Don't follow this link if you're packing!

It's just a photo set of pictures of quail, but I noticed that my right forefinger reflexively twitched at the photo of the Republican lawyer in the middle of them. There may be a neurological explanation for Cheney's shotgun error, after all.

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Everyone knows by now that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter during a quail hunt in Texas over the weekend. No big deal there, it's a risk you take and no one is going to suggest it was anything but an accident. But the fact this was not real hunting but a "canned hunt",…
Here's a story that needs no commentary from me; A Blue Ridge Mountains Boy Scout troop accidentally discovered Vice President Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" last week, a press officer with Boy Scouts of America said. The troop, consisting of a Scoutmaster and 17 boys from the region who…
My thanks to Timothy Sandefur, who just emailed me a link to this post by Stuart Buck about Cheney's statement that if Kerry is elected there will be another terrorist attack. I hammered Cheney pretty hard over that, not because of the statement itself, which is fair comment (obviously both sides…
Standup comics have long made vice president Dick Cheney the butt of their jokes, suggesting that he's never seen in public with the President because he inhabits some fortified underground bunker so as to avoid terrorists or some other unidentified threat, or that he's actually a cyborg, secretly…

I visited the site and it gave me the creeps when I came across the photo.

I can't blame Cheney for wanting to shoot big Republican donors. I feel that way sometimes, too. [figuratively, of course, if anybody's monitoring...]

By Unstable Isotope (not verified) on 18 Feb 2006 #permalink

Thanks for the link, PZ.

I am glad to see that rows and rows of pictures of pretty birds lull people into dreamy complacency so the shock value of the jolt is even greater!

They don't look all that agressive.

Anyone know the average lifespan of quail?

By Anonymous (not verified) on 18 Feb 2006 #permalink

You can pick up, hold and pet a pen-reared bobwhite quail - they are poultry, after all. They live about two years, I believe (that is Japanese quail - not sure if bobwhites may live a little longer).

According to the links Coturnix had, bobwhite quail rarely live more than one year in the wild, though they can live up to five years in ideal conditions.

Bobwhite quail - the holy grail of my stewardship plan in my ecotone in the Ozarks1

they are poultry, after all.

They are the pomegranates of poultry. Tasty, but a lot of work. Mind you, I do my quail hunting in the frozen foods section.

You shouldna included former Senator and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. You just pushed a button.

1. Nobody ever mentions that the "potatoe" spelling was what the kids were supposed to learn. Quayle was working off a set of index cards given him by the teachers. I wonder why "Murphy Brown" scriptwriters left that out?

2. As a US Senator from Indiana, Quayle was one of the few in Congress to regularly and consistantly support budgets for scientific research - specifically NIH, NSF, and NASA. I've heard him speak on those topics while I was doing research at the IU medical center campus in the late 70s/early 80s and he had his facts and figures down solid.

3. No, he wasn't a very glib off-the-cuff speaker. So What? Perhaps someone should re-read PZ's objections to the "Dodoes" movie. (Either here, or on Panda's Thumb, I can't recall of the top of my head.)

4. Now we have Sen. Evan Bayh - Mr. All-Things-To-All People, the embodiment of the curse, "be careful what you wish for...."

fusilier
James 2:24

Isn't it scary that we are longing for the good old days when Dan Quaile was the Vice and the worst thing he did was misspell and look goofy? How much difference 14-15 years makes in our perception what is or is not an acceptable Vice President.

And yes, quail are a lot of work but, do they ever taste delicious!

I assume the feather dealie is a sexual dimorphism... y'know, to impress the ladies.

By YuppiTuna (not verified) on 20 Feb 2006 #permalink