As it happens, the place where I’m staying on Martha’s Vineyard for a few days is about a half mile down a dirt road from the tiny airfield where the red-footed falcon is staying…the first and only sighting of this bird in North America, and it’s drawing birders from all over. I went out today with my camera and got some startling photos of the little critter…

Roosting in the distance

Tiny against the cloudless sky

Super enlargment of previous photo. Notice the wing markings. Beautiful!

Soaring against the sun

Coming in to roost. It’s not shy of people!

Newborn falcon! How adorable! Now we know why it’s been hanging around!

Crisp and clear…the best photo I got

Birders gather to watch. Had they been a little more observant, they might have seen what I saw.

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The Letterman Show lets visitors to their Web site suggest Top Ten entries for a weekly topic. This week the topic is “Top Ten Ways New York Is Preparing For the Republican National Convention.” Go make merry.

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I know I must be the last person in America to hear about this, but on the plane ride on Saturday, they showed a clip from the Letterman show of a kid standing behind the President, yawning his way through a speech. The clip is really funny, and Letterman’s interview with the 13-year-old was charming. The kid said that he finds the clip “hilarious,” so you don’t even have to feel bad about laughing at it.

And, no, I don’t count this as a criticism of Bush. It was a political speech and the kid’s 13. Yawns happen.

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The San Francisco Chronical aggregates the Edwards jokes from the late-night TV shows.

I thought maybe one of the jokes was funny. Maybe you had to be there.

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Mark in a comment sends us to Kiss This Guy, a site that aggregates misheard lyrics (kiss this guy = kiss the sky). Which reminds me of something I heard at the Seattle airport yesterday…

Two parents where shepherding their 8-yr-old daughter through the long “security” line. The parents took off their shoes and the girl started laboriously to unbuckle hers. “Does she have to take off hers?” the father asked the security guy. “Children are exempt,” he said with a slight Southern accent.

Still the girl insisted on taking off her shoes. After urging her not to a few times, the parents decided it would be faster just to let her finish.

After they had cleared the inspection, as the girl was putting her shoes back on, the mother said, “Why did you take off your shoes? We kept telling you not to.”

“Because,” she said, clearly upset by the stress, “the guard said that childred are exammed.”

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1. Perhaps your newspaper’s funny pages includes Whatzit, the syndicated daily puzzle that takes some everyday phrase and presents it as a clever arrangement of words. For example, “nv emerald” is “green with envy” and “TTT” is “big tease.” Imagine it runs for the next 40 years. That’s 14,600 common phrases from now. Whatzit will be down to obscure taglines from the 1950s and hepcat cliches that were last uttered in 1928.

2. When a store makes a commitment to everything costing a dollar, it is guaranteeing that it will lose value precisely at the rate of inflation.

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I woke up this morning from a vivid dream. Someone had been talking about a philosopher who liked to fast before he thought. Not for me, I replied, or else, Rene a la Carte would have written “I think, therefore I yam.”

Look, it was just a dream, ok? At least I didn’t have Jean Paul Sartre writing Being and Muffinness. Nor did Sartre say “Hell is other Peeps.” Nor did Kant issue his Categorical Aperitif. So just leave me alone.

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Doug Weaver breaks the news about Google’s next area of innovation. (Hint: How do you say “My hovercraft is full of eels?” in Googlish?)

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The most comprehensive interspecies dictionary available…

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Here are the patron saints of graphic design… [Thanks to Ian Poynter for the pointer.]

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