27 Feb 2006
Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat

No word on if this made him a polygamist ... in fact, no word if the goat was a nanny or a billy! Gay goat marriage? Who knows?

I wonder if they had a little ceremony of some sort. What would the groom have told his new bride? "There'll never be another ewe..."

A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal.

(link) [BBC]

00:00 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

Calving Time
Maeg's New Boy

First calf of 2006 - a little bull calf, born to Maeg (via Chip) this morning about 7am. It was most unusual for a Highland birth: she came up to the paddock and had him under the apple tree. Most of the time these girls go down by the creek in the most isolated spot they can find. Maybe it's experience (this is her second calf here) or maybe there's coyotes about (I did hear some late last night, off in the distance), but whatever. He's on the ground, cleaning up and getting fed. One down, three to go.

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Predators keep the world green, ecologists find

Yep - it's time for another Study in Stupidity. The leader of the "research team" is a professor of environmental science at Duke - and to reach this "startling" conclusion they studied a Venezuelan valley flooded 20 years ago for a hydroelectric project.

I could've saved them a lot of time and travel expenses if they'd have just asked. Hel, they could've asked any farmer, rancher, hunter or woodsman and gotten this answer. They could've visited beautiful Brown County State Park in southern Indiana and seen the effect a hunting ban had on the forest. Here's a hint, fellas: too many deer can deforest a parcel of land quicker than a horde of lumberjacks with a portable sawmill. Ditto for cows. Ditto for anything that eats plants. I've never seen a tree run away from a foraging goat, have you?

The only irony here is that university professors (and other "intellectuals") seem to have such a problem with the obvious.

Predators are, ironically, the key to keeping the world green, because they keep the numbers of plant-eating herbivores under control, reports a research team.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!

They don't get. They never got it. It's not "blogging for dollars" - and most of us aren't blogging for fame. We blog for the same reason we keep journals, write novels that never leave the desk drawer and mix our own CD's. We blog to express ourselves - the fact that our musings can now be easily published and widely disseminated at very low cost is ancillary. I'd keep this blog going if I never got another reader, and I daresay that 99.9% of the other bloggers out there feel the same way. Money and fame are the [potential] icing, not the cake.

Blogging differs from traditional, mainstream journalism in that it's intensely personal, in the sense that it's not driven by markets or the needs of others, but strictly by an internal need on the part of the blogger to, well, blog.

And that's not a bad thing.

'Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging,' Jason Fry writes on WSJ.com, responding to a recent wave of blog-doubting that includes a Gallup poll and a Chicago Tribune editorial entitled, 'Bloggy, we hardly knew ye.' Fry says blogging might not fly as a business, but 'the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money won't mean the end of blogs -- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits.'

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 4 comments | permanent link