I’ve been a bad blogger this past week, but all is well on the homefront. I’ll post something original soon, but until then, please enjoy this brief intermission:

I took Baci out to the neighboring farm at dusk yesterday and saw a swarm of red-winged blackbirds swirling around the mowed wheat fields. At this diminished size, the video only begins to convey the magnitude of the bird-cloud, and the sheer number of individuals acting at times like a single organism.

Click through to play the video….

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A friend just sent me a great clip of Aussie cricket star Andrew Symonds flattening a streaker during a series final against India.

This is what we spend most of our waking hours looking at:

I went out in our New Year’s Day snowstorm to shoot a few frames of the house and surroundings at their wintry best. The following shabby little clip was the result of my trying to learn the iMovie basics yesterday morning. Creating the clip took just a few minutes, but exporting, trying to figure out how to de-interlace the video, and generally muttering curses at the screen took a bit longer. (Just trying to get all my curses out now, before the baby comes.)

Anyway, once I was able to drag some clips onto the timeline, it turned into the Baci show, which amused me enough to make it worthwhile.

Emma and I went down to the city on Saturday to see our friends Slobodan and Liz get married.

There was a beautiful reception dinner with something like 8 courses of Chinese food, including everything from jellyfish to sesame noodles to lobster. But the highlight of the reception by far was the lion dance, wherein two dragon-like male and female “lions” wooed each other with leaps and spins to the rhythm of traditional drums and cymbals.

The lion dance is performed to bring good luck to the new couple and bless their home, and to ward off evil spirits.

My camera battery crapped out before the end of the dance, which featured Slob and Liz “feeding” a silvery wrapped object to the lions from the long end of a stick.

Best of luck and double happiness to the new couple!

On Friday morning Emma had her best TV appearance yet. They called her back to the Mike and Juliet show to talk about break-ups and Em & Lo’s latest book, Buh Bye.

Click the image below to launch the video.

I do love how many of our friends and acquaintances just happen to catch Emma while “flipping channels.” Not a single person has ever owned up to watching these morning talkshows. They’re all just randomly scrolling along—killing time between episodes of Masterpiece Theatre, no doubt.

That’s what I do, anyway.

I received a hilarious video this morning from my friend and longtime trainer, Simon.

Boxing and Thai-boxing are ridiculously superstitious sports—mostly because the stakes are so high. While I swear up and down that I don’t believe in luck in the slightest, I’ve always put my left glove on before my right—for the inane reason that nearly twenty years ago, someone told me that to do otherwise is bad luck.

It’s also said to be bad luck to go under the ropes when entering a boxing ring. Most people simply create a gap for themselves (or for someone entering before or after them) and step right through. Showier fighters will plant one or both hands on the top rope and swing their legs over, hurdling the uppermost rope in a sort of cartwheel. This last technique is a bit risky, and I’ve seen it backfire on a few occasions, much to the amusement of the crowd.

That said, in the countless boxing and Thai-boxing matches I’ve seen in person, I’ve never seen a ring entrance and exit close to this one. Be sure to watch until the end.

Sometimes even amateurs have been in the game far too long.

We stopped down at the beach on our last day in L.A.

It was fairly deserted, though there was some kind of pelican convention going on. I’m not sure whether they were tracking the migration of a massive school of fish, or were simply migrating themselves.

Here’s a pelican/pterodactyl coming in for a landing.

And if the shape of that head doesn’t convince you that these things are basically a chromosome away from the Jurassic Period, this ought to do the trick (warning: shocking animal behavior):

With Lorelei out on maternity leave, Emma’s had a couple of solo TV appearances lately promoting “Buh Bye.” The first clip is from ABC News, and the second is from Fox’s “The Morning Show with Mike & Juliet.” (Click either image to view the video.)