Why is bird poop white?

With a title like that we shall see if NBC4i Columbus Ohio censors me.  LOL 
 
What's going on in Bangkok anyway?  The Land of Smiles?  I've missed the WHY on this stuff?
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DJ and I were watching "Hoarders - Buried Alive" the other night, not on purpose but we flipped by the channel and after 5 seconds it was like watching a train wreak.  So after that show was over some show called "Odd Addictions" or some name like that and it was about four people that were addicted to weird things.

One woman shopped a lot, big deal move along, they cured her.

But then the next three offered us true weirdness.  One woman ate chalk!  You know, like blackboard chalk.  Just ate it, crunch crunch crunch, 5 or 6 sticks a day like popcorn. Since there was nothing WRONG with it and it's not BAD for you as it is only a porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone and it's in toothpaste anyway . . .they did not cure her.  

Then some dude ran for 20 miles a day. Run Run Run always running, 140 miles a week.His fiancee was going to dump him if he did not stop running 4 or 5 hours a day.  They did not cure him and she dumped him.

Then there was this woman that would go into a tanning booth for at least 2 hours a day. She looked ridiculous.  She had 6 accounts and would go from one to the other.  They would warn her about skin cancer but she would say that was all in the future and she did not want to look like a white pasty freak like everybody else  . . .well . . . . . . so then they brought in a woman with a Malignant Melanoma and that pissed her off and she quit the show!

Great show! Normally these types of shows have victories as they right the wrongs! Not this time.

The reason I bring this up is that I had a Malignant Melanoma about 20 years ago. They took a scoop of skin down to my muscle fibers on my shoulder.   Sunburns are so so so very bad for you. They will catch up to you at some point. And I'm an American Indian with darker skin.  Today I have to go in and get cut again.

This time it's a Basal cell carcinoma - the most common type of skin cancer and the least dangerous. In fact the only thing it does is look bad, and I didn't even know it was there so how bad could it look!! . Here is the kicker - IT'S ON MY SHIN!!!  Good gravy I'm not looking forward the THAT!!  It's not like I have EXTRA skin on my shine or anything.  The last time someone messed around with my shin was in softball when a guy threw his bat and it cracked my shin open for 3 inches down to the bone!  I used duct tape to tape the skin back together  (I had no insurance) It actually worked! I think I was injured more often on the bench then in the field. I broke my tail bone on the bench.

There are two ways fix a Basal cell carcinoma - frozen section histology which is essentially a very accurate "deli" slicer or OR paraffin embedded fixed tissue pathology - yea yea try looking that up on Wikipedia!! Not a clue - I'm just hoping I get some pain killers, whether I need them or not!
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On to funner subjects.

Ever shop at Woodmans? Do you hate it as much as I do?  Well . . . .Yahara House, Madison’s clubhouse for the mentally ill, will yank its grocery account Monday from Woodman’s Food Market due to the discount grocery retailer’s recent decision to drop mental health coverage.

The thing that got my attention was that they did a side by side comparison of grocery stores to see what prices were REALLY like.  WOW

Woodmans was 20% cheaper then the next lowest place. Hy-Vee (I love Hy-Vee).  In fact for every $100 you spend at Woodmans you would spend $120.79 at Hy-Vee, $132.22 at Copps, and $139.30 at Cub Foods.  (Copps and Pic-N-Save are both Roundy's).

Since Columbus is looking for yet another grocery stores (that has onions you can not put your fingers through) this interested me. I wonder what store we're getting.

No news on Piggly Wiggle but here is some interesting Piggy news.  Did you know that Piggly Wiggly was the first store to have aisles and checkout lanes?  They were the first to mark a price on every item. The first to use refrigerated cases to keep produce fresher longer and the first to put employees in uniforms for cleaner, more sanitary food handling.
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Birds - what is UP with bird poop! I went to take the clear bagged garbage out today and while noticing the crows made a mess of all the clear bag garbage I saw a TON of white bird poop on our driveway!  WHAT HAPPENED - did a 20 mile long flock of Passenger pigeons fly overhead? My mom used to talk about Passenger pigeons. Their flocks could be 1 mile wide and 300 miles long and take hours to fly over.  ALL dead now!  The last one died in 1914 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her name was Martha and she was in the Cinci zoo.  That is Martha on the right.

I'm still trying to figure out my moms story - something does not add up!

Speaking of white poop - what is up with the whiteness. Well it seems birds do not pee (which seems like a very very good thing) and their kidneys extract nitrogenous wastes from the bloodstream in the form of uric acid so it emerges as a white paste.

Brown poop, in case you are wondering, comes from the pigment that arises from the breakdown of red blood cells in the liver and bone marrow . . . HEY - no one ever talks about it. SOMEBODY had too!  I always thought it was the average color of all the food I ate - that never made sense either.

FASCINATING!!

ANYWAY - I had to yell at a grackle this morning for wasting bird food at our feeder. He was just shoveling it out which is beak making a mess. Maybe the cardinal asked him to do that, I don't know grackle-speak well enough yet!

This little painterly finch drops by every day eating thistle seed.

I have a reply going to the Letters to the Editor this week of the Columbus Journal. Reserve your copies today.

Cheers
Rod