Hi Tweets:

With various ongoing changes within the company for which I work, I haven't
had much time to get into any of these recent fractious threads. Dang.

But that hasn't stopped my enormous enjoyment of the clashing energies at
work. Lots of wonderful sparks flying everywhere, strings of firecrackers
going off, idea-rockets flying in all directions. Wonderful! Count your
blessings! You *could* be a single-focus, stultified, intellectually
constipated and eyes-averted list (I'm not pointing fingers, just extending
the logic) with various self-appointed List Police to impose their versions
of the local orthodoxy on--eventually--those who don't conform to the local
consensus, but why on *earth* would you want to move down that one-way road
if you you're not being forced to? After all, hasn't history shown us
repeatedly that the first step toward telling us what we can't ask is
telling us what we can't say? This is as true on the mundane level of our
list as on the grand stage of a nation's politics: think globally, think
locally, to modify the slogan.

Don Baccus writes:
>>On the other hand, if tweeters-at-large decide to *CHANGE* this list into
>>a strictly-birding list (please note the use of the word CHANGE), then I
>>am certain that those of us who post non-birding stuff would cease to do
>>so.

I wouldn't. I'd unsubscribe. One less source of boredom and
'not-before-the-children' in life, and there's far too many already. In or
out of birding, I *hate* people telling me what I can and can't say, always
have. It's precisely the intellectual 'laissez-faire' ferment, energy,
variety and honesty that attracts and holds me. Much more fun, as well as
being at times quite moving. A group having a wide-ranging, tolerant and
civil debate travels down many an unexpected lane before turning the horses'
heads for home.

>>Until this *CHANGE* is declared, though, I will feel free to continue
>>to post messages on the various topics that arise and that traditionally
>>have been considered to be *ON-TOPIC* for tweeters.

Concur: evidence is tested as it arises. From whatever source.

Ted Becker writes:
>My morning email contained 18 messages
>Two personal
>One on Gyrfalcon
>Eleven on 'shade coffee'/'waste of time'
>Four on CT birding
>
>That's one on-topic message out of sixteen. My objection is not the off
>topic postings in and of themselves but the quantity. Part of being an
>adult is knowing when to quit and part of net etiquette is knowing when to
>take a discussion private or to a different forum.

Well, that's just the mail this morning. Tomorrow's may be drastically
different in composition. To use just one day's topic-range from which to
tee off on "off-topic"--wouldn't be my description, BTW: just not so
obviously on-topic--postings is statistically sort of arbitrary; you may
want to use a bigger sample first, say several months to a year, to see what
the long-term ratios *actually* are (after getting agreement on what
constitutes 'on' and 'off' topics). That'd be interesting! I'll bet the
results would be very surprising! Other days, and often for many days in
sequence, the posted contents are entirely and explicitly on birds, so, by
definition, "on-topic". Have others noticed this? To move to general
principle from this day's particular is, logically, a bit dodgy. Besides,
the far greatest part of the time we actually have mostly or entirely what
we want, a list whose posts are explicitly or implicitly about WA/BC birds.

Even, to move to the more general, if these "off-topic" threads erupt, they
also terminate of their own accord as people run out of things to say. Even
if you don't like them, you'll have the pleasure of knowing you'll outlive
the thread just by showing patience for a two or three days. ;-)

Oh. Birds. Yeah. Yesterday, a large, darker-than-usual mantled adult Herring
Gull, all the other pale grey, maybe a 'vegae' type (and, no, not a
Slaty-backed, though I tried *real* hard... it had the lemon-yellow eye with
reddish-orange orbital ring, large-mirror, small-mirror wingtip, the mantle
grey was a titch darker than a California Gull, or about mid-range in the
'Olympic Gull' grey-density continuum), was perched on a piling on the
Fraser River in New Westminster about 100 meters E of--and I'm not making
this up--the 'Echo'-class Russian submarine that's moored at New Westminster
Quay at the foot of Eighth Street, and open for public tours for those
interested in, among other things, testing their theory that a rusty ol'
dawg like this could seriously have taken on the US or NATO navies with the
slightest realistic hope of success.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net