This week’s installment is another fascinating beast, the endangered Sisserou Parrot of Dominica, which adorns the country’s flag and can be hard as hell to spot in the wild.

Here’s one, spotted completely thanks to blind, dumb luck as it flew from tree to tree.  I got exactly one good picture.  See it?

OK, it’s almost exactly the same color as the foliage.  Fortunately, I was shooting with a decent camera, so let’s zoom in a bit.  See it now?

No?  Me neither.  In fact, while processing the photo, it took me a few minutes to spot him myself, even though I knew exactly where to look.  I started worrying maybe the little fellow ducked behind some leaves just as I snapped the shutter.  Let’s zoom in some more.  How about now?

OK, so before this turns into Highlights For Children, if you still don’t have it, let’s zoom in further, one final time:

Gigantic bird, actually.  But look back at that first picture and try to spot it. 

Pure dumb luck is pretty cool sometimes.

Keeping it as simple as possible, since it’s a new Watergate almost every day with this crowd:

(1) Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department considered firing 26 US Attorneys, not just the eight that Gonzales testified to under oath just last week. If you came in late, the Bush administration has sought to stuff the federal justice system, Third World autocracy style, with party loyalists, and the Attorney General of the United States is a liar.

(2) On a separate issue, Gonzales also pushed his predecessor, John Ashcroft, to sign off on a plainly illegal domestic surveillance program. But Ashcroft — John freaking "Let The Eagle Soar" Ashcroft — wouldn’t go for it, and the Justice Department — which had itself concluded that the program was illegal — damn near had mass resignations in protest of the program. But the illegal warrantless eavesdropping continued.

Ashcroft was in the hospital at the time, and his duties had been assumed by Acting Atty. Gen. James Comey, whose testimony this week might soon equal John Dean’s in historic importance. Gonzales’ rush to Ashcroft’s bedside — accompanied by Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card — was an attempt to circumvent Comey’s input and get a signature from a previously reliable Bush team player.

Bush was asked today, point-blank, about his personal involvement, his answer was a complete dodge, hiding behind 9-11 while refusing even to address the simple inquiry about propriety and his own responsibility.

Watch for yourself:

(3) As Glenn Greenwald points out, since we can be certain that Bush ordered the surveillance to continue, despite his own Justice Department’s conclusion that the program was illegal, the US President knowingly broke the law.

PS — As of the evening of May 17, neither ABC nor CBS have so much as mentioned Comey’s testimony.

Just imagine a version of the oil business in which you’re harvesting foodstuffs instead of petroleum, and you’re not too far off.

The universe may have more of it than anybody ever imagined, says this two-timing scientist.

Although you’re still late for your meeting.

I’m still way, way behind in posting the fun pics from the trip. Came across this one night while flipping channels in Guadeloupe:

As you can see, it’s not the mob, it’s le mur, "the wall."

The very first question I saw was in — what else? — French literature:

For those who want to play along: what literary genre made Racine famous?

While you’re mulling that, if you take a good look, you’ll notice that a bunch of the folks in le mur are in costume. (I don’t know if they do this in the American version; I’ve only seen it for a few seconds.)

In the fourth and fifth rows up on the right are ten people dressed as French chefs, complete with white toques and egg-beating whisks to wave in the air. How odd.

If you look closely at upper left, there’s also one guy dressed up as what seems to be a French stereotype of a cornpone American. (Or maybe he’s just some French dude who genuinely likes wearing yoked shirts and cowboy hats. I have no idea.)

Anyhow, of the entire mob, only one guy didn’t know that Racine wrote tragedies.  Holy crap.

And it was the cowboy. Bien sûr.

The toque-wearing cuisine-eaters then started banging their whisks proudly on the desk.

Y’know what I enjoy most about France?

It is so goddammed French, that’s what.