Foreign feathered friends
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 139
RANKED LISTS DEP'T.
Selected Names of Birds in the Pocket Guide to Birds of Southern Africa, Ranked
- Lizard buzzard
- Flappet lark
- Grey go-away bird
- Bronze mannikin
- Swee waxbill
- Purple indigobird
WEATHER REVIEWS
Kruger National Park, August 3, 2025
★★★★★ Everyone hurried out into the predawn dark bundled up against the vicious chill that the sundown game drive had ended on, only to find that a humid warmth had set in overnight. After a frantic reduction of layers and a dash back to the hotel room by mobile phone flashlight to get rid of the excess, the rangers showed up bundled in heavy coats. Overhead, where a search for the Milky Way at bedtime had found only the brilliant half-moon, there was now a nothingness, a sheet of cloud with no streetlights below to bounce off it. Traces of light began showing on the edge of the sky, too faint to have a recognizable color, as the safari truck rolled along, and the dampness on the air became raw with the road breeze. A kudu crossed the road in the headlights. The light patches took on a definite ruddy tone and the clouds went from an obscuring blankness to things with shapes and textures. The truck turned and drove facing directly into what was now a red sky, with a tree silhouetted cinematically against it, for a while, then pulled off and stopped. The rangers, having shed their heaviest outerwear, slowly unpacked their guns and loaded them as the daylight gradually filled in a gray and dusty landscape woven with paler gray paths not made by human feet. The sky seemed to have resolved to mostly gray, too. All around were patches of small-grained black scat—impala, the rangers said—with other shapes and colors and patterns of droppings among them, and everywhere the giant round elephant turds, reddened with the tannins from the abused tree bark of their winter diet. There was enough daylight to start walking now; enough, after a minute or two, to detect a pair of giraffes, adult and child, between the trees a long way off. Giraffe tracks were in the dust, too, along with the innumerable sharp little prints of impala, and a mat of impala hair and impala hoof that some predator had coughed up. Beside a dried-out wallow the elephants had wiped off mud on a tree trunk and left it to harden into a smooth sheet, extending awesomely far beyond a human's reach. The clouds had kept going past gray, picking up purple and rose and moving on toward white, as gaps of blue opened between them. At the turnaround point, during a quick snack on a dry gully bank, the sun came shining in. Before 8 a.m., the whole dome was almost clear. The tufts of grass cast long shadows. The chill held on a while longer, but soon it was time to take the knit hat off. The stubble gave way to taller and thicker grass. An impala gave an alarm call from somewhere in it, and then a whole group of them ran rocking away along the next low rise. Another giraffe appeared straight ahead, then wandered out of view. Clouds returned on the drive back, but the wind through the truck was not enough to require the hat again. Eight elephants browsed right by the roadside, and then an immense leopard was crossing, muscled and luxuriant and unhurried. By midday, the sky was fully clear again. A striped lizard with a bright blue tail, looking exactly like a skink in America, basked on a curb by the hotel. A t-shirt was the only layer needed for sitting out on the balcony writing postcards and drinking instant coffee. For the afternoon truck ride, the t-shirt merely needed a flannel shirt over it, the least ugly size-large one from the waterfront Woolworths in Cape Town, incidentally in a safari-appropriate green plaid. The animals were out everywhere in the sunshine, browsing and grazing and strolling and defecating: a prettily slim-faced giraffe walking slowly in front of the truck, zebras a few yards past that, kudus with upthrust horns and chalked-on stripes, an elephant facing away from the road into the trees and releasing a churning gush of urine and a series of thumping turds. The traffic churned up dust, hurrying past even spectacular herbivores to form little traffic jams around rumors of glimpses of something big and lethal. Hippos lay on the far bank of the river, shining dully, like turtles drying out on a rock. On a long bridge, traffic had locked up entirely, fixed on a spot of shade under a tree hundreds of yards away along the riverbed, in which two tiny specks somehow managed to convey the unmistakable character of lounging lions. The guide put the truck in reverse and drove all the way backward along the line of cars to get away. Shortly up the road were elephants audibly ripping leaves from the trees, close enough to see the ticks on their backs, and shortly after moving on from that, the driver slammed on the brakes and backed up to point out four lionesses, not the distant shapes of them but four big bodies tawny in the sun and not at all far off, stalking along in the grass, in the otherwise welcoming-looking growth by the river. The air was dry and pleasant, and warm sun angled under the truck's canopy. Elephants fed in the scenic middle distance, in the sea of high green reeds by the blue of the river, and fed nearby with the sun catching in the fuzz on a baby elephant's back. The sun continued on its way, and the frantic pace of sightings subsided into a quiet rattling drive on empty roads through a vista of yellow grass showing between gray or green trees, the land slowly falling to a dry riverbed and rising again. A bateleur eagle perched on a snag, the light setting off its red cere against the rest of its dark huge shape. The younger teen grew drowsy in the middle seat and had to be thumped alert as a lilac-breasted roller rose from the road dust in a flurry of improbable colors and perched on a branch to wrestle a long-winged insect into its mouth. The sun cut through the winter-sparse growth and picked up everything. A warthog knelt chomping loudly at something, then looked up and grunted and belatedly bolted a short distance off. A dwarf mongoose, sable brown, ran toward a thicket. The two-toned flanks of the impalas had the richness of guitar wood. It had been hours since the eye had fallen on anything ugly. A troop of baboons groomed one another in the roadway and screamed and scuffled in the scrub nearby. Down at another bridge crossing, the bulk of a pair of Nile crocodiles showed distinctly a good way upstream. Shadows spanned the road on the way back. One last traffic jam found one hyena hunched over and licking itself between its hind legs while in the ditch opposite a mother lay nursing her various-shaded babies. The wind just started getting chilly as the truck made the last turn onto the road to the hotel gates, and a smell of smoke came with it. At bedtime, from the balcony, a wealth of stars ran down the middle of the sky.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS THE Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
POD JOB DEP'T. Vacation season is upon us and the Indignity Morning Podcast Studio anticipates a two week shutdown unless some un-ignorable piece of news breaks, and I find myself with unstructured time and a connection to the Internet, but, assuming nothing unexpected happens in either direction, we will talk again on August 11th.
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The White House Cook Book: A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Hugo Ziemann and Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette, published in 1919, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
PASTRY SANDWICHES.
PUFF paste, jam of any kind, the white of an egg, sifted sugar.
Roll the paste out thin; put half of it on a baking sheet or tin; and spread equally over it apricot, greengage, or any preserve that may be preferred. Lay over this preserve another thin paste, press the edges together all round, and mark the paste in lines with a knife on the surface, to show where to cut it when baked. Bake from twenty minutes to half an hour; and, a short time before being done, take the pastry out of the oven, brush it over with the white of an egg, sift over powdered sugar and put it back in the oven to color. When cold, cut it into strips; pile these on a dish pyramidically and serve.
This may be made of jelly-cake dough, and, after baking, allowed to cool before spreading with the preserve; either way is good, as well as fanciful.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
