I was quite pleased to see the line-up for THE BIG YEAR - I think Jack Black does best in a group dynamic and Steve Martin is pretty much one of my all-time favs. Plus Owen Wilson (of course) and a great supporting cast to boot. Mostly though it is this whole idea of people pulling out all the stops for bird watching that makes me positively gleeful. It's a tonic for all the worries of our times; the best type of escapism as far as I'm concerned.

Birding was one my mind when I stumbled across the clip because I had just heard about THE BIRDING LIFE from Hollister Hovey's (addictive) design blog. I have quite a few bird books around the house and we are avid back porch birders - the hummingbirds come right up to our windows and there are literally dozens of different song birds that visit our feeders. But BIRDING LIFE Is not just about birds in flight but decorating with avian arts and crafts and all of that appeals to me in a Hemingway/Roosevelt/Cabinet of Curiosities sort of way. When we were at Harvard last week we saw an amazing number of taxidermied birds and while I am very glad that we are no longer killing birds for display purposes, they were so beautiful! It was really hard to look away.

The Hovey sisters are in the book plus - "Kristof Zyskowski, manager of the vertebrate collections at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, gives you a behind-the-scenes peek at the museum's meticulously curated collection, which includes specimens from about 70 percent of the world's bird species." More museum goodness! I'm so all over this one, it's not even funny. Totally on the Christmas list.