Happy New Year!

It's been a crazy week, with good parts and bad parts. The good part includes Christmas, obviously; I had a wonderful time hanging out with my son, and visiting my brother and his wife. I'll spare you the details of the feasting and music and general frivolity, since I'm sure you have tales of your own to illustrate holiday happiness. The bad part is all about not having enough time to do all the stuff I wanted to do over the holidays. Stuff like blogging and such...

So, I must once again thank you for your patience with the delay between postings. I know you've been spending the entire time stressing out about whether you were correct on the last picture quiz, and I don't blame you for that. I know how much fun and excitement you were having with my little challenges, and I know that I owe you an answer. I suspect that the last one was a bit tough. It would have been easier if I'd have included this picture along with the others.

But then it would've been too easy.

Got it now? Yeah, I thought so. They're all "birds".

Starting on the left, we have Meadowlark Lemon, famed basketball player and clown prince of cager comedy. I actually saw him play once in Wichita, and was sitting next to a guy who got nailed with confetti during the famous "bucket gag". If I remember correctly, the Globetrotters won the game.

To Mr. Lemon's right is Cardinal Richelieu, who was some sort of famous religious-type guy. I didn't have time to look up the actual history to verify my facts, but I seem to think that he was a pedophile or Disney-hater or something...had an obsession with hassling Mouseketeers, if I remember correctly.

The dapper chap next in line is the steadily-working actor David Canary, who folks my age remember as ranch hand "Candy Canaday" on Bonanza. Younger folks probably know him from his appearances on the soap opera "All My Children". I always thought "Candy" was an interesting name for a guy, and figured it was his parents' attempt to pull off the "Boy Named Sue" toughness-development thing. But since "Canaday" was also the last name of my college roommate and lifetime best friend, that particular moniker always makes me think of youthful hijinks and campus debauchery...which we may have to discuss at another time.

The gay guy to the far right is Captain Jack Sparrow, who was some kind of movie pirate or something.

Meadowlark -- Cardinal -- Canary -- Sparrow. All birds, see?

So this concludes our current series of "Find the Connection" challenges. Thanks for playing. I'll probably offer some more of these in the future, despite the many comments I've received regarding how stupid and boring they are. But the fact is that I enjoy them immensely, and I'm pretty sure that the Blogger site rules require all posts to be entirely author-ego-centric. Otherwise, this would just be a newspaper and I'd have to be topical and entertaining.

But speaking of topicality, here's a question for you: As I was pondering Cardinal Richierich, et al, I ended up in one of those associative reverie phases where you think about all sorts of stuff that's peripherally related to the main topic. Don't ask me for the exact sequence of triggers, but somehow I went from Errol Flynn to John Wayne to True Grit to Lloyd Bridges to Robert Stack...and that left me wondering: Whatever happened to the Hare Krishnas? They used to hang out in airports wearing orange dresses and stuff...but since the TSA was given authorization to taser them, they seem to have gone elsewhere. My question is...where? Did they cease to exist, the way the snail darter vanished when they took away its natural habitat to build the Aswan Dam? Or did they move their operations to bus stations or DMV offices or somewhere else that keeps them off my radar? For all I know, there could be thousands of flower-gifting bald boys wandering down the aisles of Babies R' Us, and I wouldn't have a clue. Do you know where they went? Did George Harrison's death leave the entire movement in confusion, so that they all gave up their sarongs and went back to being E.F. Hutton brokers? Or did they all just move to Oklahoma, where they could live in squalor and obscurity? If you have the answer, please let me know.

Thanks, and have a great day!