Thursday, August 31, 2006

Pretty Birds


Saw this colorful bird (and another one just like it) outside of the Hilton Garden Inn in Sacramento this morning. Actually, I heard them before I saw them -- their call sounded like two old men grunting. I'm not enough of an ornithologist to know what kinds of birds they were.

This evening I saw an interesting new movie from Spain called "Queens." It's about a bunch of young people getting married and how their dramatic, Spanish mothers come to dominate the goings on.

Carmen Maura, who I wrote about recently after seeing her in a Pedro Almodovar movie, shows up in this picture. She plays an interesting character -- the Spanish film legend Carmen Maura. And she pulls it off and looks good doing it. At one point, to prove how hip she is she says, "I've worked with Almodovar." Too funny.

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2 comments:

Anne said...

But, hey, if you can spell ornithologist correctly you don't need to actually "be" one ...
I'd guess that bird is the Black-billed Magpie.

Anne said...

Oops. Egg in my face. Umm, as you can clearly see in the photo the magpie has a YELLOW bill. A magpie with a yellow bill is called a Yellow-billed Magpie.
And as an interesting sidelight (to make up for my mistake) the Yellow-billed Magpie is the only species of bird restricted to the state of California. (This is a good example of biogeographic differentiation [the evolution of an isolated population into a separate species]).