--and this is a true story--there was this egg. It was a blackbird egg which sat in its nest. Now its mother had the highest hopes for the little bird in the egg, sitting on the egg as often as possible to keep it warm.

But, without getting into details, I'll just say that the bird hatched and grew like normal birds, but when it came time to leave the nest, he didn't fly. He said he didn't want to bother learning how. He thought the course work would be drudgery.

This bird set himself up well. He got his TV, having a person from the store set it up for him, since the bird didn't have a car.

The bird was then living the good life. For instance, He would watch many fine television shows. Also, whenever he was hungry, he would walk down to the grass below and pick around with his beak for worms all morning, and he would supplement the worm diet with bugs and protein drinks as well as seeds. He made friends with the mice below, who didn't mind that he didn't fly since they couldn't. In fact, the bird soon realized that if he all of a sudden started flying, the mice would get jealous, since they couldn't fly, and they would no longer call him homebird.

*Paw is mouse for hand, and foot is bird for the same thing.

One day a mouse did ask if there was a way mice could fly. He said he felt limited by being only able to walk on the ground. So he and the mouse went looking for a way to get the mouse to fly, and they soon found a little girl who blasted off rockets. The mouse ran up to the launch pad. The girl saw him, picked him up by the tail, and stuffed him in a payload section. Then she set up the rocket, pressed the launcher's launch button, and up the rocket zipped.

After a few moments, the rocket's parachute deployed and the rocket floated down. The mouse ran out. As it turned out, a bunch of other mice had followed along to watch. They received this mouse as a hero, a mouse which dared to be different, a mouse which braved the unknown, a mouse which lived to tell about it.

The mouse said that being up in the rocket was great, and that he could see so much! It was like being a bird, except for the bird they knew. It was just then that the bird started wondering what he was missing. So the bird vowed to learn to fly.

The bird checked classified advertisements on the computer, but he didn't find any ad which offered flying lessons to blackbirds.

However, he did find a dishwashing job, and decided to take it so he could save up for a satellite dish for his T.V.

Finally it occurred to the bird to enroll in an aviation course at the university in town. He learned all about Bernoulli's Principle, about the Four Fundamental Forces (lift, weight, thrust, and drag), how to read VFR navigation charts, about communications frequencies, and how to obtain and interpret weather reports.

The bird thought the girl sitting next to him was a jerk, but aside from that, he liked the class. In the end, the bird got an A+ in the class. If this is amazing, imagine a bird getting anything less in an aviation class. However, the bird still couldn't fly. The reason for this is that, though the theory being taught was interesting to the bird, it had little practical value for him--it didn't teach him how to flap his wings, how to land on branches or telephone wires, how to scan below for worms, and things like that. The only time the professor brought up birds was when he felt like spicing up the class with examples from nature, but even then, the marginal discussion was of academic value only as far as the bird was concerned, since the professor's ornithological examples often involved concepts like air viscosity, drag, vortex generation, and other things more suitable for aerodynamic engineers than for natural aviators. Neither butterflies nor birds contemplate critical mach numbers or how laminar the airflow over their wings is when they fly.

Naturally, the bird then decided to make a pilgrimage to Greece to consult the Oracle at Delphi, to see if the secret of bird flight cold be revealed to him. But then he thought it would be too much effort and decided instead to ask some other bird that he could find nearby. All the other birds were busy, though. They didn't have time to help the protagonist with something they thought the bird should have learned for itself long before. So the bird gave up.

But don't worry. This isn't the end. For, after falling asleep in front of the TV, the bird had a dream, and the bird angel of flight came to him and said, "I wonder what's on TV. I'm tired of flying now. You don't mind if I watch right now, do you?" the bird nodded yes to the angel bird, who watched TV for awhile, and then flew away. Just then the bird woke up. Believing the dream to be real, he flew after the angel bird.

Not finding it, he flew back to his nest. The TV was still on, and a nature show was on. It said that birds naturally fly by instinct. So the bird thought for a moment and realized that the problem was that he was thinking too hard about flying. He thought maybe there was something to the Zen Buddhist idea of direct experience without reflection, so the bird flew west to the East to see if he could learn from this ancient religion. And of course, the bird flew back as soon as he realized he was flying.

The moral of this story is that dreams and television can be very inspirational.