This is going to have a lot of bullshit and filler because the fact is, I’ve never had a view of a Baltimore oriole that was worth a shit.  On a last-minute birding drive with my brother, we hit up a scratchy sun-blasted park where some big cool owls had been seen.  In our allotted time there, we did not see those, but I did glimpse these black and orange birds shying away, high in a tree, colors much less impressive in yellow sunlight than they would have been in more neutral circumstances.

I did another one of these posts about the varied thrush – another orange and black bird, that actually lives in my area.  I like their overall look better than orioles, which could be cause for regional pride, but comparing the two in photographs, I realized our local birds are much more drab.  Because fucking of course they are.  PNW is drabland, safe for even the sparkliest of vampires.

So, another famous North American bird only glimpsed in passing at a distance.  What can one say about that?  Remember those educational products they sold to parents in the ’80s?  The green plastic box with postcards of unusual animals inside, with information about them on the reverse sides?  I had one of those with an oriole in it.  Much less memorable than the cuscus.

I used to be semi-aware of baseball cards as a thing to do, which made me semi-aware of the stickball team from Baltimore.  Hey, I’ll tell you everything I know about Baltimore.

You ever see the movie Long Kiss Goodnight?  God, it’s such a great entry to the genre of bullshitty action cinema.  Easily as good as Die Hard, though more self-aware and maybe too elaborate to be quite as iconic?  Any given Samuel Jackson quote from that movie ranks up there with his dialogue from Pulp Fiction, or better.  Geena Davis was perfect.  It might be the best cinematic use of her talents ever, as good as she was in Beetlejuice and A League of Their Own.  And hell, the Orion-bankrupting Cutthroat Island.

That’s all over the place.  Forget the digression.  Important thing, her character was named Charlie Baltimore.  She was so cool a rap lady took the name, altered to Charli Baltimore.  I wonder if she was repping Balti?  For my money the most hilarious moment in LKG was when she got in a car wreck with a stag, and while it lay dying, she did the action movie neck snap to put it out of its misery.  She action movie neck snapped a specimen of motherfucking megafauna.  Hahahahahha!

What else?  Internet funnyman Brian David Gilbert is from Baltimore and shows some civic pride in his series of Dances Moving comedy shorts.  His partner and collaborator Karen Han reminds me too much of the first girl I remember crushing on, haha.  Hoo.  Forget I said that.

Baltimore has, from my point of view across a continent, some fun quirky cultural things to it.  Old Bay Seasoning.  A wacky coat of arms.  One of those East Coast local accents that we don’t get out here…

Anyway, Baltimore.  And some shy little binch of a bird hiding from me in a tree in a hot-ass place I don’t ever want to be again for the rest of my natural life.  Kansas.  I’d rather go to Baltimore.  Living a thousand miles from the ocean is just fucked up.

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