The Gigantoraptor...

silverwhistle sent me an interesting clipping from The Guardian, about a feathered carnivorous dinosaur called the Gigantoraptor, though she (quite rightly) calls it Budgie-Kong.

There was a picture of an artist's depiction of the creature.

I showed the picture to my budgies, and they said, "It's big, but we're prettier and we sing better." (They actually said 'chirp', but I tend to follow the example of the TARDIS - I translate freely from Budgie.) Apparently it's a young Gigantoraptor, weighing about 1.4 tonnes. Picturing a huge, carnivorous creature with the personality of a budgie is rather terrifying. The only way I can control my little guys at all (assuming I can) is by outweighing them.

I wondered why, in the picture, the Gigantoraptor is given brown and white feathers. With the face of a parrot, might it not be colourful? Bright reds and greens and yellows? Is the logic that modern birds of prey - owls, hawks, eagles - tend to be brownish? I always thought that was because they hunt at night. Did the Gigantoraptor hunt at night? Why should he, if he didn't fly? Why not give him the colouring of a peacock or a macaw?

Scattered carts...

I like harmless anomalous objects.

When I walk to work, I go along Col. By Drive, then up the stairs just past the underpass at Ottawa U. Then I cut through the University to Cumberland Ave.

Today, on the landing at the middle of those stairs, someone had tethered a large shopping cart - the kind you get in supermarkets - to the handrail, with a bright red bicycle chain. Was it because they wanted to be able to pick it up later? A piece of semi-performance art? A joke? Whatever it was, it amused me.

It reminded me that on the weekend I went for coffee with maaboroshi at Bridgehead, and we were sitting on the patio at the back. I noticed that in back of the expensive condo next door, someone had left out an old wooden cart. It was the kind you see in agricultural museums that farmers used to use, with sloping sides. It seemed anachronistic, not so much the kind of thing that one might deliberately put in one's garden - there really wasn't a garden, and it seemed randomly placed. As if it had fallen through a rift in space and time. Not so much an attempt at art, or a functioning work-tool.