Hat-tip to you, sir. Eloquently stated.

@DMcCreery1956

Add "garden" to the list of fine American possessions. Love your garden posts.

Cannons make great lawn ornaments.

@jaymaron YES! Canons are marvelous in the garden. We have a friend who brings his muzzle-loading canon here for Independence Day weekends. I would love to have it under my cherry trees right now to scare away the pecking, pooping birds.

@DMcCreery1956

Luke Skywalker was captured by Ewoks. He could have used his Force Powers to escape, but he chose instead to remain captured. He channeled the spirit of Franklin and found ambassadorial opportunity. As it happens, C3PO is an ambassador robot, programmed for linguistics and politeness. Luke created the illusion that C3PO possessed the power of The Force, forcing the Ewoks to respect him. C3PO used the stage to become commander of the Ewoks.

Luke saw that the Ewoks are capable of taking down a Death Star.

Wild birds can be your friends. Once upon a time, I fed birds in Central Park and built up a congregation of 100 ducks and 200 geese. [jaymaron.com]

If you help humans, some will be grateful, but most will not. Most homeless are not worth helping.

If you feed ducks and geese, they treat you like a celebrity. They have more sense than humans. They understand that it's no longer about "survival of the fittest", but that it's now "survival of the friendliest".

Poop is fertilizer.

@jaymaron I appreciate this angle of bird's-eye viewing. Nevertheless, the starlings and robins lazily sit in the treetops, pecking cherries and giving themselves diarrhea, which coats every leaf and all of the fruit below them. Ewwww. The FDA says we should never even touch the fowl fouled fruit lest we die. Now that my pie cherries are finally ripe enough to pick (the birds have been at this for weeks), salvaging said cherries is a disgusting process. I have picked and processed 3 gallons from the first tree. After multiple washes and rinses, I've pulled off the stems and soaked the cherries in vodka to kill any remaining pathogens. Then they're pitted and dehydrated or frozen. The problem with birds is like the problem with people: they take the path of least resistance and gorge themselves on the easiest meal, which is not flying about eating bugs, and they don't follow a basic rule for dinner guests, "don't shit where your hostess eats." Yes, it could be called foliar feeding, but that much nitrogen will probably burn the leaves .

Happy hump day.

@DMcCreery1956

Yes, birds poop wantonly. I have birdseed on the desk, and the birds poop on the desk.

@DMcCreery1956

Yes, Democrats are spiteful. A spiteful person happily takes on damage if it gives him a chance to damage his foe even more.

Democrats will happily sabotage the health of the USA to hurt Republicans.

The opposite of spite is synergy. A synergistic person looks for good deals, so that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts.

Democrats consider spite to be virtue. Republicans consider synergy to be virtue.

Shame Democrats for failing to seek synergy. Whiff! Negligent!