, 2023 @ 12:34pm)
  • HinTN on We Have the Best People (Sep 30, 2023 @ 12:33pm)
  • Another Scott on We Have the Best People (Sep 30, 2023 @ 12:30pm)
  • Subsole on Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer (Sep 30, 2023 @ 12:27pm)
  • Bill Arnold on Saturday Morning Recap Open Thread: The Impeachment KKKlownshow, So Far (Sep 30, 2023 @ 12:27pm)

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
We All Need A Little Kindness
What Has Biden Done for You Lately?

Balloon Juice Meetups!

All Meetups
Talk of Meetups – Meetup Planning

Fundraising 2023-24

Wis*Dems Supreme Court + SD-8

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Mailing List Signup
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)

Twitter / Spoutible

Balloon Juice (Spoutible)
WaterGirl (Spoutible)
TaMara (Spoutible)
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
TaMara
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
ActualCitizensUnited

Join the Fight!

Join the Fight Signup Form
All Join the Fight Posts

Balloon Juice for Ukraine

Donate

Cole & Friends Learn Español

Introductory Post
Cole & Friends Learn Español

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc