Tuesday, August 28, 2007

"Stool Pigeon"

Sirs:
In The Story of San Michele, a current "best seller," (TIME, Nov. 24) Dr. Axel Munthe describes with righteous indignation the practice in Italy some years ago of putting out the eyes of song birds, which were then used as decoys for the capture of other birds.
I find a parallel for this cruelty, and at the same time the origin of our name "stool pigeon," in The Passenger Pigeon in Pennsylvania, a book compiled some years ago by Col. Henry W. Shoemaker, at present U. S. minister to Bulgaria.
He tells us that in netting passenger pigeons the trappers would blind the decoy birds or "stool pigeons" by sewing their eyes shut with a fine needle and silk thread. The decoys were then fastened by their feet to the stool, which has a circular piece of board six or eight inches in diameter, fastened to a stick four or five feet long, the opposite end of which was placed in a slot in a stake, thus forming a hinge so that the bird could be raised and lowered by pulling a string running to the fowler's hiding place.
Col. Shoemaker says: "By raising the bird and dropping it suddenly it was made to flutter as it was going down; and the flying birds, seeing it, would begin to circle around, coming nearer and nearer, until they finally lit on the bed around the stool pigeon. Then the net would be sprung. At once there would be a mass of fluttering, struggling pigeons, with heads protruding through the meshes. The fowler and his assistants would rush to the massacre, which was the crushing of the head of each individual bird between the thumb and forefinger."

From:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,752706-2,00.html

Saturday, August 11, 2007

As Osama Bin Laden said...

Bush left no room for doubts or media opinion. He stated clearly that this war is a Crusader war. He said this in front of the whole world so as to emphasize this fact. … When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn't mean it. He said, 'crusade.' Bush divided the world into two: 'either with us or with terrorism' … The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths.

From Why Do They Hate Us? By Reza Aslan in SLATE