Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
There are Magnolia warblers hanging around my neighborhood. This is pretty exotic for us. Ordinarily, we stock just the most basic urban tough guys – crows, starlings, house sparrows, now and then a Cooper’s hawk – and we get to dress things up with cardinals. But thanks to the migration, right now these little butterfly-like characters are hanging around Logan Square, singing, eating bugs and flashing their intense black-and-yellow chests. Continue reading
We are watching the film Detropia, right now, on PBS. It was made three years ago but is not that far off about today. The city administration is still pushing hard for what it calls “right-sizing,” or “consolidating,” which is to shove people into central parts of the city and then, to be honest, walk away from everything else. OK, that’s fine, but (a) who will pay these people fair prices for their homes? and (b) what will happen to the empty parts? Continue reading
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
We were driving around Detroit the other day looking for pheasants, which have naturalized themselves all over town. Terry spotted some things moving around in the grass here and I rolled down the car window to take the picture. The birds – hilariously, they were a pheasant and a wild turkey – fled into the weeds. This house had been burned so recently that the sour hard stink of the crime rolled into the car.
In the last few days some idiot has been going around torching buildings that I have been looking at for years. It’s someone’s vicious little rite-of-spring hobby – probably a few someones. Not as vicious as the large-scale razing being ever more efficiently wrought by the city council, not as vicious and nasty as the mountain-on-a-city-block sized pile of black petroleum waste from Alberta that the Koch brothers are dumping downtown. But still, vicious. Continue reading
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
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