Here.
I’m afraid this posting says it all for me, about birds and their incessant “singing”.
LATER: Plus, these owls don’t think they’re being cute at all.
Category: Other creatures
Starlings over Denmark
This is a link to yet another of those huge-flock-of-starlings videos, where a bewildering number of starlings do lots and lots of coordinated – but not militarised, if you get my drift – swirling.
The only slightly unusual thing about this video is how very numerous this particular assemblage of starlings was, and, especially, how very black they manage, or the guy processing the video manages, to turn large chunks of the evening sky. Worth just over a minute of your time to watch.
The President of Turkmenistan expresses his love of dogs with a golden statue
Here:
Says Eurasianet:
The new monument that was commissioned several years ago puts the Alabai in exalted company at the forefront of state propaganda.
The Alabai being a breed of dog. The statue, which is in the middle of a roundabout, celebrates the entire breed, rather than any individual dog.
Previously the only animal to be celebrated in local sculpture was the Akhal-Teke horse. …
So, aside from dog statues, how has Turkmenistan been doing lately? Not so well, it would seem:
Berdymukhamedov’s professed love of native animals, expressed through poetry as well as more encyclopedic works, has only grown as the country slides deeper into an economic crisis …
Don’t take your people’s minds off their miseries with foreign wars. Do it with a dog statue!
It looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken
A new restaurant is opening up in Tel Aviv:
At a new restaurant in Tel Aviv called The Chicken, the chicken on the menu is grown from cells in a bioreactor in an adjacent pilot plant visible through a glass window. Diners don’t pay for their meals; instead, SuperMeat, the startup making the “cultured chicken” meat, is asking for feedback on its products, as it prepares for large-scale production of food that it thinks can transform the industry.
The main item on the menu, the Chicken Burger – a crispy cultured chicken fillet served on a brioche bun with toppings – looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken. “The burger has a juicy chicken flavor, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside,” says Ido Savir, CEO of the startup. “Feedback from multiple tasting panels was consistent that it was indistinguishable from conventionally manufactured chicken, and simply a great-tasting chicken burger.”
So not really a restaurant as such, more an exercise in handing out free samples. But still very interesting. Although “feedback”, in this context, sounds like someone’s been sick.
Human guilt about the way we treat animals has been building for quite some time. Which means that as soon as we can stop maltreating animals so that we can then eat them cheaply, we will. In the same sort of way that we largely did away with slavery as soon as some of us felt that we could.
I learned of this story from the endlessly informative Steve Stewart-Williams, my favourite tweeter by a considerable margin. He has supplied me with many a story for my Fridays here, when I like to reflect upon and giggle at and about animals and their complex relationships with each other and with humans, from mutually supportive to horribly cruel. And there could not be a more important animals/humans story than this one, because it will surely utterly transform how animals are treated by humans. (Next up, animals won’t be allowed to eat each other either. They too will only eat “cultured” meat. Think about it.)
Sadly for many animals, the choice they have is between being reared by humans, maybe cruelly or maybe not, and then being eaten by humans, or not being reared at all. Life as food, or not life at all.
On a cheerier note, watch the heads of veggies explode when they realise that the fastest food is now also the most veggie food.
And yes, if you’re thinking I must have prepared this earlier, as they say, you are quite right. I wrote this, apart from this, last Monday.
Only a small risk of getting rabies
Oh, those glorious days of the past when I could be bitten by dogs in beautiful places with glorious mountains, churches, food and wine, with only a small risk of getting rabies. I miss those days so much.
Sigh.
Cat participates in DarkHorse podcast
I listened earlier in the week to this DarkHorse Podcast with Douglas Murray and Bret Weinstein, in which Murray describes what is going on in Portland, Oregon. And it’s not good. Worth a listen, if you have the time. I’ve not heard Weinstein in podcast action before.
But, look who else joined in, as shown in the bottom right of this screen capture:
The cat made its first appearance in this interview at about 9:23.
