Humor | What’s in a (blog) name?

Dear Readers,

If you ended up here after typing “Wisconsin Magpie” into a search engine in hopes of finding information about an elusive ornithological species — and now you’re wondering why you’re up to your binoculars in stories about a woman buying other people’s detritus and building toy robots in her basement — I apologize.

Allow me to explain.

But first, let me say, this is NOT a Wisconsin Magpie:

It’s just a pretty picture of a bird to break up the text.

Wisconsin Magpie is the name I gave to this blog after months of painstaking research, hours of quiet contemplation and a few too many glasses of merlot. (Mostly the merlot.)

Setting aside the merlot (carefully, so it doesn’t spill), I would like to point out that my naming options were limited. By the time I started this blog, all of the really great domain names — Funky Junk, Chronically Vintage, Shanty-2-Chic, Remodelaholic, Design Sponge — were already taken.

Most of the really awful blog names (which I won’t list here because we Midwesterners are too gosh darn polite to talk smack like that) were also taken.

Incidentally, this is not a Wisconsin Magpie either:

In fact, it’s entirely possible that “Wisconsin Magpie” was the only domain name still available in 2015. (Evidently I arrived late to this blogging game, as I do to most things in life.)

Fortunately for me, Wisconsin Magpie pretty accurately sums up what this blog is about: I’m a Wisconsin girl through and through, and I like to collect odd things for my nest, much as I have heard the birds of the same name do.

Here’s another pretty picture that is also not of a Wisconsin Magpie:

In addition to our passion for collecting, there are other similarities between me and my feathered friends. For example, we are both attracted to shiny objects, we’re both a bit territorial and we’re both smart enough to be able to recognize ourselves in a mirror (unless, of course, one of us has been dipping our beak into the merlot again).

Furthermore, bird magpies are known for their screechy, squawky, annoying call. And anybody who’s ever had the misfortune to sit next to me at St. Jerome’s on Sunday morning knows that that is also an accurate description of my singing voice.

This is a turkey in a hat:

So to the visitors who came here expecting to read about home decor, thrift store finds and vintage collectibles, I’m sorry for boring you with this (scientifically suspect) ornithological lesson.

And to the confused birders who bothered to read all the way to the end of this post and still don’t know why you’re here, I would like to apologize once more for leading you astray with the name of my blog.

But I hope you both will come back and visit again sometime because this is the only place where you can learn about the peculiar nesting habits of the (human) Wisconsin Magpie.