May the 4th be with you, from a dreary and rainy Richmond, VA. Also note that the Sunday links publishing schedule will be inconsistent for the next 5 months, as camping season starts for us next weekend. I often won't be home on Sunday mornings. I still plan to do one weekly, but it might be Monday or Tuesday on camping weekends.

It's peak bird migration season here. We went out yesterday, and I would have been out this morning if I hadn't woke up to thunder and pouring rain. It's been really dry the last couple of weeks, and my lawn was starting to suffer. So I washed the car in the driveway yesterday, knowing that direct taunt at the weather gods would deliver rain. It worked.

We bought a new backyard toy this week, and enjoyed our first backyard fire last night. It was nice to sit outside for a couple of hours listening to music instead of sitting inside watching TV. I would have listened to baseball, but the Red Sox lost in a late afternoon game yesterday.

Stuff I wrote this week.

Birding at Malvern Hill Battlefield

The Girl From the Tar Paper School - In 1951, before MLK started marching, before Rosa Parks sat where she wanted to sit on the bus, and before young people sat-in at lunch counters, 16-year-old Barbara Rose organized and led a walkout in Farmville, VA to protest the conditions black kids had to endure at school.

I wrote about the challenges of making friends as an old guy

Radio is underrated - Just yesterday I was streaming a hair metal station from Germany that was much better than anything YouTube Music has ever delivered for me. They were playing deep cuts from the 80s, and not the same 60 songs over and over again.

Stuff I didn't write.

Monty Python and The Holy Grail is 50 years old this week.

The LinkedIn scam bots are getting better

A NYT article about the impact of photography on and after the Vietnam War. - It's a gift link, but not my gift link. Hopefully this works. It worked when I tested it in a private window.

An excuse generator for those times when you want to say no.

Waiter Rant went to a Jews for Jesus service on Easter Sunday and came away with some thoughts about how the promise of Jesus' resurrection can be seen in a new puppy. I'm a non-believer, but I always find Steve's thought on religion (he is a Catholic Seminary dropout) very reassuring.

Benjamin Hollon posted a well done, somewhat academic, overview of the Indieweb movement.

And finally, if you have not seen Wolfie Van Halen's new video, go watch now. Their are numerous 80s Easter eggs in the video, including at least two musical references to his dad, Eddie Van Halen. Also watch for Myles Kennedy, Slash, and his mom, Valerie Bertinelli. This songs rocks, too.

This post was composed while listening to Mammoth on shuffle play. I really haven't spent much time listening to Mammoth. I need to change that because Wolfie is very possibly more talented than his father. He is definitely a better songwriter.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.

In 1951, before MLK started marching, before Rosa Parks sat where she wanted to sit on the bus, and before young people sat-in at lunch counters, 16-year-old Barbara Rose organized and led a walkout in Farmville, VA to protest the conditions black kids had to endure at school. The NAACP eventually took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it and several other cases were combined with Brown vs. Board of Education, which ultimately led to a ruling outlawing segregation. For her bravery, Barbara's family endured harassment from the KKK that led to a cross burning in her yard. Her family sent her to family in Alabama to finish out high school.

My editor would like me to point out that illegal or not, public schools never really desegregated.

So why don't know we know more about Barbara Rose? She was a kid, and her name got dropped from the headlines when her case was merged with Brown vs. Board of Education. After high school, she graduated from Drexel in Philadelphia, got married, raised a family, and worked as a librarian in Philadelphia until her death in 1991. I like to think she'd be pleased that, in 2025, I learned about her role in history after checking out this book from the library. History has caught up in the last 10 years, with Virginia in particular finding several ways to honor her legacy. Her story is also now part of the 4th grade curriculum in the state.

Also, it's worth pointing out that the book is a kid's book, and you'll be able to read it in 10–15 minutes, and that I learned about it, and about Barbara Rose, when the author ended up in my Mastodon feed. This is a book that the current US government does not want you reading, so it's your moral duty to read it. Also, by checking it out at your library you keep it active, which means it doesn't get removed from circulation.

You know what to do.

The Audubon group was meeting at 6 AM this morning, which meant leaving the house by 5:40 AM. We decided to go solo birding instead and leave at 7:15 AM. We went to Malvern Hill Battlefield, which offers a nice mix of open fields and forests, and is only a few hundred yards from the river, although you can't see it from the battlefield.

We identified 53 species. We spent about 15 minutes watching about 6 Indigo Buntings chase each other around an open area in the forest, while occasionally stopping long enough to hunt for a bug in the grass. It's the longest extended look I've ever gotten at an Indigo Bunting. We also watched 2 Summer Tanagers that appeared to be fighting over a female. We also saw a Bald Eagle soaring in the distance between us and the river, and I also saw a Northern Harrier hunting along the edge of the meadow and forest. It was a very solid morning of birding.

Birding at Malvern Hill is always a little weird. Early in the morning it's peaceful and quiet, with the only noise bird song. Yet, their are replica cannon and placards reminding you of the carnage that occurred in that very spot in 1862. It's one of the better preserved Civil War battlefields, with the grounds mostly unchanged since the battle. But the contrast with the events there in 1862 can be a little unsettling.

Our e-bird list for the morning.

I'm 57 years old. I deactivated my Facebook account 26 days ago and have heard from exactly zero Facebook friends in the last 26 days.

This is not a cry for help. It's a realization. Facebook makes it too easy to believe you have meaningful relationships with people who are, for all practical purposes, strangers. You may have been online friends for 20+ years but it's an online friendship. In most cases it pales in comparison to a friendship IRL. Yes, you can use Facebook to stay in touch with real friends. But it'll be better if you keep in touch outside of Facebook, or any social media.

So now the obvious question. How does a 57 year old dude make friends IRL? I've been married since my mid 20s, and if I'm being honest, I've been coasting since I finished grad school at about age 25 in the friends department. We had the rush of new friends when we all the same age kids, but most of those friendships faded over the years. We moved to Richmond in 2017, and COVID certainly got in the way but I can't blame COVID for the fact that there isn't a single person (other than family) in this city that I can text with a reasonable expectation that they'll want to meet up for a beer. I can blame working from home, but again, nothing was stopping me post COVID from getting out there other than laziness and inertia.

This is not a "I never leave the house thing." My wife and I go out, a lot. We do date night more weekends than not, we eat out some, we go to baseball and soccer games, and we travel a lot in our camper. We do meet up with some friends for camping, but they don't live in RVA. But it's always just the two of us. Which is great, we are best friends as well as spouses, but I would like some dude friends like I had in my 20s and 30s.

Or do I? Is that even a reasonable ask? Do guys my age hang out like we did when we were under 40? I really have no idea.