Hitchcock showed unequivocally that birds are the enemy, making it all the more important to know their ways…
For many years I used to wake up screaming, having had nightmares in which the apocalyptic vision at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds came true. I took these terrors to be a warning, and a decisively personal warning at that. “Only you, Mr Key, and you alone, can prevent the otherwise inevitable vanquishment of human civilisation by our avian foes!” This was what I was being told, by whichever gods control our minds in the depths of the night.
Luckily, I realised that in order to prevent the inevitable etcetera etcetera, we had but to know the enemy. With a clear understanding of precisely what is going on in the innards of a bird, we could rally our defences and outwit the aerial fiends. To this end, and using a generic bird as my pattern, after long minutes of study I prepared the two helpful diagrams below. Armed with these, you need never fear a bird, ever again.
Click on the images, then click again, to enlarge.
eek…a penchant for ultravox recordings
The sequence Ennui — Flippancy — Disgruntlement — Nonchalance — Desperation — Criminality is surely an accurate summary of any normal Friday in the office editing a Statistics Dictionary.
And the epic progression Misanthropy — Balefulness — Remorse — Inexplicable Latin Caption — True Grit — Surliness — Dyspepsia would have to be Monday morning.
Genius. No other word for it. Except, possibly, ‘madness’.
But it’s a fine line.
I have a suspicion that the rooks on my roof are suffering from Rex Harrison syndrome rather than a surfeit of ultrasound? Or was that Ultravox??
Could you make a t-shirt out of these too please?