At the zoo

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it's true...

I joined the small expotition to Edinburgh Zoo last Sunday. We had LG, JW, JW's sister whose name I do not know, and their friend Gordon who also goes by Percy. As one does. JW is an important person who is in possession of The Membership, which gave me an additional discount on top of the student discount. I could theoretically have saved another 50p on the entrance fee by opting out of the voluntary donation that they don't really tell you is voluntary. But I was feeling charitable. Chimpanzees need a place to live as well.

There were many animals at the zoo, although there were at least equally many that should have been there according to the signs, but empirical evidence of their existence is lacking and the only possible scientific conclusions are that they are either imaginary or abducted by aliens and sold into slavery in the Andromeda nebula. (Poor sod who bought the sloth.)

The penguins went for a walk, but they did not do tap-dance nor did they burst out into polytonic renditions of classic Motown hits. Very disappointing. They must have been the wrong species.

The Avian antics were nice but also very scary. I wouldn't want to run into a turkey vulture in a dark alley on a cold November evening. (Or anywhere/anytime else.) We saw an otter having caught a little white mouse try to eat it but when he dove under for a second an evil seagull stole it. And the second one as well. I think some form of seagull deterrent near the otter enclosure is in order. Personally I was thinking about laser-guided nuclear missiles, but LG thought that was a bit harsh.

It was nice and sunny and I had a nice time and a hotdog (although not 'the greatest hotdog in the world' as they advertised on the carton).

Homer and the hippies

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/6901543.stm

The Simpsons movie comes out next month, and to get some extra publicity, a giant outline of Homer Simpson holding a doughnut has been painted next to the Cerne Abbas giant, an age-old chalk carving of a guy with certain attributes that make it quite clear why people nowadays think it was a fertility symbol.


(image stolen from the BBC website)

But the Wessex district manager of The Pagan Federation (there is such a person) isn't at all happy with this.

"I'm amazed they got permission to do something so ridiculous. It's an area of scientific interest."

Which is why Homer was painted in the field next to the giant. No longer an area of scientific interest.

"We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away."

As we all know, the weather is made possible in cooperation with differences in athmospheric pressure, among other things. I doubt rain magic comes into the picture. I can see how a massive Homer could be offensive to people who regard the Cerne Abbas giant as a holy site, but threatening with rain magic just draws it right back into the realm of the ridiculous. Another point not scored by the neo-pagans.

Which doesn't mean I think it's an excellent idea to paint Homer on a hill, but that's beside the point.

Gezellig naar de Krim

I just saw the most horrendous television programme ever. Take a dozen couples of old age pensioners with caravans going on a mass holiday in the Crimea, and broadcast their adventures on national television. Why, pray tell, would this ever be a good idea? I only saw about ten minutes of the programme, but they were ten minutes of constant cringing.

At the fact they bought and pre-cooked-and-then-froze all their food in the Netherlands, so that they won't have to eat any of the Ukranian food. At the fact that they complain they can't get recent Dutch newspapers in the middle of nowhere in the Ukraine. At the fact they ridicule Ukranians for not speaking English. At the sorry state of their own English which makes me want to jump off the top floor of David Hume Tower in replacive shame. At the way they made custard by shaking the ingredients in a thermos - "because we don't have a mixer" - which of course wasn't closed properly so that the Ukranian campsite was covered in yellow mush.

At the fact that these are horrible examples of proletarians who should just have taken their sorry old excuses for a caravan to the fokking Veluwe - or the Sauerland or the Belgian Ardennes, if they were feeling adventurous. But most of all at the fact that all of this is on television and there are people who actually like to watch this.

Meanwhile... we had a couple of days of good weather. I did some cycling; I'm terribly out of shape (not as bad as some of the roads though) and now have severely sunburnt legs despite the suncream. I also bought two new CDs (Crowded House and Tori Amos) and two new DVDs (Flushed away and Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Wererabbit), some new clothes and a new book.

Bigotry

Danny Kennedy, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party on the news that the British National Party may be recruiting in Northern Ireland:

"This isn't the kind of imported hate-mongering that we want or need in Northern Ireland."
(BBC News website, 3 July 2004)

Interpretation 1: We are perfectly capable of doing our own hate-mongering, and we have enough of it already, that we don't need extra hate-mongering brought in from England. (That last bit is a bit odd for the UUP, maybe?)

Interpretation 2: They're even bigoted when it comes to the origins of their bigotry.