I glanced at the hummingbird feeder the other day, and it looked like a twig had fallen into one of the “flowers” of the feeder and was sticking straight up.  Then, the twig moved, and I realized it was a wasp.  The bug was standing on its head in the flower, trying desperately to get a drink of the sweet nectar.

But, Ah Ha!  He failed!!  How did this great win come about?  Well, here’s what happened.

After I put the hummingbird feeder up this year, the bees and wasps discovered that they could get the nectar themselves.  At first, it was just a bee or two.  Then, I was looking outside and the feeder looked like a nest of bees, wasps and who know what other little nectar-sucking bugs.

So, I searched the Internet.   The first thing I found was a suggestion to take the feeder down for a few days.  The concept was that insects are so stupid that they’d forget about it if it was gone for a bit. 

Evidently, they’d never seen a nature show describing how bugs send messages to their buddies, giving directions to good food sources.  No matter how long the feeder was gone, by the afternoon of the day I put it back up, I’d have another busy hive outside.

Another piece of advice was to put vegetable oil on the “flowers” of the feeder.  What was that supposed to do?  Make it so slippery the insects would fall off?  What would happen to hummingbirds who were also coated in vegetable oil?  I rejected that solution.

The next solution I came across was to put out a separate feeder for the insects.  What??  I’m supposed to fill another feeder with sweeter nectar than the one for the birds to attract the insects?  So, I was supposed to have a permanent hive on a corner of the deck somewhere?  Please.

The final answer, of course, cost money.  A new birdfeeder.   It, naturally, cost more than the original feeder I purchased.  It was also shaped differently.  Rather than a vertical glass jar with flowers extending horizontally, this one is shaped like a flying saucer. 

And, it comes with little plastic caps to go over the holes into the feeder from the inside.  The caps have a thin membrane covering the opening to the nectar.  Birds can poke through it, but supposedly, insects can’t gain access.

So, rather than having a bee hive right outside the door, I decided to give this bug-proof feeder a try.  It seemed to be working, but the final confirmation was the sight of that silly upside-down wasp.

Victory is sweet!  (Some days you just have to take what you can get)

Newspapers are supposed to be well-researched, well-written and well proofed.  So, it really makes me smile when I see the corrections the papers are forced to publish.  Here are a few that might make you chuckle.

Apology: I originally wrote, “Woodrow Wilson’s wife grazed sheep on the front lawn of the White House.”   I’m sorry that typesetting inadvertently left out the word “sheep.”   [So, you're calling Woodrow Wilson's wife a cow, huh?]

We apologize to our readers who received, through an unfortunate computer error, the chest measurements of members of the Female Wrestlers Association instead of the figures on the sales of soybeans to foreign countries.   [OK, give me a break.   This one is way past a computer error!  Even computers aren't that dumb!]

Just to keep the record straight, it was the famous Whistler’s Mother, not Hitler’s, that was exhibited. There is nothing to be gained in trying to explain how this error occurred.  [Evidently, someone on the paper has a problem pronouncing Ws.  Probably the opposite of the problem experienced by Elmer Fudd]

In one edition of today’s Food Section, an inaccurate number of jalapeno peppers was given for Jeanette Crowley’s Southwestern chicken salad recipe. The recipe should call for two, not 21, jalapeno peppers.  [Unfortunately, there are still a lot of folks in town whose mouths are permanently scarred.]

The marriage of Miss Freda vanAmburg and Willie Branton, which was announced in this paper a few weeks ago, was a mistake which we wish to correct.  [Do you think it was Freda and Willie who put in that correction?]

Our newspaper carried the notice last week that Mr. Oscar Hoffnagle is a defective on the police force. This was a typographical error. Mr. Hoffnagle is, of course, a detective on the police farce.   [Isn't it written somewhere that two wrongs don't make a right?]

From a California bar association’s newsletter: Correction — the following typo appeared in our last bulletin: “Lunch will be gin at 12:15 p.m.” Please orrect to read “12 noon.”   [Some days, a correction just isn't worth the effort, evidently.  Maybe more gin would help.]

Corrections & Clarifications:  A recipe for Italian Breaded Chicken Parmesan on Page 2G of Wednesday’s Food section suggested beating the chicken with a small mallard.  That, of course, is incorrect.  A mallet would be a better choice.  [I agree.  It's never a good idea to use one bird to flatten another.]

Have a great day!

Here’s another startling performance from Britain’s Got Talent.
Take a minute.
It just might make your day.

As you may remember, I recently wrote a post about Tynt, a company whose software allows you to learn what is being copied from your website and leverage those copies into more traffic.

I’m sure it works great for some folks.  But, I may have to give it up to save myself from a heart attack.

Actually, this is only a Whimsical Wednesday post because it is slightly unrelated to real estate marketing, and because I’m taking this opportunity to vent.  Internet theft is a pretty serious subject as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve been getting the Tynt reports on our main site, BuildRealEstateResults.com.  During the month of May, there have been 53 copies made from the site, 43 new links created, and zero people who landed on my site from those copies.

So, just for fun, I checked the page that had the most copies made, the home page of the site, on Copyscape.   I don’t have a premium Copyscape account, so I only got the first few results.  And, what I found is shown below.

There are two plagiarists:  the first company that stole Internet content, and the second company that stole Internet content.  As you can see, Goldstar put the content on their services page, and the stolen content comprises 21% of the text on the page.  Spacecoast Marketing populated 16% of their home page with my copy.

Great!  So, GoldStar and Spacecoast, if you’re listening, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d hire me to write your copy rather than steal it.  And, if you’d be so kind, I’d appreciate it if you removed the copy from your pages.  You’re both overseas, and my content was way ahead of you in being cached with the search engines.  That is the only reason why I’m not following my own advice in terms of dealing with Internet plagarism.

C’MON GUYS.  YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE SOME COPYWRITERS OVER THERE!

I don’t always look at the caller ID before I answer the telephone.  Sometimes I don’t think about it, and sometimes the phone is buried under a few things on my desk.  Well, sometimes more than a few.

Besides that, I’ve found that there are some people I’d really like to talk to who have strange things showing up on the caller ID.  Some say private number, some just give the city and state with no name.

So, I often just answer the telephone and suffer through the pain if I end up with a telemarketer.  I have gotten to the point where I don’t suffer people trying to take up my time very well.  I find the best thing for me is to tell the person that I am not interested in their product/service, but that I appreciate their call.

I know they’re just trying to earn a living.  But, then there are those people who will start talking faster, rushing through their script and asking me questions designed to make me feel stupid.  At that point, I’ve really had enough.  So, I’ll just apologize for hanging up on them, and then hang up.

But, I didn’t need any tricks to get rid of a telemarketer who called the other day.  It happened that I looked at the caller ID when the phone rang.  And, it is sad because whoever was calling just hadn’t figured out the technology piece yet.

So, what, you ask, showed up on the caller ID??

TELEMARKETER

Now that’s the idea!  Stop it before it starts!!!