October 16, 2006
"They often play games among themselves. The young ones will throw a plastic bag up in the air and to each other..."
"... and the older ones will bully them in order to get it." Just a quote from John Roberts, for your amusement.
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10 comments:
amused.
-most delightful to read. I saw on tv a couple of years back some elephants that had a band of sorts. They banged on some drums and clashed cymbals.
Is this the Chief Justice talking about his SCOTUS colleagues?
Elephant polo... wow...
The image that puts in my mind sure beats this image for weird lawnsports:
Link.
(Yes, it's perfectly work-safe. It's Nigella Lawson playing croquette while being carried around in a sedan chair (or litter, or whatever you call those contrivances)).
And...
"Like all good ideas, elephant polo came about as a result of a few too many drinks in a bar one evening."
So do many things! That reminds me of Robin Williams' bit on how golf was invented:
Inebriated Scotsman: "Here's my idea for a f****** sport. I knock a ball in a gopher hole... not with a straight stick, with a little f***** up stick."
In the amusing quote department, I'll see you and raise you one (a quote that made me think of you).
In the Sunday NYT review of Adam Gopnik's new book, the reviewer relates a passage in the book where Gopnik's son plays in a chess tournament against "a slow girl who was taking everything down in proper notation. " The reviewer notes that, of course, the boy lost, learning a concrete lesson: "'"Girls with notebooks are risky," he said, truer words never having been spoken.' A girl with a notebook -- that's experience stipped bare, and no amount of metaphor can beat it."
Sounds like Ann: a dangerous girl with an (electronic) notebook.
What AJ Lynch said.
I was going to comment along the same lines.
This is clearly a bait and switch post.
I'm filing a complaint with the Better Blogger's Bureau.
Elephants are the single best argument I've heard for animal conservation. They seem genuinely intelligent, and they bury their dead!
Dolphins are overrated.
"Dolphins are overrated."
No joke, but I sorta put the blame on humans for that one. Anyway... anyone seen the Discovery channel special on dolphin infanticide? Or the University of the Witwatersrand's neuroethologist's claim about the dolphin's brain structure "not (being) made for information processing"? (link) They're not as smart or, well, cuddly-friendly as we think they are.
Now, I'm not saying dolphins are evil or wicked creatures, so don't overextend my argument. I'm saying we as humans overly anthropomorphize them. They're wild creatures, admirable for their own qualities - they can survive in a dangerous ocean and hold their own against incredibly efficient killers, like sharks and orca, and I'm not fully buying the above scientist's claim (observed behavior does point at a certain level of intelligence) - but we tend to project too many of our own positive human qualities onto dolphins and ignore too many of the negative ones necessary for survival.
XWL:
said "this is clearly a bait and switch blog".
That's why I rarely even glance at the actual articles Ann links to.
Yep, Ann is like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke- she promises that young pretty thing will be upstairs waiting for you, but when you get up there the lights in the room don't work.
For large animals at play, nothing beats horseballs: Horseplay the Healthy Way. (This is not some grossout bestiality link!)
http://www.horseballs.com/user/video-horseplay-qt.html
Make sure you have your volume on, it's just not the same without the music.
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