I remember finding the blue fragments of a robin’s egg when I was about 10. The delicate shards lay scattered on the ground beneath a tree. I squinted up at a small, finely woven nest above my head but could see neither the baby bird nor its mother. I brought the pieces home. I was a far too sensitive kid to actually steal a bird’s egg before it hatched. The thought would have horrified me, that is if it had ever occurred to me, which it didn’t. But there were other kids in town who did take them. They’d climb trees and stuff their pockets, show their friends, and more often than not end up breaking them against a wall.

A story about egg snatchers appearing today in the Guardian has very little to do with those early memories, but I think there’s a connecting thread between them. A sense of the mystery of birds and of the tempting, jewel-like quality of their eggs. And perhaps, a bit of residual instinct — the egg hunter in action — animates both the robber-oologist and the schoolboy egg thief.

In any case, the Guardian story must be read to be believed:

When the Operation Easter detectives opened the door of the second bedroom in an ordinary house in Cleethorpes last month, they suspected they would find a shoebox or two of wild birds’ eggs. Officers did not imagine they would discover 20 polystyrene fish crates, several biscuit tins and a suitcase, containing a collection of 7,707 eggs. Nestling between layers of cotton wool were the dainty speckled pale green and blue of blackcaps, corn buntings and yellowhammers, just like Cadbury’s mini-eggs; the larger, blotched chestnut red of the osprey; goshawk eggs the colour of the moon. Each aquisition was meticulously recorded in notebooks; each egg painstakingly labelled in spidery black ink and its insides blown out through a tiny hole drilled in its side. For the collector, these dead things had clearly been a life’s work.

Contemporary egg thieves are a peculiar sub-branch of oologsts (egg studiers). Interestingly, some of them leave a trail of journal entries and video recordings documenting their raids. These are later used as evidence in their criminal trials.

Carlton D’Cruze, who kept journals describing how a sea eagle on the Isle of Mull broke one of her own eggs in a desperate attempt to defend her nest from him, received six months in 2002. Anthony Higham, found with video footage showing him stealing red-throated divers’ eggs on the Orkneys, was jailed in 2003.

(link, via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society)

Just days after we launched the Six-Word Memoir Contest with Twitter, the collaborative nature of the Web started working its 2.0 magic.

Chris Messina—who we’ve never met—decided take the most recently posted six-word memoir and create an online book of sorts. It’s simple and elegant and delights us to know it and he are out there.

Meanwhile, we’re streaming in new six-word memoirs on the right side of the six-word memoir page every day. The memoirs keep pouring out of you and into our in-box—

“70 years, few tears, hairy ears.” -B. Querengesser
“Full of tequila and bad ideas.” -B. Johnson
“Happiest when ignoring huge financial debt.” -A Bryan
“Being a monk stunk. Better gay.” -B. Redman
“Internet famous, for what that’s worth.” -R. Hogan
“Write about sex, learn about love.” -M. Garvey

The contest continues until Christmas. Keep ‘em coming.

Pardon the self-promotion, but this is so cool. A major national weekly knows a good zine when they see one. 400 Words, this little (seriously, it’s like five and a half by six inches) literary-cum-sociological experiment that I do, has been written up in the current issue of Newsweek, in the Periscope section at the front of the book. The Newsweek issue in question hits newsstands tomorrow (I’ll be the young lady at the 6th Avenue/22nd Street Barnes & Noble, buying five), and it’s online right now, here.

Merry Christmas indeed.

Incidentally, I’m now entering the early stages of collecting stuff for the third issue, which will be on the theme of Work. Got a story to tell about your working life? I know you do. Whisper it to me; details here.

What a pleasure it was to stumble upon Daily Guilt, the blog of Melanie Orndorff, a multimedia documentarian and blogger in L.A.
Melanie’s documenting her own version of a project started by the folks here at Triplux. Mission: complete 101 preset tasks in 1001 days. It’s like a Life List meets a to-do list, a little less climbing of Kilimanjaro, a little more learning to play bocce ball*.

I got lost in her list (#9. Take a DJ class at Scratch DJ academy; #91. Pay for the person behind me at a fast food drive-thru) and will be following her progress for the next, oh, couple years (only 624 days 13 hours and 12 minutes left). Maybe when she’s almost reached her goal Oprah will invite her on her show (#47. Attend a taping of Oprah). Now that would be win-win.

What’s on your list of late?

*Bocce photo via Flickr>>Creative Common>>Eric Perrone.

Tis the season to hear from your third grade teacher, old pals living abroad or your second cousin twice removed—or something. The Christian Science Monitor had a great story about the importance of Christmas cards and how these “personal connections… are more important than ever” because they “serve as a barometer of people’s lives.”

