I'd like to meet:
10 Things You Can Do to Make Your Bird Happy
1. Provide a healthy and varied diet — not just seeds, but grains, beans, vegetables (cooked and raw) formulated pellets, and some fruit. (Harmful foods include chocolate, avocado, highly processed or overly salted foods, human junk food, and caffeine.)
2. Give your bird the largest enclosure possible — no space is too big for a creature adapted to flying through jungles and across savannas.
3. Provide daily exercise and ample out-of-cage time, preferably to include free flying in a safe, supervised environment. (Bird-proofing a room for out-of-cage time includes keeping birds away from items containing lead and zinc, and from paint chips, ceiling fans, electrical cords, cats and dogs, and open windows.)
4. Bird Toys Offer a variety of toys and enrichment activities. (Buy toys from "Out of this World Bird Toys" and help support bird rescue.)
5. Provide plenty of socialization with other birds and/or human caretakers.
6. Give access to unfiltered sunlight and/or full-spectrum lighting. Birds need exposure to UVA and UVB rays from direct sunlight (windows block necessary UV rays) or full-spectrum lighting to synthesize vitamin D necessary for bone health.
7. Offer daily or weekly misting with a clean spray bottle of water to promote feather and skin health and for fun! Some birds prefer to bathe in a small container (like their water dish); others enjoy being misted with water. It is important to allow the birds to air-dry in a warm room or in the sunshine.
8. Develop games and teach your bird skills ("jobs") like foraging or treasure hunts (this can be done in the house or with creative toys in the cage), cleaning up toys by putting them in a basket.
9. Provide a secure enclosure, carrier, or harness so your bird can enjoy the outdoors with you.
10. Place multiple perches/stands throughout the house so that your bird can benefit from ambient "flock time" while being included in family activities like watching TV or movies, preparing meals, playing cards or games.
Books:
It's a good one to read & mmmmm tastes great
Heroes:
Funny Smart Asses!
Dog and Dylan Moran
and M. Cho ....
and the one with the smaller head in this picture
MARK MORFORD!
Take a gander at some of his words....
I'm Drunk And Naked On MySpace!
Plus, more great reasons you can never run for office. Also: Are teens insanely boring?
Upon the hot heavy-petted hard drive inside the overworked MacBook Pro on which I am typing these words right now sits a rather wide variety of video clips -- homemade, semi-pro and otherwise -- of a nature that would surely make an evangelical congregation scream and their pastor secretly swoon and a few adult-film companies send me a nice fruit basket as a personal thank-you. I know, big shock.
I am also, I humbly admit, in comfortable possession of large quantities of digital pictures and letters and even IM transcripts of a deeply delectable and hotly intimate nature that could, given their content and their overexposed flesh tones and should they fall into the wrong mealy hands, entirely ruin my chances of becoming a state senator, an insurance adjuster or dorm floor leader. I believe I am rather OK with this.
There is also, of course, much more mundane fare: Pictures from parties. At the beach. Posing with friends and family and leering at the camera and looking tired or happy or baffled or drunk or entirely frightening to small children.
There are yoga pictures. Head shots. Girlfriends. Holidays. Vacations. Personal notes and spiritual meanderings and deep thoughts about shallow topics (and vice versa), scraps of columns that never made it to fruition right alongside brilliant hilarious full-length pieces that were never allowed to run because they apparently contain too many dildo/Jesus/you-might-offend-someone-in-Walnut-Creek references.
I tell you all this because a) The Chronicle doesn't have to pay for my home office computer and therefore I am allowed to endow it as I desire; b) I sometimes flatter myself into believing it is my job to hint at secret salacious personal anecdotes that make me sound much kinkier and weirder and more scandalous than I probably am.
But most importantly, I tell you this because c) I am not a member of Generation Next, and therefore not a glimpse of any of said material is posted anywhere online, and never really will be, and no one really cares about this fact (and in fact, most are probably rather happy about it), and this is exactly as it should be.