What this illustrates is that cats who have been well treated by humans typically enjoy human company. When humans are doing things, cats often like to be part of it. Their anti-social reputation is rather undeserved, I think. Basically, they are not as insanely desirous of human company as most dogs are. By that standard nobody, cat or human, can possibly win any sociability contest. But by any reasonable standard, cats, provided, as I say, that they have been well treated by their human companions, are very ready to be companionable with humans.
How do Dark Horses feel about cats? Does this cat appear regularly on these podcasts? Does it boost traffic? I can’t be the only one who has commented on this feline participation.
The greatest show on earth (but not always nice)
So, what creatures does SteveStuWill have for us today?
Mother bird refuses to abandon her eggs. || The amazing diversity of caterpillars. || Sarcasm alert: Nature is so delightful. || Some baby owls sleep face down. || Like humans, wild chimpanzees focus on fewer yet more meaningful friendships as they grow older – that’s me. || Things aren’t always what they seem – butterfly faking it. || This bizarre-looking creature is a long-wattled umbrellabird. || A hognose snake faking its own death. || Who hurt the little sea toad? || A great-backed gull swallowing a rabbit whole. || Cat’s tongue under a microscope. || Scary octopus. || Baby gorilla. || Feline civil disobedience.
Or, to sum it up, Evolution Is the Greatest Show on Earth.
LATER: This. Eat your heart out Peter Bonetti. Not one of SS-W’s, but worthy of being added to them.
LATER STILL: Albino squirrel, demonstrating white supremacy by the looks of it.
A bird stands on its own reflection
Yes, I found this in the photos I did on an expedition along the New River, back in 2015:
You don’t see that, if you are merely looking at the actual thing. It takes a camera to see it, and then show it to you. And even then, it took me quite a while to see this particular thing.
I think it helps create this illusion that there is coloured stuff in the water, which makes the reflection look less like a reflection and more like a solid and separate thing.
London buses in times past
Incoming from one of the Robs:
Hello Brian,
Hello, one of the Robs.
Hope you are well.
Mustn’t grumble, as people say when inclined to.
YouTube’s mysterious algorithm just recommended this video to me and I thought it was your cup of tea.
It is.
Maybe the past was more colourful than we tend to imagine.
Rob
The past in this case being the 1920s. I think most of us get that life has always been in colour, albeit not necessarily all that colourful, long before photography learned to register this fact.
To be more grateful and more serious, what struck me was those curved staircases at the back of the buses. The Boris Bus clearly harks back to that shape. I had not realised this.
YouTube, having established that I wanted to watch this, then showed me some film from before WW1, back in the age of horse-drawn buses. Apologies, I lost the link to this, but basically we’re talking about a world dominated by these things. Was one of the driving force behind the motorisation of buses the fact that so many of those horses were sent away to fight in the above mentioned World War? Well, no, the timing is all wrong. Dragged out of retirement, more like. By the time that war had started motorised buses had already arrived in a big way.
And as soon as they did, lots of adverts.
Is this duck the same weight as Amey Coney Barrett?
This duck has been in the news recently:
The Babylon Bee did a piece just over a week ago about how Senator Hirono, also to be seen in the fake-photo above, brought a duck with her to the Congressional Hearing concerning whether Amey Coney Barrett should be allowed to become a Supreme Court judge. If the duck weighs the same as ACB, then she’s a witch!
Facebook disapproved of this mockery of their preferred political team, saying it incited violence, taking it down and taking various economic measures against the Bee, while telling the Bee to say nothing about having been thus admonished. But the Bee’s Seth Dillon took public exception. Twitter also got in on this attempted censorship.
The Babylon Bee is wise not to base its business model on never publicly disagreeing with Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Woke Social Media Platforms. By not depending on them and by never begging them for permission to do its business, but rather by mocking these social media all they like whenever these platforms try to screw with them, the Babylon Bee has turned the wokist workforce of these social media entities into a Streisand effect salesforce for the Bee and its various jokes and fancies.
Quack.