Does this look lucky to you?!
So, a seagull shat on me today.
I was walking past a lady talking on her cellphone with a nice little dog at her side. I bent over to say hello to the dog, and seagull dipped out of the sky and strafed down my back.
The horrified look on the lady’s face almost made up for it.
Then the whole rest of the day, everyone consoled me by saying getting shat on by a seagull is good luck. You ever heard this? It is not part of my store of legends.
Poking around the web, it does indeed seem to be a thing. In Britain, it’s seagulls. For the Russians and the Turks, any old bird will do. It generally means money coming your way (a Turk buying a lottery ticket with shit on his head is a cartoon staple). This article is representative.
My grandfather took my grandmother on a first date on a river boat in New Orleans. 1920 maybe. Something of a dandy, he was wearing an all-white suit. Right off the bat, a seagull pooped on his knee. He spent the rest of the date strategically holding his Panama hat over his knee.
Was it lucky? They got married. That could go either way.
That same grandfather never once, since he was weaned, missed eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s day. For luck, if you don’t know. He had a bowl brought to him in the hospital. Then he died.
No comment.
Posted: January 4th, 2022 under birds, personal.
Comments: 10
Comments
Comment from durnedyankee
Time: January 4, 2022, 8:25 pm
Oh, and here at first I thought maybe you’d taken up creating Jackson Pollock style art.
But why mock superstition, it’s the official government methodology for dealing with this insane pandemic.
We should be glad they haven’t claimed wearing 10 lbs of chain would reduce your chance of coming down with the Chicom lurgy.
Though the clanking around of the mask wearing chain encumbered flock might be mildly entertaining that 1st day I suppose.
Comment from Stephen Falken
Time: January 4, 2022, 8:51 pm
Too bad that you aren’t in the states to buy a ticket because the Powerball drawing is up to $610 million.
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: January 4, 2022, 10:11 pm
My Ma always said it was good luck, so take it as a good omen, SWeasy…you’re starting the year off well.
Comment from Deborah HH
Time: January 4, 2022, 10:58 pm
I’ve heard the bird-poo/good luck story all my life, too.
As for eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, we do. In JavaMan’s family, the tradition is to put a clean new dime in the serving bowl. The person who finds the dime on their plate gets extra special good luck in the coming year.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: January 4, 2022, 11:25 pm
It’s a silver sixpence in the Christmas pudding in Jolly Olde. Or was when Once B was a lad.
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: January 5, 2022, 12:51 am
Hmmm – I think I heard about the whole bird-butt-luck thing watching some Brit-Com show… I suspect it started with some Mom trying to get her kid to stop crying at Brighton Beach one day some generations back. When it happened to his or her own kid years later grandma’s story was re-used… seeing that lots of people have gone to Brighton over the past few hundred years, and given the sea gull population, I can see how the story would spread over the entire population. There’s a math final exam question in there somewhere: given that England’s population is X and Y is the percentage of those who go to Brighton each year, Z is the sea gull population, and S is the hit rate per sea gull, how many years until….
Never mind. My brain hurts.
Anyhow our family always had to eat pork and sauerkraut at New Years and our odd custom required putting a little of each and every basic and necessary food in a box outside the front door of the house on New Year’s Eve. I am a little vague on this next part but I think that no one who visited on on New Year’s Eve ( or maybe New Year’s Day or maybe both) was allowed to leave without eating at least something…ideally as much as they wanted.
Comment from steve
Time: January 5, 2022, 2:38 am
I once got crapped on by a pelican.
They are big birds. Their stools are massive.
Nothing good came of the incident.
Comment from dissent555
Time: January 5, 2022, 4:39 am
It looks like Professor Plum. In the drawing room. With a candlestick. Through my scratched and well worn polycarbonate safety glass lenses. In a thick fog.
Comment from Jeff Weimer
Time: January 5, 2022, 5:29 pm
I heard the same thing after a seagull shat on me right before I checked onboard my first ship (USN) in my Dress Blues. Of all things, gotta make a very first impression and that happens. I was mortified.
Comment from BJM
Time: January 7, 2022, 8:09 pm
@ Stoaty…they don’t make men like our grandfathers anymore. My Spousal Unit is all manly and stuff, but prickly as hell. That may go with being-in-charge-of-everthing-he-surveys. Lead, follow or get out of the way works for me.
The Southern side of the family ate a Smithfield ham and black-eyed peas with a dime and the Dutch side, ate smoked pork sausages with sauerkraut or pork-stuffed cabbage rolls on New Years Day…sometimes both.
There’s an old Dutch saying “the pig roots forward”. But the Dutch being practical folk know that the only thing wasted from a pig is the squeal and a jar of kraut is always on the table so the NYD meal was probably not an exception just more lavish. I still shudder at the thought of trotters and/or headcheese…which the older folks on both sides of the family loved.
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