Ah, but if you've been reading the media lately, this is far from the case for Generation Next, that highly visible, fascinatingly shameless, apparently horrifying segment of tech-soaked teens and twentysomethings who are, right this minute, photographing and itemizing and reorganizing their nervous little worlds and then blithely revealing every quasi-sordid detail on MySpace and Facebook and YouTube and MyFaceLogSlutBook because, well, because it's just what they do.
Perhaps you've heard. Perhaps you know them. They're the ones entering online contests with names like Hottest Naked Dorm Whore and AreYourBoobsBig.com. They're the ones you see taking endless low-grade cell phone pictures of themselves at the beach in Cabo as they binge drink and sunburn their genitals and give mock oral sex to a beer bong and posting them online, thus crushing their shot at becoming CFO of Hewlett-Packard in, say, 2024.
Yes, they are the "show everything" generation, always live, always "onstage," always craving to snort a line of cheap reality show-style fame no matter what the cost to personal freedom or privacy or the fact that no one really cares how many times they made out with a certain hottie backstage at the Linkin Park concert and then threw up three times.
It is, some say, a serious issue. An impending disaster. Some even believe it will be the humiliating downfall of a generation as already many Nexters entering the workforce are finding that HR departments are increasingly performing actual online background checks, and should you have had all your icky dating habits and fetish for pot brownies and spanking photographed and posted online, well, you're probably not getting that sweet gig as sales assistant at Smith Barney. Shame.
Here is the question: Does it matter? Should you care? Is it really a new, panicky, frightening mutation of the culture that confounds adults and shakes up our notions of privacy and secrecy and cheap dime-store fame?
Well, not really. For one thing, if everyone in Generation Next eventually has their tell-all MySpace journals that only 10 friends and their therapist are forced to read, then soon enough the whole culture, the entire workforce will mutate and absorb the phenomenon, and it will become exactly no big deal at all that you once revealed your crazy love of pet rats and tequila shooters and boys' butts online, because hell, everyone revealed similar silliness and everyone saw everyone else's drunken underwear and everyone stopped giving much of a damn about 10 years ago.
But there is another big factor in the messy analysis of this supposedly brazen generation, another angle that gets drastically overlooked in the shock and awe of this new wave of online teen behavior.
It is this: After scanning your 125th profile of yet another pale, spazzy Good Charlotte fan from Minneapolis, after seeing 257 pictures of Jenny from Orlando's drunk, giggly friends at hookup parties and reading about her love of dolphin tattoos and her desire to get her eyebrow pierced, oh my God my mom will kill me lol, it hits you: Sweet Jesus with a bottle of Tanqueray and a polysyllabic thought, these are the most boring people I have ever seen in my entire life.
It is like watching ferrets finger-paint. It is like watching kittens with ADD chase flashlight beams. It is like reading only US Weekly and eating chocolate Pop-Tarts and masturbating with a brown Microsoft Zune. Interesting for a few minutes, then it's all oh my God my brain is seeping through my toes and everything hurts and please make it stop.
Put another way: Aside from the "thrill" of seeing bits of young flesh and cringing at the 10 million ways teens can find to abuse the English language, there is really nothing of substance here. All that revealing and all that shamelessness and all that detailing of personal lives and you end up with ... well, not much at all. And why? Simple: No matter how "fearless" they seem, the YouTube generation simply have yet to do much of anything truly interesting.
There are, for example, no brutal divorces. There are no terrorist offspring. There are no intriguing scars of the world, no warped wisdom, no kinky sex and no mortgage-payment blues and no experimental gender play and no painful rashes in unexpected places. There are no wild travel tales to share, no lost weekends in Vegas with three midget hookers and a small pony, no stalkers, no tales of violent acts of revenge. There is, in other words, very little of that most precious and revealing of personal issues known as, you know, life.
Hey, they're teens. It's supposed to be cute and shallow and irritating and angsty. But do you really need to read about it?