Word.

I love getting a year’s worth of hand-written gossip—oh, and the Hallmark card is nice too.

You can check out Marilyn Gardner’s piece here.

Accidental hobby, budding fetish or personal media art piece? Call my pregnant women series what you want, but there’s no denying the beauty in the shots and the stories of the women here. I was lucky enough to see my friend Lara Swimmer, a Seattle-based photographer who was on the East Coast for a gig shooting the Philadelphia Naval Yards, during her eighth month. A few weeks later, she sent me these photos taken by her friend the artist Iole Alessandrini.

The shots of Swimmer here are part of a larger series called Shroud: Swimmer, and a subset of Alessandrini’s ongoing Shroud project. To model for these photos, Swimmer and her belly moved in and out of Alessandrini’s laser plane during time-exposed photos at the Western Bridge gallery space in Seattle. What you see is what the artist got: no editing tools were used to create these astounding pictures.

“In general, we perceive the physical world in a material way,” Alessandrini says via email. “In contrast, I invite people to physically immerse their bodies in a space made with and shaped by lasers. Through the creative manipulation of light, I create unique aesthetic phenomena, rather than mere illusions, that show, in Whitman’s words, how “much unseen is also here.” By playing with visual perception and direct participation, people see their material body as light itself.”

On November 30, 16 days after the photo shoot, Swimmer gave birth to Avery Dorian Zimmer.

Bonus baby! SMITH contributing editor and Treehuggable Meaghan O’Neill has given birth to nearly nine sweet pounds of Nicholas O’Neill Edenbach.

For Memoirville, we spend countless hours scouring book catalogues to bring you excerpts from just-below-the-radar memoirs that you may have missed. We also go reading to reading, writer’s site to writer’s site, even door to door talking to writers of all levels and aspirations about submitting a piece of their memoir in progress to the site.

Our latest find is a gem of global proportions: Elizabeth Koch’s “The World Tour Compatibility Test,” a 10-part series that’s one part travel diary mixed with a couple parts love story and a few parts as yet unknown. Over on the Memoirville blog, we introduce SMITH readers to Koch. Read on here. Then visit Shanghai.

…It’s only 16 days, 17 hours and 18 minutes until the Simultaneous Global Orgasm for peace.

The mission of the Global Orgasm is to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy. Now that there are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti- submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!

The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.

On Solstice Day, Friday, December 22, do your bit to change the energy field of the Earth by reaching climax, “in the place of your choosing and in as much privacy as you choose.”

Hokay!! I guess that’s more fun than writing letters to your elected representative. We’ll see what happens.

(Image source: Global Orgasm)

This week’s question:

Since Murdoch pulled the plug on OJ, he’s asked you pen an “If I Did It, Here’s How it Happened” book instead—what’s yours about?

Next week’s question:
By now, we’ve all seen Britney’s hoo hoo. What’s the most unpleasant surprise you ever found under someone’s clothes?

Your answer goes here (in 100 words or less, please). We’ll post our favorites on the front page of SMITH.

We’re happy to announce the arrival of two new diaries to the site; the first is “Soldier of Misfortune,” the story of Tish, a soldier we discovered—in the most meta, personal-media way possible, on MySpace. In her first entry for us, Tish writes about her experience thus far:

I guess you could think of the Army as a facet of that “fair shot,” though most people never even consider enlisting unless they already feel they have been failed by “the system” in one way or another. So, here I am, in Columbus, Georgia, a small town with very little to offer aside from drugs and proximity to Atlanta. I am stationed at Fort Benning, on Kelley Hill, in a mechanized infantry brigade. Don’t believe that shit they tell you about women never going into combat zones. It’s (mostly) untrue; support personnel may not technically be in an Infantry position, but we pull guard and do combat patrols and hide from mortar rounds all the same, in the same neighborhoods, against the same people. I’ve been here since sometime in June, though I am nearing my one-year mark being in my life in the Army so far.

My MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) is 68W (”W” is “whiskey”, from the phonetic alphabet). My day-to-day consists almost entirely of “moving boxes” and “mowing lawns.” There is a reason we call ourselves “Landscaper Medics.”

The other is “Out of the Frying Pan,” a diary by my close friend (please don’t hold that against him) Tim Riley, a classically trained chef working through his first years out of the Culinary Institute of America, the country’s best cooking school. Tim’s diary promises a look into the life of a cook trying to set a career path that will take him into being a chef, plus plenty of “food crimes,” some of which will turn your stomach. (Two words: rotten duck. It’s coming in a future entry.)

A preview of Tim’s first entry after the jump.

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