OF MIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION--A Tale of Two Territories

I bought a bird feeder.


I hung it on my back porch and filled it with seed. Within a week we had hundreds of birds taking advantage of the continuous flow of free and easily accessible food. But then the birds started building nests in the boards of the patio, above the table, and next to the barbecue.

Then came the poop. It was everywhere—on the patio tile, the chairs, the table—everywhere.
Then some of the birds turned mean: They would dive bomb me and try to peck me even though I had fed them out of my own pocket.


And others birds were boisterous and loud—they sat on the feeder and squawked and screamed at all hours of the day and night and demanded that I fill it when it got low on food.


After a while, I couldn’t even sit on my own back porch anymore. I took down the birdfeeder and in three days the birds were gone. I cleaned up their mess and took down the many nests they had built all over the patio.


Soon, the back yard was like it used to be—quiet, serene and no one demanding their rights to a free meal.


Now let’s see . . . our government gives out free food, subsidized housing, free medical care, free education and allows anyone born here to be an automatic citizen. Then the illegals came by the tens of thousands.


Suddenly our taxes went up to pay for free services—small apartments are housing five families, you have to wait six hours to be seen by an emergency room doctor, your child’s second grade class is behind other schools because over half the class doesn’t speak English, Corn Flakes now come in a bilingual box, I have to press “one” to hear my bank talk to me in English, and people waving flags other than Old Glory are squawking and screaming in the streets, demanding more rights and free liberties.


Maybe it’s time for the government to take down the bird feeder.

IN ADORATION OF DOROTHY PARKER - My Favorite Parkerisms.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are “check enclosed.”

Money is only congealed snow.

Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencie

Wit has truth in it ... wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

...as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up. (Closing words of review of The House at Pooh Corner, in Parker’s “Constant Reader” column.)

People Who Do things exceed my endurance;God, for a man that solicits insurance!

And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs. Parker said, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.

. . . have heard it said that it took Messrs. Shipman and Hymer [the playwrights] just three- and-a-half days to write their drama. I should like to know what they were doing during the three days. (On a review, written for Vanity Fair magazine, of a bad play.)

I do wish that as long as they are translating the thing, they would go right on ahead, while they’re at it, and translate Fedor Vasilyevich Protosov and Georgei Dmitrievich Abreskov and Ivan Petrovich Alexandrov into Joe and Harry and Fred. (On the long names characteristic of Russia and common in Russian literature)

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

This play holds the season’s record [for early closing], thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence it ran just five performances too many.

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say No in any of them.

He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.

How can they tell? (On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge.)

[We look like] a road company of the Last Supper. (On lunching with James Thurber and others at the Algonquin Round Table.)

For a short bio of this wonderful writer, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker