POTD: Leftover Turkey

POTD: Leftover TurkeyLeftover Turkey
Bozeman, Montana
2015

The day after Thanksgiving happened to be garbage day on our street and there was a small flock of magpies who happened to be there to work through the Thanksgiving dinner detritus and I happened to have my camera nearby when I looked out the window and saw them.

5 thoughts on “POTD: Leftover Turkey”

  1. Websters: happen, happened, happening. 1. to occur by chance. 2. to take place. 3. CHANCE. Also, following separate listing: happening. 1. OCCURANCE. 2. an event or series of events DESIGNED (my emphasis) to evoke a spontaneous reaction to sensory, emotional, or spiritual stimuli.
    For these guys pictured, this looks like a Happening! (Damn, now I’ve got a music worm in my brain from the Peter Sellers flick- The Happening).

  2. None taken. Using a form of “happen” three times in one sentence made me suspicious that the scene was not a haphazard (another use of “hap” referring to chance) coincidence but by design. ie, food left out + camera = photo of scavengers. But then, I’m always up for a good conspiracy theory. I really doubt you’d like to clean up your trash after those guys strung it all over the place just to get a photo. I like looking up root meanings of words to see how far their meanings can be stretched. I found it interesting that happening can mean both “by chance” and “by design”.

    1. Steve, in general your suspicions of this not being a haphazard scene would in general be correct in that I will often bait corvids in order to photograph them. However in this case it was a happening of the chance rather than design type. It is indeed interesting that the word happen can be used both for planned and unplanned events–I wonder how often it is the case that the same word can have nearly opposite uses.

      In this case the use of the word “happen” the second time was unintentional. Generally when I see I’ve done something like that, I will change one of the words to eliminate the repetitiveness in the writing. But for some reason this time I decided (or should I say happened in the by design sense of the word) to take the stranger tact of using it yet again to make it look like I had done it all on purpose from the beginning. (In spite of what it may come out looking like at times, I generally try and be pretty careful about my writing style!)

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