Gramarye

Recently took my sister and mother to Citizen Cake in San Francisco to celebrate a birthday. Still have sticker shock from the check, but no regrets (I feel like one of those stupid Mastercard commercials). However, I’m now thinking a bit more about menus. I think someone needs to make a menu celebrating police procedurals, perhaps including:

* The CSI Meat Puzzle: Various meat pates formed into interlocked puzzle pieces and baked. Or, more authentically, a whole cow cooked via explosion.
* The NCIS Crotchlight: A turkey plated with a spotlight between the legs.
* The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: Anything with veal, lamb, and quail eggs, you perv.
* The Law and Order: Criminal Intent: Your waitron will be a portly man who can’t shave himself properly (no, I am not available); he will use his arcane world knowledge to explain your meal to you, while simultaneously deconstructing your hypocrisies
* The Bones “Crispy Critter”: Any meat dish, overcooked.
* The Crossing Jordan: A dish composed entirely of ingredients which you recognize, but whose name you do not know, arranged in a fashion that is clever without actually being intelligent, and which is ultimately not at all filling.

Obviously I’m missing a few entries here…

Okay, so I like birds now. Whatever. After a semi-recent bird-related excursion with a more knowledgeable and better-equipped friend, I developed a profound case of gear envy regarding spotting scopes and high-end binoculars; nothing to be done about that, but I can definitely close the field guide gap. My friend brought several of his books for reference; the Sibley one particularly caught my eye, but I haven’t seen it yet at the couple of local bookstores I’ve checked. I may just order it from Amazon.

In the meantime, though, I did come across a book of excerpts from the early twentieth century bird-related writings of some guy named William Leon Dawson. The prose is an awesome mixture of poetry and campy, Victorian enthusiasm, and it features some of the species I’ve grown fond of. For example, regarding the American Coot (my favorite):

A leaden figure steals from behind a distant clump of reeds and glances this way and that apprehensively. It is only a man in a boat — perhaps — she did want to visit that snail-bed before the sun got too high. So she advances, not without many misgiving hitches of the head, across an intervening stretch of bare water, and disappears behind a stretch of reeds. The passage successfully accomplished, another mud-hen, and another, ventures forth, the last one sniffing scornfully over the alleged danger. Confidence restored, the invaded precincts begin to re-ec ho to their wonted sounds of life, splashing and noise of pursuit, and mellow notes of several sorts.

Some of the passages are exceedingly dry; others, like this one regarding Mallards, are extraordinary:

Being somewhat less gregarious than the Teals and the sea-ducks, the Mallards are found in pairs or small parties, wherever a swampy pool or a widening of the brook affords a resting place, and one may easily recognize their fitness for domestication in the fact that they can content themselves with a little six-by-eight puddle when the whole world lies before them.

Obviously that is a passage more about people then birds, but still.

Also, I had no idea that the phrase “tricked out” was so old, or that it could be applied to pelicans…I can’t wait to get to the chapter in which Dawson tells me how to pimp my grebe.