Atempt* (for Attempt*)

"Attempted Murder" reads the caption beneath a shot of two crows sitting on a fence. This joke, or visual pun, is not an original, but was conveyed to me by a friend who had seen it on Facebook. I chose this particular pic myself, though. Doesn't it look like these two are just waiting for their fellow co-conspirators to show up? (Their crow conspirators, if you will?) Crows are considered to be very intelligent birds, clever and conniving even, and possibly in possession of a wicked sense of humor—which might be why a group of them is often called a murder. Among all the creatures in the animal kingdom, many of whom kill on a regular basis, crows were perhaps the only ones thought capable of malice aforethought. On the other hand, it could be that these allegedly headed-for-jail birds have simply gotten a bad rap. There were 18 cases of the murder of attempted in OhioLINK today, and 692 in WorldCat.

(A pair of Ceylon House Crows (Corvus splendens protegatus) in Kochchikade, Sri Lanka, 3 May 2010, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid