Randy Rainbow is back...

There are about 4-5 more Randy Rainbow productions posted in the Video - humor section of this blog.

Moonroof after a hailstorm

Image cropped for size from the original at the DamnThatsInteresting subreddit, via Neatorama.

The cherry blossoms of Washington, D.C.

The annual blooming of the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. is currently underway.  The Washington Post featured this photo of "Stumpy," a hollow remnant that still manages to generate blossoms in the spring.  

I was born in Washington, D.C. while my father was stationed there as part of his Navy assignment, and a visit to the cherry blossoms was a standard part of my life, beginning before I was one year old...

... and again several years later at about three years of age -

Nine-year-old girl refuses to let her goat be slaughtered

Excerpts from a story in The Washington Post:

Jessica Long’s 9-year-old daughter brought the family’s goat, Cedar, to the Shasta District Fair and Event Center in Anderson, Calif., 150 miles north of Sacramento, last year to sell him for slaughter. As the livestock auction was starting, she told her mom she couldn’t bear to lose him. They took Cedar home.

Less than two weeks later, a detective with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office got a search warrant, drove hundreds of miles to seize the pet goat and returned him to Shasta County fair officials to be slaughtered...

In April 2022, Long bought her daughter, who was 9 at the time, a white-and-brown Boer goat. Her daughter, identified as E.L. in court documents, spent nearly three months feeding and caring for the goat, which she named Cedar. She bonded with him as if he were a puppy...

On June 24, Long and her daughter, who is a member of the 4-H program, went to the Shasta District Fair’s junior livestock auction, where she exhibited Cedar for potential buyers, according to the suit. But the girl balked the following day, the final day of the auction, causing her mother to try to end their participation in the event, the suit states. Fair representatives allegedly refused to let them, saying the rules prohibited their withdrawal...

Instead of handing Cedar over, Long took the goat and her daughter home. Before doing so, she told fair representatives she would pay for any financial hit caused by the decision to keep him, the suit states...

On June 27, Long sent a letter to the district fair “to get them to understand, as human beings, her position,” according to her suit. In it, she told fair officials that watching her daughter sobbing had been “heartbreaking,” that the girl had suffered through the deaths of three grandparents in the previous year and that “our family has had so much heartbreak and sadness that I couldn’t bear the thought of the following weeks of sadness after the slaughter” of Cedar...

Melanie Silva, CEO of the district fair, responded the next day, according to an email provided by Long’s attorneys. She wrote that, as a mother, she was “not unsympathetic regarding your daughter and her love for her animal,” but also asking her to understand that the fair is designed “to teach our youth responsibility and for the future generations of ranchers and farmers to learn the process and effort it takes to raise quality meat.”

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules that are set up for all participants,” Silva wrote in the June 28 email...

Later that day, Ashbee, joined by Fernandez and fellow detective Jacob Duncan, drove at least 500 miles round-trip over the course of about 10 hours “to seize a young girl’s beloved goat for slaughter,” the suit states. 

That definitely will teach her a lesson.  More details and nuances at the source link.

Does anyone really know what time it is...

The discussion thread at the Facepalm subreddit suggests that this might be Australia, or that the orientation of the numerals doesn't really matter since nobody looks at them anyway.

Backstory and more details here, courtesy of an unknown reader.

This reminds me of Drew Gilpin Faust's lament that college students nowadays literally cannot read cursive writing.

Mommy, what's a phallic mikoshi ?

This image (credit AFP/Getty Images) was one of the photos of the day in a gallery at The Guardian.  The caption indicates only that it is a portable shrine paraded through the streets during the Kanamara festival.  Wikipedia has some additional information.

Remembering "Mad Men"

I certainly remember "Mad Men."  I was enthralled by the story during the first several years of its run.  But then it seemed to morph from a depiction of the business world of the 1960s to more of a soap opera probing the personal lives of the characters.  Kottke found and posted this video analysis of a key episode in the third year; it will bring back memories to those familiar with the storyline, but will be of little interest to those who haven't seen the series.

Batesian mimicry

Posted on April 1 - not to fool you, but to demonstrate how Nature fools Nature.

The strategy of pretending to be something other than what you really are is of course common, and not just for humans. In my backyard in Connecticut, for instance, the caterpillar of the swallowtail butterfly Papilio troilus does a brilliant imitation of bird poop, to avoid being eaten by birds. Later in its development, it turns green and produces eyespots so it can pretend to be a snake.

In Malaysia, a spectacular adult moth, Macrocilix maia, one-ups the poop mimics by mimicking bird poop on its body, and two flies feeding on the poop on its wings... All this is just Batesian mimicry. We’re not even going to talk about Müllerian, Wasmannian or Bakerian mimicry.

More at The Grand Animal Costume Party.  Photo credit: Gerry Images/Flickr RF

Not to be confused with crypsis, BTW.

It's o.k. to be not-for-profit

There is a longstanding and ongoing effort by various members of congress to take the U.S. postal service private because it is "losing money."  Were that to happen, there are enormous profits that could be reaped by the new owners because of the near-monopolistic status of the mail (just as the Russian oligarchs became billionaires by privatizing Soviet industry).  

I'll defer ranting on this subject for now.  There is some salient commentary at the MurderedByWords subreddit where I found the embedded exchange, including opinions that healthcare, education, and public utilities might also be viewed as public services rather than profit centers.

Kindergarten play cancelled because...

 "In April 2014, the Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, sent a letter to the parents of its kindergartners, confirming rumors that the school would not be going ahead with its annual play.

Dear Kindergarten Parents and Guardians,

We hope this letter serves to help you better understand how the demands of the twenty-first century are changing schools.

The reason for eliminating the kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and careers with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers. Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never please everyone. But know that we are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.

These kids, the letter implied, could not spare two days from their regularly scheduled work..."

The essay continues at Harper's.

Movie props

Via Kottke.

Prescient

"... members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and post-modern professors will no longer be calling the shots...

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet."

That passage was written 25 years ago.  Discussed at Harper's.

The Gloucester Tree is a fire-lookout tree

The Gloucester Tree is a giant karri tree in the Gloucester National Park of Western Australia.

At 58 metres in height, it is the world's second tallest fire-lookout tree (second only to the nearby Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree), and visitors can climb up to a platform in its upper branches for views of the surrounding karri forest. It is owned by the Shire of Manjimup.

More information at the link.  I just learned yesterday that a friend of mine has climbed to the top of this tree.   Congratulations, Olie.

Here's a video (real-time, not compressed), thankfully without irrelevant music and with minimal narration:

There is no way I would ever climb this behemoth.  It just keeps going and going...  (and there could be drop bears up there)

Agatha Christie's writing being "cleaned up" for modern readers

Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.

Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK...

The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as “of black marble” and a judge’s “Indian temper”, and removed terms such as “Oriental” and the N-word. The word “natives” has also been replaced with the word “local”.

Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.

This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”

I don't believe I really like sanitized literature.  I quite understand why my favorite novel of hers had its title changed to And Then There Were None, but much of the rest of this is unnecessary and ridiculous.

Remixing explained

I haven't watched this through (it's a hour long), but from the samples I've seen, it looks interesting and well done.  Via Kottke.