Our pet ducks.

This year, a duck couple has found our backyard to be the appropriate place for mallarditudinous doings:

When you accuse a 6-year-old of plagiarism in an art contest...

... you'd better be ready to make a decision to disqualify her and stick to it. You've besmirched her, and you can't unbesmirch her. Oh, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service! You idiots!

“Following the contest, concerns were raised by parents and teachers about the authenticity of the work,” the agency said in a press release. “The Federal Duck Stamp Office investigated and learned that the painting had been transferred, which is inconsistent with the Junior Duck Stamp Contest rules.”

Madison [Grimm] said she was “sad” and “a little angry” when she heard the news. “I worked really hard on it,” she told the Daily News.

Her father said was aware that the graphite transfer technique, which is when an artist uses pencil lead on a photo print to create an outline for a painting, was allowed, as was Madison’s use of an unpublished photo from her father as a model.

Robert Lesino, who was the Federal Duck Stamp Program chief when the junior program started, helped write the rules for the contest. He told the Argus Leader that Madison’s two practices were not violations, but rather legal and common practices among artists.

So it wasn't even a violation of the rules?! The press release was wrong? I'd like to know more about these "parents and teachers" who raised "concerns." Maybe they thought the "Junior" contest was supposed to consist of childlike art, like this one, which is the only one in the "2013 Federal Junior Duck Stamp Best of Show Art" Flickr set that doesn't look like it was traced from a photograph. Frankly, I'd prefer to see a duck stamp made from a naive child's drawing than a mature child's labored attempt to produce something that an adult illustrator would do, but you've got to make different rules to get that outcome. The concerned parents and teachers should lobby for different rules next time, not take aim at the one mature child who happened to be the best of the acting-like-an-adult photo-tracers.

"And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way."

I figured that "ducks will have something to eat" post has got you screaming please, please, give me a "Gatsby" sentence. I know many of you don't like or don't get the "Gatsby" project, in which we isolate and munch on a single, possibly turgid, sentence from "The Great Gatsby," more or less every day around here on the Althouse blog. But now, perhaps, you'd love one as an amuse bouche. The moods are orchestrated here on Althouse.

This sentence has us suspended in time. Time passed, servants waited, standing around, and the man is there, being awkward. Blink is a good word in relation to time. It expresses the shortest kind of time, and anxious eye blinking contrasts to the waiting around of the servants. They are patient and he is nervous, and then — cutting through the awkwardness — the man speaks — but his speech piles on more awkwardness, as he talks about the weather — rain — and we need to be told that this isn't relaxing talk-about-the-weather small talk. His weather-talk has a specific, unsettling attitude: He spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way.

How is the weather where you are? Is there much rain? Please watch out for the ducks... the hungry, hungry ducks. 

"The world’s most experienced penis reattachment surgeons can be found in Thailand..."

"... where, during the 1970s, an estimated one hundred vengeful Thai wives, spurred by media coverage of a prominent 1973 case, sliced off the penises of their adulterous husbands as they slept. When a suitably equipped microsurgeon was on hand to reattach the errant appendage, the men were able to resume philandering within a matter of months. Though probably with reduced success: The penises, though operative, were shorter, numb, and often only partway erectable. The most serious complication, in the Thai attacks, was infection. Two of the wives flushed the penises down the toilet, forcing their husbands to grope for their lost manhood inside the septic tank. (Incredibly, both were found, cleaned, cleaned some more, and reattached.) More commonly, the women would hurl the penis out the window. In the cases described in 'Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam,' all the recovered penises were 'grossly contaminated.' Better that than eaten by livestock. Many rural Thai homes are elevated on pilings, with the family’s pigs, chickens, and ducks tending to mill about seeking shade in the space underneath. It is not, oddly, the pigs, but rather the ducks, that the castrated Thai must worry about. The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.'"

I'm reading "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," by Mary Roach.

"I'm a lot like Baby Huey. I'm fat. I'm ugly. But if you push me down, I keep coming back."

So said President Bill Clinton (in 1993).



Remember Baby Huey?

He would see his peers playing, and would immediately get excited. Whenever he tried to involve himself in the activities of his peers (also anthropomorphic ducklings) he would often inadvertently cause more problems, and as a result they would drive him away through trickery (and into tears). A hungry fox would show up, originally intending to eat Huey's peers, but upon seeing Huey as a bigger meal and overhearing the distraught duck's desires to play with someone, would feign friendship and set traps along the way, all of which would prove ineffective on Huey and/or backfire on the fox. At first Huey was blissfully unaware of the fox's true agenda. But as his peers watched the annoyed fox in action from a safe distance (and fearing for his safety just as they did their own), Huey would come to realize the truth about his predator and dispose of him, usually by saying: "Hey, you! You're the fox! And I think you're trying to kill me!", and would finish the fox.

Bizarre for a President of the United States to equate himself to that!

"My duck does a wonderful trick. My duck can lay an egg!"

Via EDH in the comments to "Signs that people are tired of thinking about politics," which highlighted the Washington Post article about the amazing fact that a bird laid an egg. And who better than Shirley Temple to epitomize the desire for distraction from politics?