Wordpecker 13: Scroogs Panini

In which we are not making a sh*t sandwich joke

Selfish AI | Scroogly | Giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture | Neil the Seal | Passerculus sandwichensis

Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash

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This week in phraseology

The phrase “explosive diarrhea” is objectively pretty great, but seeing it so often during the current cyclosporaisis parasite outbreak is not good for ye olde mental health. I did like this variation, which nicely sums up 2026 overall:

Thankfully, I’m all out of diarrhea-related phrases. I just don’t have it in me to think about this anymore. I’m emptied out. The jokes have run dry. (I’m going to stop now.)

This week, we have some bird stuff, an admirable use of adjectives, a big baby showing Tasmania who’s boss, and more.

Let’s get to it!

1. Selfish AI

Loved this piece by game and app developer Josh Moody titled How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly, e.g., “in ways that end up making more work for others.” Wow, imagine that. As a marketing copywriter and editor who’s had to hack through my share of AI slop with a machete, fruitlessly trying to reshape it before giving up and just rewriting, I can relate.

The post is nuanced, noting that many people who use AI selfishly (or otherwise) are under tremendous work-related pressure for various reasons. Which is true!

But the post is a setup for his list of emoji reactions to selfish AI, including:

• Passive aggressive emojis - 🏺Amphora (Ancient Greek vase): I randomly wanted to remind you of the incredible art humanity produced with their bare hands thousands of years ago

• Fully aggressive emojis - 🩼 Crutch: You aren’t capable of writing even the most basic of messages without help

• Positive emojis - 🧠 Brain: a human brain was used

Click to see all the emoji reacts.

2. Scroogly

Our family made up this word to describe a normal budgie feather molting phase that looks both mildly pitiful and also extremely cute. When this happens, we all stand around enthusiastically admiring how scroogly our feathered friends look. Here are a couple of photos to see what this looks like:

Kiwi bein’ scroogly, photo by Matt S.

Yoshi, who has zero sense of personal space, in full scroogle mode.

But do they let us give them scritches to get some relief? No, they do not!

“He likes to butt things with his head.” Yoshi getting some relief from the scroogs

3. Giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture

Once again, sociologist, author, and documentary filmmaker Tressie McMillan Cottom offers brilliant commentary on our era. Here, she’s writing about data centers, which many Americans on both sides of the aisle hate. In fact, that’s the opener to her opinion piece: “Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.”

According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

McMillan Cottom sees this consensus and the grassroots organizing around it as an opportunity for the Democratic party to unite around, but wisely notes that what the party will actually do is anyone’s guess.

BTW if you’re not familiar with this concept, I wrote about hostile architecture a while back. It’s a design practice meant to keep certain community members away, including teens, unhoused folks, and those dreaded poors. Examples include removing park benches to prevent lingering (or sleeping) and creating dead-end cul-de-sacs to wall off affluent enclaves. The downside is broader than the exclusionary band-aid fix it seeks to address, making spaces hostile to the entire community.

4. Neil the Seal

NEIL!!! I yell his name every time he crosses my feed, making me a delightful housemate. But we simply mustn’t let Diarrhea Parasite Summer overshadow Neil the Seal’s time in the sun. If you’re not familiar, Neil the Seal is a beloved six-year-old, one-ton elephant seal who shows up in Tasmania a couple of times a year, starts fights with traffic barriers and parked cars, and lays around blocking traffic. He’s still young and nowhere near his full size! I can’t wait to see what Neil gets up to next.

Image via neiltheseal316 on TikTok

Here are TikTok and YouTube accounts that follow Neil’s antics. This TikTok of Neil confronting a parked van is captioned “unafraid, unapologetic, ungovernable.” I LOVE HIM.

5. Passerculus sandwichensis

We’ve covered weird bird names here before, from the Latin to the English to the colloquial. The bar-tailed godwit. The swamp candle. The butter butt. The drab-breasted bamboo tyrant. Really, I could do one of these a week and coast on that bit for a year or more.

When I saw the Latin name for the Savannah Sparrow had the word sandwich in it, I had to know more.

They’re very cute, with distinctive yellow eyeliner - here’s one in a bit of a skroogs mode:

Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash

Here’s a more Insta-worthy look:

Photo of tiny friend by Eduardo Bergen on Unsplash

Unfortunately, the backstory for the name isn’t as fun as the name itself. Turns out Savannah Sparrows do not enjoy a good PB&J or grabbing Subway off the interstate.

They were first noted by a naturalist in what is now Prince William Sound in Alaska, which was originally named Sandwich Sound, which was named for the Earl of Sandwich, who was named for the town of Sandwich, in Kent. Alas, according to Wikipedia, sandwich means “market town on sandy soil,” not “assuming the Italian stance at Al’s Beef.”

That’s a lot of sandwiches, and now I’m hungry so I’m going to sign off. See you next time, probably with more weird bird stuff.

In the meantime, tell me about your favorite sandwich:

Remember to keep making it weird and stay furiously curious!