The Duck Cam (And Other Tales)

Spring has sprung and in Spokane, that has begun to mean one thing: duck nests on the side of the bank building!

Yes, it appears that the mother duck from last year, who built her nest on the window sill of the Sterling Savings Bank building, is back. I wrote about the circumstance here, and how one of the employees ended up saving the babies as they dropped out of the nest by catching them in his hands, and then helped the mama duck get her babies to the Spokane River a few blocks away.

This time, everyone is ready.

And we now have a duck cam to monitor every move.

This is true. The bank let the newspaper (Spokesman Review) set up a camera and stream live video. There is no chance that even a single moment - precious or otherwise - will escape film. I've watched a couple of times. Must say, the mama duck appears to be fairly low key. Presumably things will become a bit more active once the babies hatch.

(UPDATE: The babies have hatched! The Duck Cam is no longer active. But here are some links to the hatching story with a video slideshow. And here is a link to the mama duck's facebook page (she now is named "Amelia Duckheart"). Also, one of the local television stations provided this video.)

The ongoing camera action reminds me of an event from last fall. As Obama fans may recall, Obama signs were very hard to come by at that time. A woman in Oregon for sure will remember that, because she would obtain one of the coveted signs only to have it stolen from her front yard. After the second sign disappeared, she resorted to making a handmade sign and then told her 16-year-old son to set up a spy camera so this third sign would remain (or at least they would catch the thief on camera). Her son took his assignment a step further and set up the camera as a video stream on the Internet. This video stream became the sixth-most-watched stream in the world. The help in watching for thieves spanned to places like Belgium, Sri Lanka, and Australia. Because the viewers were able to comment, an odd sort of club formed. The house (and the sign) were in a quiet neighborhood. Nonetheless, the obsession stuck. As noted in this article, one telling comment was "I need to go to the bathroom. Call if anything happens." Also in the article: "Each time a car passed, viewers posted alerts: 'Car. Carrrrrr' and when a garbage truck stopped within view in the early hours, the site went wild."

As one blogger from the Mudflats site (out of Alaska) put it:

We've seen squirrels, neighbors, passing cars, suspicious kids on bikes. The wind has blown, the rain has come. The sign has been covered in Saran Wrap before our very eyes to shield it from the elements. We've seen the family cat. We've chatted and laughed. And occasionally we've been inundated by trolls. All in all, a very entertaining evening....staring at a sign.

Well, and one more sign story. I can't provide a link, and I don't think it's up anywhere anymore. But from my memory... This guy somewhere out east (I think he lived in Virginia) was a big Obama supporter in a mainly McCain neighborhood. He put out his Obama sign. It was stolen. He asked around, if anyone knew what happened. He had a description of the potential culprit. The neighborhood became very upset that his sign had been stolen. We're nothing if not Americans, with the right of free speech, you know? One of the staunchest McCain supporters from this guy's neighborhood went down to the local Obama office and bought him a replacement sign. Ultimately, the presumed culprit (another neighbor) showed up at the Obama guy's door to apologize. Apparently he had heard from more than one neighbor that he had to.

That stauch support for the political process - regardless of political affliation - is something I experienced often when out campaigning for Obama last year. There were many times that I knocked on the door of the house of a McCain supporter, who would laugh and tell me my error. As I would leave to go to the next house, though, often that person would stop me and thank me for what I was doing. "You are the democratic process at work," they would say. I sure do love this country.

Community Organizers

I sat in amazement, watching Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin poke fun at community organizers at the Republican National Convention last September. It was bizarre, watching them belittle the people who labor voluntarily to do work that few want to do because it is so challenging without much (or any) financial compensation. As it turned out, their ridiculing efforts backfired. I remember reading an article which I can't find now, about a woman from southern, rural Ohio (a swing state), herself a community organizer at her church, who listened to the derision by Giuliani and Palin and decided that that was it - she wasn't sitting on the sidelines anymore. The next day, she got up and went to work for the Obama campaign. That story is just a snapshot of what happened all around the country after the RNC chose to be so condescending of community organization. In fact, here's a link to an article that outlines the details of the firestorm that the comments set off. Why would Republicans choose to mock community organizers like that? Really, really bad idea.

At the time, I wrote this op-ed piece (never published), specifically about the comments at the RNC. Here's the last part of it:

When the Republicans mock Barack Obama’s roots as a community organizer, they mock his origins, hard work, and ability to transform people’s energy and enthusiasm into action. They mock his staff that works around the clock. They mock me – and thousands like me – who are out pounding the pavement of the sidewalks of this country, reaching out to fellow Americans.
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They mock the people who are putting an Obama sign in their yard as a way to start a dialogue with their Republican neighbors, even though it is a bolder step for them to take than they ever have taken before. They mock the woman who stood in her doorway listening to how I could return with policy papers if she needed them, who finally said, with awe in her voice, “I have never had anyone come to my door and offer such things,” and who then started to imagine what information I could bring her.

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And they mock the many McCain supporters who waved me off when I told them who I was campaigning for, but then – as I smiled and turned to go knock on the next door – stopped me and thanked me for what I was doing. “You are the democratic process at work,” they said.

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That is who John McCain allows to be mocked when he lets his supporters mock Obama’s work as community organizer. Why would they go out of their way to deride the very nature of the democratic process?

About a week after the RNC, McCain spoke highly of community organizers - and of Obama's own work - at a 9/11 symposium. Good for him. I knew he knew their value.