Remember the video about Beauty the Eagle, who’d had her beak shot off?
Here she is with her beak prosthesis in place:
Jews around the world can rejoice now that rabbinical authorities in Israel have officially decreed that giraffes are kosher. It’s a little late now if you were looking for something special to serve for a traditional Shavout feast, but maybe you can get a nice giraffe brisket for the High Holidays this year.
Our cat Harry is off to a roaring start for his 2008 hunting season. He’s already bagged two moles and two chipmunks, and it’s still early yet. I don’t know if he’ll score another full-grown squirrel like last year, but he’s on a pace to deverminize the entire neighborhood by Independence Day. Meanwhile, the people at MAKE:blog had a couple of must-have cat-related DIY projects to talk about recently: first is this electronic controller that will turn your bathroom faucet into a kitty fountain (check out the video of this gadget in action), and second is this RFID-controlled cat flap that works with those subcutaneously-embeddedd pet RFID identity tags. It only opens for the pets it recognizes, meaning that rodents and other critters like raccoons and skunks can’t get into your house. Harry and Maynard are both big fans of drinking from the sink, so I think the faucet controller is a must for us, and at this time of year it would be awfully nice to let the boys come and go as they please.
On Charlotte’s birthday I briefly mentioned that she did a big report on cheetahs for school. It was really quite an elaborate project considering that these were first-graders. They had a choice of making a poster board or a diorama, and Charlotte chose the poster board. She read five or six books about cheetahs (reading-level-appropriate, of course) to do her research, downloaded pictures from the Internet (which Bridget printed at CVS on photo paper so they looked like real photos), watched some YouTube videos about cheetahs, and then did a presentation in front of her whole class about what she learned. When I was in first grade, I painted a rock. Shows you how times have changed.
Anyway, my reason for bringing this up is to link to this blog post at tingilinde about how the limits of human running speed may have been reached due to the way our muscles work. Steve Crandall found some relevant studies about cheetah musculature vs. human musculature that explains why the cheetah can go from 0 to 60 in just a couple of seconds but a human can’t. I think this would have been a bit too technical for Charlotte’s report, but it’s interesting none the less.
And lastly, the Bangor Daily News reports that PETA has petitioned the commissioners of Somerset County, Maine to turn the old Skowhegan Jail into an “Empathy Center” for lobsters. The prison is the “perfect setting”, says the petition, to demonstrate the cruelty shown to lobsters who are kept in overcrowded restaurant tanks and then boiled alive.
PETA envisions an interactive environment where visitors are caught in inescapable traps, have their hands immobilized with huge rubber bands, then thrown into filthy, overcrowded holding tanks, and kept there for an hour. No word about boiling the tourists alive, though many a Mainer has wished for just exactly that every summer for decades. Drawn butter would be extra, of course.
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