The Digest 2

I haven't read that much in the past few days, but I did go out and have an actual cultural experience, so I thought I would share that with you. But first, you are familiar with Night Heron-gate, I hope? This is the situation: over at the main Post Office, birds were pooping on mail trucks, so the PO hired a tree trimmer to cut back on the trees overhanging their parking lots. To everyone's inexplicable surprise, baby birds fell out of the trees. Baby Night Herons, to be specific. Which are protected by federal law. The poor tree trimmer is paying for their care and to PO is promising not to do it again.

The strange part about the NYT article on the topic is the number of homeless advocates they quote. While I agree that it's annoying that more people get outraged over injustice against baby birds than homeless adults, the birds in Oakland are a stand-alone story. There's a night heron scandal brewing on nearly every shore of Lake Merritt.

For example, at any given time, there are between 2 and 10 night herons eating KFC trash at the end of our street. I wrote about it earlier HERE. All the baby bird fetishists seem uninterested in the fact that there's nothing for the night herons around the lake to eat other than KFC and Kwik Way trash. Even the homeless aren't over here looking to eat that crap.

In other bird news, I spotted five white pelicans balletically eating in the lake this morning.

After my bird-filled walk and volunteering to do pizza day (it's like a penance of some sort to do this), I ran over to the Oakland Museum of California to see the Vinyl exhibit and the SuperAwesome: Art and Giant Robot exhibit.  The SuperAwesome exhibit was, in fact, super-awesome. It was curated by the founder of Giant Robot zine, Eric Nakamura, and the art is just great. It's Asian-American artists and I found it to be some of the coolest stuff I've seen in a long time. I was a big zine and comic person once, but wasn't familiar with all of this stuff. It came with a wierd "trigger warning":

I would be fine with my kids seeing this stuff. The only part of the exhibit that I might have a hard time explaining is the Adrian Tomine comics, but the text is so small that I doubt they would bother to read it.

The Vinyl exhibit did not really grab me. It was an attempt to recreate the experience of shopping for and playing vinyl records. There are bins of records and turntables you can use, and there's an opportunity to choose a favorite record and tell a story about it. I think this is a worthwhile experience if this is not something you have done before. I felt a little like a secret part of my past was being put on display and I didn't like this. Records bring out the snobbiness in people, and it made me feel snobby. I've done this before, like 100 times.  I guess I should be glad that other people are getting that experience now too.