This website has this image: The Old Telephone Company

I’m showing my age. I remember all of these. And if you don’t know what I’m referring to, you are younger than me. I used to dial phones because that’s what everybody did. And you were wired to a wall while you were on the phone. There was even furniture made for just the purpose of keeping a phone on; it was a little chair attached to a small desk with a shelf underneath for the phone book.

Telephone numbers began with a two-letter prefix that stood for a word. My phone number growing up was Sherwood 2-9250. If you wrote it down for anyone, you wrote it out as “SH2-9250.

My father was a lover of technology, (for what it was at the time) and had the first reel-to-reel tape recorder in the neighborhood. The man didn’t hang out in bars or pool halls, he spent all of his spare time building stuff, designing stuff or whooping it up with the guys at Radio Shack. Yup, Dad was a real partier….The only guns he owned were a soldering gun and a staple gun.

After he got the first small tape recorder, he decided to build a stereo system. And he succeeded. He bought a cabinet, built everything into it and designed the turntable for the records that pulled out of the cabinet on a track. The record player played 45, 33, 78 rpm records. The TV drove him nuts unless it was a documentary on World War II or the news. But he liked music.

Image from Here

We had a small house, so he built shelves for the speakers and hung the shelves using chain anchored up through the ceiling into the attic beams. You would have needed a battering ram to pull the damned things down. In the sixties and seventies, bigger was better. Bigger cars, bigger stereos; the bigger it was, the more costly it was.

Since then, almost everything in technology has shrunk, except the accessibility of information. That accessibility has exploded with the force of a nuclear bomb. You can find out about almost anything now. Anything!

Some of my friends on Facebook are from all over the world. Just look at the revolver map in the lower right-hand corner of the blog and you’ll see people who have visited here from countries I’ve never even heard of.

The information available about practically everything is rampant and Google has changed the world. If the internet had existed when I was in school, everyone probably would have gotten a better education. (And I sure as hell would be a better typist.) I’m not sure kids even know what the Dewey Decimal System even is.


Google went from being worth zero to twenty billion dollars in 400 weeks. Their reach is phenomenal. You can find out about almost anything on the internet.

With all of this technology and free information floating around, could someone tell me why in the hell there are companion parrots still on an all-seed diet? This makes me even madder than the excessive and incorrect use of apostrophes, and the misuse of “there, their and they’re.”

What in the hell is going on? I could get upset at the seed companies and I do. I could get upset with Petsmart, Petco, Pet Supermarket, Pet Land and all of the rest of the big box pet stores for promoting grit for every companion parrot, but they wouldn’t listen. I’m just so tired of having to say, “An all-seed diet for a parrot really blows.”

But I will until I’m blue in the face because apparently I need to. I truly wish the all-seed diet went the way of the dial phone, the reel-to-reel tape recorder and the typewriter because it simply has to change.

I have an idea. But I can’t do it by myself. If we all reached out at our social networks at our bird clubs, on our blogs and on our websites, we might be able to make a small dent in the crappy, unhealthy, ridiculous, archaic, obsolete, outdated, outmoded, extinct, defunct, antediluvian, antiquated, all-seed diet. (Mom! She’s using the Thesaurus again!)

And here’s how we can all get involved. Do you remember the film “Network?” Perhaps not, but you might remember this classic phrase:

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Here is the scene:


We can do the same thing on the internet: Put up a post on your wall, at your website, in an email and type “An all-seed diet for your parrot really blows!” Tell your friends, your club, your “Parrot Peeps,” your internet buddies, anyone who will listen about this. You never know it just might make a small scratch on the diets of birds everywhere. And in the words of a viral hit: “Tell err’body!”

Put it on other people’s walls. Graffiti the internet with it. I’m even thinking of creating some bumper stickers. How would this look on the back of my car?


Now listen. I don’t have to tell you guys this. You know. You’re here. You put up with my incessant ranting, my videos, and my repetitious hollering about vegetables in a parrot’s diet. You already know all of this. But you might have friends who feed mostly seed to their birds. Maybe they just don’t know better.

Do you have any idea how many parrots still get just seed? Well, I don’t know either and it chills me to the bone even thinking about it. It’s just not right. It’s not right to feed dirt cookies and lead paint chips to your kids. And feeding an all-seed diet to a parrot is harmful and isn’t right either.


I guess until I can figure out a way for the big box store to make more money on pellets and stuff to make “Chop” than they do on seed, the parrots of the world are going to have to suffer the consequences. And that’s what really blows.

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