An EU regulation designed to stop the spread of BSE has had the unintended effect of starving scavengers, many of which are protected species. Around Europe, vultures, eagles and bears are going hungry due to a lack of carrion. Now animal activists are demanding action.
This is going all over the place so we might as well join the band wagon. But it seems that making fun of code pink is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Police in the northern German village of Güster had their hands full on Monday when they were called out to catch an escaped sheep. “They gave chase in their vehicle but the pursuit didn’t prove easy because the animal at times ran at speeds of up to 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour,” police said in a statement.
They finally caught up with it when it briefly got its leg stuck in a fence. “An officer carefully lifted the uninjured animal from the fence and placed in the field. But the sheep evidently didn’t like its new home because it made a daring leap straight over the hood of the police car.”
If this did not come from a serious German News paper I would not believe it. I can see a goat doing something like this but a sheep? I wonder what breed it was.
This week’s essay of the Week is a good old fashioned adventure story. We found it courtesy of Dr. Bob.
And strangely, we all found it funny.
I would get me some of this Insurance if only it really worked…
Language deconstrutionists teach that language has only relative meaning. If you say the word “chair” to me, you may mean your comfortable stuffed armchair and I may picture my much less comfortable desk chair. Likewise, no matter how many words you use to make a point, I may understand those words differently and come up with a different point. Thus, the theory goes, it is impossible to ascertain what words mean, and their “meaninging” in the vulgar, functional sense of the word is determined by their opposition or difference (or differance, for those in the know). That is, if you say “chair,” I am not likely to think of a dog or of the planet Neptune.
What they say about language is correct, but not what they say about meaning. After all, no matter how we misunderstand each other, your chair, my chair, and the planet Neptune all exist. The lifeblood of civilization is communication that is functional as a transactions of meaning. None of our language can exhaustively define what we are speaking of; that would require words which create precisely that which they define (there’s the rub). Short of that, we are borrowing a portion of the possible meaning when we communicate, as the moon reflects light. But the light is still real, even if it is reflected; and so the meaning.
Now, that’s a rather tedious way to introduce this video which you can enjoy without considering any of that. But with that introduction, I pose the question: is the customer being naive in failing to grasp the relative meaning of the word “tall,” or is the “nameless” coffee shop being perverse in its attempt to confuse the meaning of the word “tall”?
I’m siding with the customer.
When we were kids, we imagined places like this with cities in the bottom. I didn’t know that such places really existed!
This week’s poem of the week is this parody of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales that serves as an attack on the current archbishop of Canterbury and modern upper middle class mores.
If all product reviews were written with such passion the world would a more entertaining place.