Avoid stork club

	Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image.

Are we going to have to rethink the stork as a symbol of childbirth? (Time out for a word to you kids and intelligent designers: The stork doesn't actually bring babies. In reality, babies derive from some sort of collaboration between birds and bees.) Perhaps you heard the news from Germany that seems to indicate storks might be clueless when it comes to reproduction. Two of them decided to nest in the middle of a golf course. Their notion of becoming parents was to steal golf balls and try to hatch them, according to the London Telegraph. You'd think the word "Titleist" on the balls would have been a dead giveaway, but, no, the storks took so many balls that one nest, on the fourth green, overflowed, and they had to build a second at the seventh hole. Is it possible that golfers are the symbol of childbirth in the stork community?

Stork facts

From the BBC News online: Poland is the European stronghold of the white stork, with about a quarter of the continent's estimated 44,000 breeding pairs. Traditionally, storks have nested on roofs or in trees. To have a nest on your house is seen as a sign of God's blessing by the Poles, particularly, no doubt, by Polish roofers. But over the last 25 years, storks have developed a preference for nest-building on electricity poles. A naturalist told the Telegraph that between 1894 and 1997 only 16 stork couples in all Europe had been reported to have had nests on the ground. So these German storks were really out of it -- possibly because they lost their nest to pushier breeders. Facing a deadline on the short breeding season, they did what they had to do to satisfy the strong parental urge, even though stork eggs are twice the size of golf balls and don't have those little dimples.

Famous storks

From the AP
• Man Buys Smoker, Finds Human Leg Inside • Coach Stops Runaway Horse by Biting Ear • Man Allegedly Tries to Use 'Blurry' $100 • Police Break Up Brawl at Chuck E. Cheese • Suggestive Card Ruffles Farmer's Feathers • Nerds to Auction Themselves to Women • Toilet to Tap? San Jose Probes Plan • Seattle to Allow Pygmy Goats As Pets • Yankees Rookies Dress Up in Oz Costumes

Ted "The Mad Stork" Hendricks, Hall-of-Fame defensive end, Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders (1969-1983). He got the nickname as an undergrad: "The University of Miami's defensive team had a middle guard nicknamed the "Mad Dog." So he decided to nickname the other 10 players with the prefix "mad." Since I had skinny legs, and the mascot for the team was an ibis in the stork family, he named me the "Mad Stork." Profootballhof.com

Dave Brubeck on Paul Desmond, the great alto sax who gave the Brubeck quartet its distinctive sound: "He had the nickname of 'The Stork', because he'd stand on one leg and lean on the piano. That was his nickname amongst a lot of musicians and a lot of fans. With his head kind of down and the crook of the horn kind of suggesting a stork in repose. And he was ... I knew he was listening to every note I played all night and I was listening to every note of his." (From interlog.com.)

Stork quotes

"His mother should have thrown him out and kept the stork."
-- Mae West as Ruby Carter, "Belle of the Nineties," 1934.

"I'll bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork."
-- Groucho Marx as J. Cheever Loophole, "At the Circus," 1939.

Storko Marx

"Vlasic" pickles uses the child-bearing stork as a mascot who sounded an awful lot like Groucho Marx in TV commercials.

Blame Victorians

In Victorian times, it was too difficult to talk about sex, so when a child asked, "Where did I come from?", parents straightforwardly answered, "The stork brought you to us." And so the image of a stork bearing an infant became the symbol of diaper services the world over.

Powerball odds

With the Powerball lottery up to $180 million for tonight's drawing, here's some cold water from the Washington Post. There were 20 horses in the Kentucky Derby. That means there were 116,280 possible superfecta combinations, a superfecta meaning picking the first four horses in order of finish. An endlessly wealthy bettor could have cornered the market on all possible combinations and still earned more than a half-million dollars. The odds for a winning Powerball ticket, in comparison, are more than 1,000 times worse, at 1 in 120,526,770. If someone hits tonight, the jackpot would rank as the 10th largest in Powerball history. If the winning ticket was sold in Pennsylvania, it would be the state's second-largest single-winning ticket.

Give us a "P"!

Tell us this hasn't happened to you. You're eyeballing the Pennsylvania state flag, but you have this nagging doubt: Is it really the Pennsylvania state flag? (You'll want to get this straight for your lottery check presentation in Harrisburg.) State Rep. Timothy Solobay, D-Canonsburg, has introduced legislation that would clear up any misunderstanding by adding the word "Pennsylvania" to the state flag.

The Morning File tries to steer clear of politics, but we support solon Solobay: It makes more sense than adding "New Mexico" or "Teaneck High School."

This, Solobay said in a news release, "will ensure that all who see it know it represents the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, home of America's oldest freely elected Legislature."

Also, the largest and among the most expensive Legislatures, but Solobay was too modest to point this out. He wants to have a contest "so that every Pennsylvanian can help determine exactly where to place the state's name on the flag." Count on us to follow this story.

More gambling news

This just in to The Morning File: While you were absorbed in your own small lives, the betting community was giving serious thought to the best all-time sports movies. An online gambling outfit named BetCris.com polled 23,000 of its "clients" and came up with this list:

• Million Dollar Baby (15.6%)
• Hoosiers (12.1%)
• Rocky (9.8%)
• Raging Bull (8.4%)
• Slap Shot (7.5%)
• Caddy Shack (7.2%)
• Bull Durham (6.5%)
• The Longest Yard (5.6%)
• Field of Dreams (5.1%)
• Karate Kid (4.9%)
• Major League (4.1%)
• When We Were Kings (3.8%)
• The Natural (3.2%)
• The Sandlot (2.6%)
• Others (3.6%)

Perhaps next year the golf movie "Honey, the Stork killed me on the back nine!" will be on that list.

Stork postscript

None of the golf balls produced storks, or, for that matter, any kind of birdie. But golf course personnel found an abandoned stork egg and slipped it in among the golf balls. A successful birth is expected.

Maybe there is some point to golf, after all.