#5: The Rough Faced Shag

I was taking time out of my busy dirt bag schedule to work on a brand new blog I'm doing with Jesse Pruden (eeeeee!) and decided I should update this fucking cool thing. Here goes!

Rough Faced Shag

This bird name is almost too easy to make fun of, but holy shit! Not only does this bird have an embarrassing common name, its latin name is PHALACROCORAX CARUNCULATUS. How much does that suck? Latin people AND modern people can make fun of this guy. There are too many obvious jokes on just the name front for me to even bother. Please "insert" your own.

Ok, I will make one. Rough Faced Shag sounds like what you call a lumberjack that you totally FUCKED! No wait, it sounds like an ugly guy you totally FUCKED! No, no, it sounds like a burn victim......no, a type of carpet.....no, it's a beard fetish! Somebody stop me! It feels toooooooo good!

Anyways, yeah other than all those SUUUUUUUPER funny jokes I just made (weren't they good and also funny?) this bird looks like it has balls on its face. Balls that are made out of brains. Brain balls. That are orange! So...that sucks. And they are right in front of the bird's eyes, so all they look at all day is tiny little brain balls. That would drive me insane. It's probably really frustrating to constantly teabag oneself. So defeating.

They have these tiny little mohawk kind of things going on atop their heads and a blue ring around their eyes. It makes them look like cyber punks, which I guess is ok, for a bird. According to movies about the FUTURE made in the 1980s (man's most futuristic decade) cyber punks are going to exist FOREVER. Good news for this fucked up looking little dude, hey? Maybe he will be teamed up with a Daryl Hannah type character and wear some sort of modified swimsuit looking thing and actually turn out to be a ROBOT all along and this doesn't really make sense anymore and isn't very funny so I'm going to move on. This is what happens when you get me onto the topic of cyber punks, so I should've known better than to even begin this paragraph.

This bird is also known as the King Shag, which is altogether more impressive sounding than the Rough Faced Shag. Although, it kind of sets you up for disappointment. You google it imagining a tiny crowned treasure and all you get is Ballface. Sad.

I guess this bird isn't tooooo ugly. Just kind of unfortunate looking. I have a thing for weird shit on faces though, so I might just be over sensitive. I also have a thing with googly eyes you should ask me about sometime. This bird is a lot better than a couple other ones which have been showcased in this blog, so I guess it does alright. Because I said so.

Ok I'm tired of this.

SF


See? Brain balls.

#4 The Limpkin

So it's 2009 and I haven't done an entry in this for like, 3 months and fuck you. I am busy. I play a lot of nintendo and sleep all afternoon, not to mention the amount of soup I heat up and then consume. Trife life. Give me a break.

The first bird of the year is the Limpkin. I chose this bird because it sounds like a particularly pathetic character from a Charles Dickens novel. Like an extra orphany orphan. I'm imagining a scene wherein the main character is at a poor house and is all "Oose dat in da cohner, den?" and some other orphan is all "Oo, dat? Why, dat's Limpkin, of course. Ee's da saddest of us all" And Limpkin would be wearing part of a newspaper and eating a bread heel, crying.

In actual fact, the Limpkin is a kind of ugly bird from Florida and ughh....below? I was trying to figure out how to best construct that sentence and I think I failed. I was trying to say they also live in a lot of South America and the West Indies. And Mexico. It lives a lot of places. It also doesn't migrate. Boring.

Ughhhh what else. They eat apple snails, which are gross looking. They are really big and have a gross breathing tube and are freaks. They have a door on their shell they can close when they don't want to dry up. Creepy. Creepy little snails. I am glad that they get eaten. Apparently they fucked up rice in Taiwan, too, so fuck em.

The Limpkin's actually pretty boring. It's brown. It doesn't go anywhere. It lives in marshes and swamps, which is also where rapists live. It's a fact. All rapists live in swamps. Ughhhhhhh what else. This bird sounds like it's SCREAMING when it talks. It goes "AAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! aaaaah aaaaaAAAAAAAHaaaaaa AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!" Very annoying. One website describes its call as "evocative" but they must mean it "evokes extreme annoyance in Sarah's brain when she is sick and writing bird blogs."

On a more sombre note, the Limpkin is the only member of its family. Tragic. It may seem like a heron or an ibis, but don't be fooled. It is special. Special and alone. Maybe that's why it screams all the time. Maybe we hear "AAAAAAAH! AAAAAAHHHH!" but what it's actually saying is "Holy fuck, where's my family?! WHERE DID THEY GO? FUUUUUCK! I'M ALONE! FUCK! FUUUUUCK!" I feel sad now.

Apparently Limpkins are so tame (read: dumb) that you can just go up to their nests and grab them, so people used to keep them as pets. I woud way rather have a dog though. What the fuck are you supposed to do with a Limpkin? People would come over and you'd have to be like "Look at my boring brown bird. Isn't it cool? It stands around eating snails all day and screaming. Jealous?" and no one would be jealous. No one.

I don't know, this bird's kind of lame. Doesn't seem to have much going for it. Other than the whole being a Charles Dickens thing. I would probably read a classic work of fiction entitled Limpkin, The Screaming Orphan. Maybe not. That actually sounds pretty shitty.

Anyways, sorry for yet another crappy bird. It's not my fault nature is fucking bad at making cool ones. If I was in charge of creating birds, you can bet your fucking ass they'd be rad shit. Like a taco bird?! Dream!

-Sarah Ford

Limpkin. Uggh, boring.

Apple Snails. So fucking gross.