Odds and Ends #3

Knut the Killer

Makes me wonder how many post graduate degrees are required before somebody realizes Knut is a polar bear – aka a wild animal – basically doing what his mother should have taught him. Stop chucking food into his enclosure; he will quickly catch on to the tastiness of raw fish and other moveable feasts. As for his howling for a friend, maybe the media reporter carping about a bear who "senselessly murdered the carp" can volunteer to sit across the table from Knut to discuss their mutual psychological problems.

Fabulous Feet

Almost positive some of the under socks I use for hiking are laced with silver threads making my feet much more valuable than the rest of my body. Last quote I remember was $13 per ounce for silver so I’m planning to wash my feet each time into my gold pan and attempt to swish out the silver, instead of allowing my foot odour to become part of the toxic sludge problem. Then I recalled that the Borg were heavy into nano technology and am beginning to suspect we are being assimilated despite our protestations. Trust the big corporations to have been taken over by aliens, right under our noses while we worried about malodorous foot scents.

What about the Bags?

For years we have been treated to the sight of millions of plastic bags waving throughout the countryside and quivering like sea kelp over acres of dump sites. All of a sudden, the garbage police have discovered evil contents within the confines of the plastic beast – tons and tons of unused foodstuffs reeking and fermenting, inundating the atmosphere with tons and tons of obnoxious gases fuelling the spread of greenhouse warming. Since I eschewed the use of plastic, I’ve been driven to carting my putrid leftovers to the bin wrapped in my best Sunday shirts (they are washed in non phosphate detergent and hung on my balcony to dry despite the protests of neighbours) which are manufactured with organic cotton in approved factories somewhere off world. Now I’ll have to take a course in fruit wine making, to prevent the unneeded produce from being discarded, even if it means I spend all my spare hours getting soused.

Stonehenge Spa

Over the past decades this stone circle has been explain in many ways: an astronomical observatory, pagan ritual site replete with human sacrifice, Neolithic convention center for end of harvest celebrations, alien landing zone (von Däniken theory?), and now it is a healing place. Unless an error in reporting comes to light or I’ve just read the reports incorrectly, I’m amazed that among other findings the archaeologists have unearthed some Roman ceramics from the sockets under the bluestones. While over the past decades, there have been numerous readjustments of the timeline of construction due to carbon dating inaccuracies; the general consensus suggests the total building period stretching from 3000BC to 1600BC. – give or take a couple of centuries, but whose counting. Historically, the Romans visited here during the first century BC and naturally proceeded to slaughter enough of the inhabitants to ensure adding the bulk of the island to the Empire. Therefore, barring the ability of the roman centurions to time travel, how does some of their dinnerware show up under mammoth stones placed over two thousand years before their arrival?

Green Screen Relay

Not even going to take sides. But does it make sense to have an Olympic torch relay when the spectators are lining a different route. You might as well hold it in front of green screens deep in the bowels of the ‘Forbidden City’ and add the background of cheering people from a Santa Claus parade, the rose bowl festivities or the gay-pride celebrations. It would be in keeping with the Communist iron fist ruling party plus save the bother of rewriting or re-video taping history to show the true wonder of the Olympics held in the Middle Kingdom.