"The year was 1980. In Washington D.C., President James Garfield collapsed after Charles Guiteau shot him; a Stalwart angered by the Republican’s failure to appoint him U.S. Consul of Paris. In the small city of Canterbury, England’s Queen Mother secretly met with Cardinal Richelieu to plan the removal of Pope Pious I from office. Back across the sea, scientists marveled at Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbuster as the FDA closed in on this mad discoverer of orgone. A few hundred miles south in the state of New York, Jonas Salk unveiled his polio vaccine to the masses, just a few days after famed industrialist Howard Hughes fatally succumbed to the disease. The troubled continent of Africa shocks the natural world as famed biologist Stephen Jay Gould discovers the last living quagga in Botswana. One week later, internationally renowned, field ornithologist John James Audubon is beheaded in the Ivory Coast by Foday Sankoh’s rebel hoard after discovering the first fossilized Archaeopteryx specimen. To add to the chaos of the year, Augustus De Morgan, a mathematician and English colonel suffering from syphilis, calculates pi to 707 digits, only to realize there was no end to the number in sight. However, in the quiet metropolis of Louisville, Kentucky something paramount to the future of the human race was taking place. An event made the Nobel Prize-winning minutia of the world seem all the more trivial.

     Lisa Kaelin, a fire-tempered brunette from the city’s south side, found herself rushed into the delivery room of the district’s leading birth center. The harridan was complaining of frequent contractions and her cervix had begun to dilate. She was ready to give birth. At her side was world-renowned obstetrician Dr. Abraham Sapirstein. He tried to calm her as he began delivering the baby. Out in the waiting room sat Walter Kaelin, a rakish assembly line grunt and husband of Lisa. Near him were the couple’s close friends, Minne and Roman Castevet, Dr. Shand and a bespectacled eccentric known only as Laura-Louise. Minutes seemed like epochs as he awaited the announcement of his son’s birth. Finally, a blood-soaked orderly burst through the doors and ran sobbing out of the hospital. Aghast, Walter plunged through the same set of doors through which the hospital worker had fled. Moments later, he arrived in the delivery room and found his hysterical wife strapped to operating table. About the floor were the gored corpses of the delivery team. Walter tried to calm himself as his wife cried out, “Where is my baby? What is wrong with my child?” Walter found his son in the corner of the room, chewing on Dr. Sapirstein’s heart. So goes the story of the birth of Walter M. Kaelin Jr. Some say it is a mere work of fiction, with elements of popular horror films like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “It’s Alive” added for good, sensational measure. Others are less tactful and label the entire tale as “a fucking crock” or some equally offensive fricative expletive. Whatever the verdict, it is here that this brief biography must begin."   ~Beau Kaelin

 

"Soaring With The Eagles" 

or 

"Taking Advantage of Newton's Third Law As Members of the Family Accipitridae Do" (a title for the more ornithologically-inclined)

By Evelyn Grundy, PhD.     Resident professor with the Bodega Bay Institute            of Ornithological Studies

Author's Note:  "It is a great honor for me to write this biography for my dear and personal friend and associate, Mr. Beau Kaelin.  I first met Beau in the summer of 2002.  He came to me from the University of Louisville as part of a transfer program that would allow him to earn graduate level credits while still working towards his Bachelor's degree in Biology.  He and I spent many days in the fields of Bodega Bay, Ca. logging behavioral patterns of the residential crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos).  Our busy schedule may never have lent itself to discussing personal lives in detail had fate not stepped in.  That summer, in an event still unexplained by science, birds attacked Bodega Bay.  Gull, swifts, crows and other species challenged every fact known to ornithologists by flocking together and killing human beings. Many of you may have seen this on the news.  He and I barricaded ourselves into the Institute where we waited out the attacks for almost nine days.  In that time, we came to know each other very well, and I consider it my pleasure to retell his life story as accurately as he told it to me.  Regrettably, fact and fiction frequently intertwine, but it still paints an accurate picture as to what it is like to know this extraordinary man!"  

Biography

The life and times of Beau Kaelin begin at his birth.  This event took place in the late summer of 1980.  Once can only imagine the joy in the hearts of parents Lisa and Walt that day.   It was undoubtedly analogous to the happiness experienced by all emperor penguins (assuming we allow for anthropomorphization of these Sphenisciformes, that is) the day their chicks hatch forth from their shells, despite subzero temperatures.  A light gray plumage found only on the chicks ensures that they are able to retain ample heat in the –40 °C environment to survive until adolescence.  However, such plumage does not protect the chicks from their natural predators, the Antarctic Giant Petrels (Macronectes giganteus).  The chicks rely heavily on parental protection, just as Beau Kaelin did during the first few years of his life. 

 

Years went by and soon young Beau Kaelin found himself cast from the nest of his happy homelife into the perilous realm of the blackboard jungle.  While it took Beau a brief period to gain his bearings, he was soon soaring in his new surroundings like the common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) in an open field setting.  Common kestrels are diurnal creatures as well (much like Beau – or other humans for that matter). Very few Falconiformes fall outside of this classification and I find it sad that the educators of most schools (especially the loathsome public elementary schoolhouses) add owls into the same category as buzzards, caracaras, harriers, serpent-eagles and goshawks.  The very idea is absurd.  Owls are not only nocturnal species, but their beaks lack a tomial tooth for garroting prey.  The molting pattern is notably different among the avians as well, the Falconiformes beginning on the tenth (or in some cases, the seventh) primary feather of the wingtip and owls (properly referred to as Strigiformes) commence with their inner secondaries.  Nevertheless, despite these quite obvious differences, the uneducated instructors of our children continue to clump owls and falcons into one large, colloquial categorization called “birds or prey” (or in more drastic, lowbrow cases, “predator birds”). 

 

This is a sad state of affairs indeed.  If our government truly cared about the education of our nation’s children, they wouldn’t allow such outlandish butchery of proper taxonomic classification to exist.  They would require all educators to acquire at least three credit hours in an internationally-approved ornithological course of study.  Only then could we hope to win the battle against the avian misconceptions taught to our children.  We owe it to them.  If not, consider the alternative: Dozens of teenaged boys and girls out on the streets at night, aimlessly seeking osprey (Pandion haliaetus).  Unbeknownst to them, the night hours are not the active time for these species (they aren’t even remotely active during the crepuscular hours as well).  These impressionable children, led to believe that the house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) is an invader species,  will be rife for corruption at the hands of drug dealers and prostitutes.  Crime will increase with every generation.  Our society will become awash with heroine addicts and necrophiliacs.  Methamphetamines will be pumped into the air to accommodate the labored breathing of many a malformed child – aberrations of nature born under the prepartum influence of illegal substances.  Our government will collapse and in the very end, before nuclear war brings an abrupt halt to our time on Earth, crazed Creationist looters will destroy the last remaining Archaeopteryx fossil in an effort to eliminate all evidence backing evolutionary theories.  The birds will survive though.  The birds will survive.

 

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