Thread 9 - TalkLair: “Russell's teapot goes on being round”

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of previous threads (thread 8).

The new lair of JTT escapees is all cosy and homey; we have truly settled here. Outside, the garden is blooming with summer flowers - should bloody well be, what with all that rain. Inside, the hearth is glowing, pictures are up on the walls, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Thing is, Mavis, if you were a cat you'd enjoy those things and eating a mouse would be a highlight of your day.

Suppose so! My cats are so weird about “human food”, they wouldn’t even eat chicken for their first few years and they still recoil from the prawns that all my previous cats turned cartwheels for. If we run out of cat food pouches they cannot be fobbed off by anything else. It’s all “OK, but where’s our real dinner please? Am I not doing the miaowing right or something?”

Mine absolutely hates prawns too! Other fish is completely fine, but prawns are apparently disgusting.

Oh my giddy goodness, as someone from my past used to say (if only I could remember who). Not even with a lottery win, Gwynnie.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/02/gwyneth-paltrow-airbnb-goop

Sorry Gwynnie, I'd love to be there but I'm afraid I have a subsequent engagement.

Not if she paid me.

I'm not sure why guests have such a big cooker. Doesn't she/her husband/the help normally cook for their guests? And it's a bit bland with all that white. I'd love to meet her though.

It's a lovely guest house but it's a no from me.

I had a darling cat who loved olives so much that she'd try to get them out of your mouth when you were eating them. I say that, she tried once and then I would hold an olive between my lips so she could "steal" it because it was so adorable. @MavisMcMinty if you were my cat I'd feed you good human food and never make you eat mice or birds.

Kasper is extremely suspicious of anything that doesn’t resemble a cat biscuit. He has refused prawn, salmon, tuna, sardines and mackerel. He will lick a small amount of egg yolk off my finger but afterwards will look at me with disgust. Interestingly, he did lick a wasabi-flavoured crisp once. Perhaps that’s where the problem began?

I’ve recently managed to get him eating some eye-wateringly expensive Royal Canin wet food. I’ve tried him on so many varieties but he refuses them all, and even this is touch and go. I have to mix up some lick-e-lix gravy and pour it over the top.

I was doing some online streak-plating earlier for my summer school microbiology project. I was quite pleased with my little Kasper colony.

Top agar work, Cyan.

Well we have just had day 2 of trying to get Skittles to take her medication, which has not been pleasant. She doesn't like the pill pockets and it's actually easier to get the tiny half pill into her mouth without it, but on the other hand it has to be taken with food, so...

Considering she has to be on this medication for life, I'll give it a week to see if it gets easier but at the moment I'm inclined to just find the bloody money for the radioactive iodine treatment. I need to Google though to see how much it goes wrong because $1500 is a lot of money and I have a large dentist bill of my own coming up shortly.

Very nice!

Lost track of these threads again, I'm keeping up with the On Topic one but not the chat. Anyway, just dropping in to recommend this thread, looks like being fun based on the first page. Sorry if it's already been linked to from here. Hope everyone is well.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4862860-please-tell-me-batshit-things-about-your-work

That's an excellent thread, @bignosebignose!

It's unlikely, but I don't suppose anyone here knows how to identify bird nests? I tried a Google image search but it came up with too many unsuitable results (because there doesn't seem to be a way to specify a geographical location). We found this abandoned exquisite little nest, woven into the planting beds in the gardens of our beachside accommodation. I'd estimate it is about the size of a teacup. The bird has made little piercings in the leaf to sew its nest securely.

Oh, and I can report that the Merlin app (aka Bird Shazam) doesn't really work in SE Asia I installed the relevant pack, but it really struggled to identify any bird calls. Sometimes it would recognise one example of the species, but completely fail for other individuals of the same species. Most of the time it simply didn't recognise anything even when we were sitting directly below the bloody birds singing away madly.

What kind of plant is it? Might offer a clue.

Could it be a reed warbler nest of some sort?

Tailor bird of some sort - yes they are warblers.

Amazing nest!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_tailorbird

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-bird-that-stitches-its-home.html

If you're on Facebook there's a group called The Dinosaur on Your Windowsill that is really good for this sort of question. ICt was started by some biologists at the University of Southampton (I think) in lockdown when they couldn't take the students on their field trip, but now it's a general wildlife & nature group with a mix of experts and amateur enthusiasts from all over the world.

Oh brilliant you lot! I think it must have been a tailorbird (warbler) nest! We did once very briefly spot a small olive-green/brown/cream bird flitting across the garden, it had quite a pointy beak, and DDs said it looked like the perfect beak for making the neat little holes in the leaf.

It makes me wonder whether our ape-ish ancestors learned to sew (and weave) from observing bird behavior.

btw, I searched for 'Malaysian warbler, nest stitched to leaves'. Admittedly 'warbler' came from some distant suppressed memory, and duckduckgo knows I do natural history searches, but bird might have done as well

DDs will be delighted to know my Internet friends have identified our mystery nest builder!

In live news, so far CB has visited 3 times today. First thing in the morning, she startled DH by leaping up onto the front windowsill and SHOUTING while he was sipping his coffee. Then later she took the opportunity to march in through the open back door while we were hanging out the laundry. And just now she's come to the patio doors to SHOUT for me to let her in, now rolling about on the carpet.

I think she thinks you belong to her.

She's very sweet.