Ive raised pet birds (macaws, amazons, and cockatoos) for about 15 years now. Since i was 10 years old, birds are not for everyone but they are amazing creatures.

Ive got a scarlet macaw that knows how to use a key to unlock a small box i always hide his Brazil nuts in, its a neat trick to watch.


But that brain can get them into trouble sometimes 2 though

"The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least"---Mohandas Gandhi

Eartha Kitt, sultry 'Santa Baby' singer, dies

12/25/2008 6:36 PM, AP


Eartha Kitt, a sultry singer, dancer and actress who rose from South Carolina cotton fields to become an international symbol of elegance and sensuality, has died, a family spokesman said. She was 81.

Andrew Freedman said Kitt, who was recently treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, died Thursday in Connecticut of colon cancer.

Kitt, a self-proclaimed "sex kitten" famous for her catlike purr, was one of America's most versatile performers, winning two Emmys and nabbing a third nomination. She also was nominated for several Tonys and two Grammys.

Her career spanned six decades, from her start as a dancer with the famed Katherine Dunham troupe to cabarets and acting and singing on stage, in movies and on television. She persevered through an unhappy childhood as a mixed-race daughter of the South and made headlines in the 1960s for denouncing the Vietnam War during a visit to the White House.

Through the years, Kitt remained a picture of vitality and attracted fans less than half her age even as she neared 80.

When her book "Rejuvenate," a guide to staying physically fit, was published in 2001, Kitt was featured on the cover in a long, curve-hugging black dress with a figure that some 20-year-old women would envy. Kitt also wrote three autobiographies.

Once dubbed the "most exciting woman in the world" by Orson Welles, she spent much of her life single, though brief romances with the rich and famous peppered her younger years.

After becoming a hit singing "Monotonous" in the Broadway revue "New Faces of 1952," Kitt appeared in "Mrs. Patterson" in 1954-55. (Some references say she earned a Tony nomination for "Mrs. Patterson," but only winners were publicly announced at that time.) She also made appearances in "Shinbone Alley" and "The Owl and the *****cat."

Her first album, "RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt," came out in 1954, featuring such songs as "I Want to Be Evil," "C'est Si Bon" and the saucy gold digger's theme song "Santa Baby," which is revived on radio each Christmas.

The next year, the record company released follow-up album "That Bad Eartha," which featured "Let's Do It," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."

In 1996, she was nominated for a Grammy in the category of traditional pop vocal performance for her album "Back in Business." She also had been nominated in the children's recording category for the 1969 record "Folk Tales of the Tribes of Africa."

Kitt also acted in movies, playing the lead female role opposite Nat King Cole in "St. Louis Blues" in 1958 and more recently appearing in "Boomerang" and "Harriet the Spy" in the 1990s.

On television, she was the sexy Catwoman on the popular "Batman" series in 1967-68, replacing Julie Newmar who originated the role. A guest appearance on an episode of "I Spy" brought Kitt an Emmy nomination in 1966.

"Generally the whole entertainment business now is bland," she said in a 1996 Associated Press interview. "It depends so much on gadgetry and flash now. You don't have to have talent to be in the business today.

"I think we had to have something to offer, if you wanted to be recognized as worth paying for."

Kitt was plainspoken about causes she believed in. Her anti-war comments at the White House came as she attended a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson.

"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she told the group of about 50 women. "They rebel in the street. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."

For four years afterward, Kitt performed almost exclusively overseas. She was investigated by the FBI and CIA, which allegedly found her to be foul-mouthed and promiscuous.

"The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth — in a country that says you're entitled to tell the truth — you get your face slapped and you get put out of work," Kitt told Essence magazine two decades later.

In 1978, Kitt returned to Broadway in the musical "Timbuktu!" — which brought her a Tony nomination — and was invited back to the White House by President Jimmy Carter.

In 2000, Kitt earned another Tony nod for "The Wild Party." She played the fairy godmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" in 2002.

As recently as October 2003, she was on Broadway after replacing Chita Rivera in a revival of "Nine."

She also gained new fans as the voice of Yzma in the 2000 Disney animated feature "The Emperor's New Groove.'"

In an online discussion at Washingtonpost.com in March 2005, shortly after Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman won Oscars, she expressed satisfaction that black performers "have more of a chance now than we did then to play larger parts."

But she also said: "I don't carry myself as a black person but as a woman that belongs to everybody. After all, it's the general public that made (me) — not any one particular group. So I don't think of myself as belonging to any particular group and never have."

Kitt was born in North, S.C., and her road to fame was the stuff of storybooks. In her autobiography, she wrote that her mother was black and Cherokee while her father was white, and she was left to live with relatives after her mother's new husband objected to taking in a mixed-race girl.

An aunt eventually brought her to live in New York, where she attended the High School of Performing Arts, later dropping out to take various odd jobs.

By chance, she dropped by an audition for the dance group run by Dunham, a pioneering African-American dancer. In 1946, Kitt was one of the Sans-Souci Singers in Dunham's Broadway production "Bal Negre."

Kitt's travels with the Dunham troupe landed her a gig in a Paris nightclub in the early 1950s. Kitt was spotted by Welles, who cast her in his Paris stage production of "Faust."

That led to a role in "New Faces of 1952," which featured such other stars-to-be as Carol Lawrence, Paul Lynde and, as a writer, Mel Brooks.

