Bird Turds 12

• I seem to have gone a week without posting a new Bird Turds. Sorry about that, dudes. So here's one. (It's not that I didn't have one ready, of course. I think that the readers of Curtains For You, Kid have grown accustomed to a greater degree of professionalism than that, right?)

• I'm not sure what having a Flickr pro account does for a person, exactly. And if I had one, I would almost certainly never take full advantage of it. What's weird is that if you have a Flickr account, you can buy a pro upgrade for any other Flickr user. So, it's not that I want one, really, but I will say that whoever buys me a Flickr pro upgrade will get an original Bird Turds comic strip, which I can nearly guarantee will never be worth as much as you'd spend on said upgrade.

• I went, the other day, to this live satellite presentation of This American Life.

Until I actually arrived on the scene, I thought it was going to be, like, a live performance of This American Life. Like they do with Whad'ya Know?, but it wasn't. So I did not, in fact, get to see the condensation on Ira Glass's glasses.

{Never let what you consider to be a good line go to waste, eh? - Ed.}

The place, a movie theater south of town, was packed. It was so crowded, in fact, that this woman had to scoot two seats over closer to me to accommodate this guy and his kid.

And then the show started.

And then the theater lost the video portion of the satellite feed. This made the experience, you know, exactly like sitting in the dark listening to the radio with like 300 groaning, muttering strangers. The audio, which was to accompany a preview segment from the second season of the This American Life TV show, soldiered on.

"I think," said the lady next to me, "that if I keep staring at the screen, and, you know, focusing, then the video will come back on."

"That'll either work or it won't," I said, "but it will be impossible to tell."

"You know," said the guy on the other side of the lady, "it's bad enough that I can't see what's going on. Now I can't even hear it."

So whatever. We shut up. Because, you know, at least on my end, I get it. You paid a lot of money to be here. So far be it from me to fuck it up for you.

But then, a minute later, the video came back, like everyone knew it eventually would. And then the good folks in the projectionists' room "rewound" the feed, so everyone could see the show in its entirety. Which, I mean, shit. All of this was bound to happen. Every theater manager I've ever met - and I have known a few - would much rather yell at some high school kid for ten minutes than deal with several hundred angry NPR enthusiasts.

"Hey, look," said the lady next to me to the guy next to her, "Now you can see all that stuff you missed."

But he wasn't feeling it. So when, a few minutes later, the vertical hold fucked up for a little while, he seized the opportunity the storm off and demand a refund, which was fine with everyone.