Just Politics

[janice shell]

Do the mynahs talk to you? Sing along with anything playing on the radio or whatever? Or do they just poop on your floor?

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose parents' neighbor owned a mynah. We went over there once. It was interesting; the owners were really into Japanese stuff--I have no idea why; it was pretty unusual for the neighborhood--and the mynah was keeping up with the radio. It wasn't like a parrot; it didn't really interact with people verbally.

It was fascinating to me. We'd had a parakeet, unimaginatively named "Pretty Boy", who didn't last long. Most people didn't know as much about birds, or any other pets, back in the '50s. But the mynah interacted much more with people. Too much, really. Even in the course of a half-hour visit, he became pretty irritating.