While traveling the world as a dancer and singer in the 1950s, Kitt learned to perform in nearly a dozen languages and, over time, added songs in French, Spanish and even Turkish to her repertoire.

"Usku Dara," a song Kitt said was taught to her by the wife of a Turkish admiral, was one of her first hits, though Kitt says her record company feared it too remote for American audiences to appreciate.

Song titles such as "I Want to be Evil" and "Just an Old Fashioned Girl" seem to reflect the paradoxes in Kitt's private life.

Over the years, Kitt had liaisons with wealthy men, including Revlon founder Charles Revson, who showered her with lavish gifts.

In 1960, she married Bill McDonald but divorced him after the birth of their daughter, Kitt.

While on stage, she was daringly sexy and always flirtatious. Offstage, however, Kitt described herself as shy and almost reclusive, remnants of feeling unwanted and unloved as a child. She referred to herself as "that little urchin cotton-picker from the South, Eartha Mae."

For years, Kitt was unsure of her birthplace or birth date. In 1997, a group of students at historically black Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., located her birth certificate, which verified her birth date as Jan. 17, 1927. Kitt had previously celebrated on Jan. 26.

The research into her background also showed Kitt was the daughter of a white man, a poor cotton farmer.

"I'm an orphan. But the public has adopted me and that has been my only family," she told the Post online. "The biggest family in the world is my fans."


RIP, Catwoman will live forever in our hearts

un-cared for bipolar disorder, and a horrible temper and just shear stupidity

Your not the only one, Its a pretty disgusting and subjegative. Half of that book would make the perpriotors of the black and blue ball proud! LOL

In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.

Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different road, so long as we reach the same goal. Wherein is the cause for quarrelling?


Everyone has there reasons for doing good in this world, i really dont care why just aslong as it gets done!!

Myself, as a Scientist, have spent quite a while now studing the similiarities between Great Apes and humans. Like it or not, we are very very similiar both on the molecular level and the Psychological level. The same emotional levels we have, they have. They form the same family bonds as we do, the use of tools, They have Mirrored self recognition, chimpanzees eat realitivly the same diet as we do. I could go on and on. It is very striking if you would take a look at it, we really are not all that different. So why would something be a "sin" to us, when its a normal behavior for something so geneticly similiar. It seems to me, if we were created by some all powerfull being, that would be very hypocritical of that being to put a behavior into his creation, then turn around and call in an abomination. This country sees sex in a totally backwards way from what nature intended, theres so much stigma and fear set into the idea that it is totally ridiculious and idiotic, take a look at Bonobo society, Sex is nothing but a form of communication and for reproduction. Violence is completly avoided almost entirely, because there are no stigmas or prejustice! It seems to me that the idea of sin is only a way to divide us humans into groups so fear and the feeling of inferriority can reign. We all are just apart of the world around us, the idea of supperiority and inferriority is just another man made BS story! Im not saying there is no such thing as right and wrong, Nature seems to be a good judge for that, We as humans, are just apart of everything that is around us, we are no better than any living creature on this earth, we just need to find our positive role and live it out while we are here. Nature is a wonderful guide to see where this world can go and its so arrogent to think that we are supperior to it when we are just a part of it. There has never been a case of lethal aggresion EVER DOCUMENTED in bonobo society, I WISH WE COULD SAY THE SAME FOR US HUMAN BEINGS!

Just another hollow man made BS story, with some mystical pillar of salt transformation. I learned along time ago that Science Fiction is just that, FICTION!

Women are like Rollercoasters

How much fun would a Rollercoaster be if it just went straight?

Kinda boring huh?

It takes alot curves,twists and turns, to make it one hell of a ride!!



Curves are just plain YUMMY!!

To quote Dr King

Lord almighty free at last, Lord almighty im free atlast *When you see a good lookin, sweetheart of a woman, the first words i could think of were* Ive seen the promise land!!


Atleast thats what i say after my first major break-up

Science is as infanint as the space it tries to discribe!

A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability----Robert Kennedy

Fear of the unknown is usless, If you have no knowledge of something, why fear it? It should be the capture of the knowledge you lack that should be your goal, not to allow fear to incase your heart, then that knowledge your soul craved is gone forever. If fear is taken completly out of the equation, and replaced with the curiosity and the quest for knowledge, it would end this alot of the turmoil that we have put ourselves in as fearfull human beings

Replace fear with curiosity, and there u have your answer and the cycle is broken

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty".---Mohandas Gandhi



I see a bunch of victims here, that poor woman who was maliciously attacked by a group of men who decided that it was there right to "change" her. These men are also victims of societys idea that was implanted in there souls that it is ok to hate a certain group of people for making a personal life choice that differs from there own. I am no way saying that they should go un-punished but the only way we are going to see things like this come to an end, is to cleanse our whole society from the idea that Hate and Intollerance has a place in this world, as we are all only here for a short while and all we are need to see ourselves as brothers and sisters that are only trying to live out our lifes in the best way we see fit

An invasion wont be needed for the fall of this country, it will come from within, from its own people without violence, in the form of a tax revolt!!

Plus it keeps me from getting darn good cigars, Darn u JFK lol JK

Ive got a unbridled mind, thats why im still up.

Cant sleep worth a darn even when i do get some shut eye

Ill bet anyone my kitty is bigger than his! LOL

"Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not."--RFK


Hmmm, If you could take something that never was and make it so, what would it be and why?