The strangest things happen when you Google ‘today’s top news stories’. Perhaps some priorities are still intact.
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Say Cheese
Goats shown happy and angry human faces prefer the happy ones, according to research published by a team of life scientists from Britain, Germany and Brazil. The study, led by Dr Alan McElligott of London’s Queen Mary University, is among the first to provide evidence that goats can read human expressions.
I can’t tell you what a shame it is that Alan’s name isn’t McElligoat, but it was near enough to make me smile. “But how do they know when a goat is happy?” I hear you ask (using my Kryptonite Super-hearing app) and the answer is that they examine things with their snouts. The goats that is, not the researchers. Dr McElligott gushed further:
“These findings have important implications for our understanding of livestock in general, and we hope our research can now go forward using species such as sheep, or indeed, pigs.”
Will it be possible one day to teach a pig to sing? Are sheep really as dumb as, for example, Antifa activists and Guy Verhofstadt? Are goats just silly-billies who merely act the goat, and is separating the sheep from the goats anti-mullticultural racism?
All this and more is adding to the sum of human knowledge. No kidding.
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Follow that plane
Every day is Something Day on Twitter. Today, it’s World Tourism Day which (for the 3.64 million 1950s born female over 60s defrauded out of their pensions by Westminster Overspending Decades) must be tremendous news, given that most of them can barely afford a bus to the end of the road.
But as always, there is hilarity in these daft Days for this, that and every other thing from caterpillar racing to domino ecology. One contributing site, for instance, asks “Do you really know what 24 hrs in Travel & Tourism look like?”. There’s no answer to that, beyond howTF can Time look like something and please get a life before time runs out.
The Liverpool tourist Authority promises “18 reasons why we think you’ll LOVE our city”. I love Liverpool too, but Number 13 worries me: “The Bluecoat might be like 300 years old, but there’s always something to challenge your mind inside. Whether it’s a brand new Biennial commission or a giant room filled with huge pieces of chalk”. Whatever floats your boat.
However, the whole shebang is topped by the World Tourism Organisation – a UN subsidiary my nose tells me is behind all this pollyfilla. It offers this visual as the lead into Why Tourism Matters:
Yes, you read it here first (well, second after the UNWTO): tourism preserves cultures, protects wild animals, brings peace and security, enhances regional development, employs 1 in 10 people on the planet (I don’t believe that), and contributes $1.6trillion to US exports (I don’t care).
Um, pray enlighten me UNWTO, how did the military tourism of Islam, the Nazis, the USSR, the US and the British Empire preserve cultures? Which bit of contemporary tourism protects our species by trampling all over their environments and massacring habitats to build faceless hotels? Exactly what Peace & Security has resulted from package tours to South Africa, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and Egypt?
A lot of Twitter is tosh. Twitter Tourism Tosh is a special type of tosh that has been carefully preserved and concentrated, and then aged in wooden casks to create the sort of TotalTosh that only woodentops would buy into.
But all that said, you have to admire the tenacity of the Irish:
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Many Obscure Celebrities of the Day
Cleveland.com led today with celebrity birthdays. “Birthday wishes go out to Avril Lavigne, (who?) Gwyneth Paltrow, Meat Loaf and all the other celebrities with birthdays today. Check out our slideshow below to see more famous people turning a year older on September 27th.”
These included Actor Wilford Brimley, Singer Randy Bachman, Meatloaf, Actress Anna Camp and former King of France, Louis XIII.
Note that – except for Paltrow and Meat Loaf – all of these “celebrities” needed a prefix just to jog your memory about whoTF they might be. Further clues are added via the use of Fun Facts as follows:
Interesting points here for me to ponder. For example, if a flea can stand on it’s own two feet from day one maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of asking our own off spring to do the same. Especially, if we are a 1960s born woman and therefore won’t get our state pension now until we are almost dead.
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Tourism certainly matters following four decades plus of gleeful deindustrialisation in the all-important search for ‘stockholder returns’ – the UK (like the USA) now has to build an economy based on tourism plus financial/real estate speculation, online gambling, coffee shops and tattoo parlours (still plenty acres of quivering flesh to be covered in ink – so it’s all good).
Of course there’s also opioid painkillers and cannabis.
We’re set fair – much better position than countries like Germany and China with their silly ‘manufacturing and export for long-term wealth creation’ – pfffff that’s for loosers [sic]! They need to break out the tattoo guns and get with the plan!
The plan being a bit like Morocco – only with more fat birds.
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I do not know If it is off subject, but the Beeb was asked why does the soap Eastenders reflect the racial make up of the Eastend.
As yet no reply, but I suppose if some one was to take up the case with the race relations people. I don’t think that they would want to give an answer either.
I suppose a new revised Eastenders based on the ethnic mix of east end of London with the Mosque, or Temple, or the African cultural centre etc. would frighten the S### out of middle England.
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I am a simple minded fellow;…’l.night follows day.’..that type of clue.
I note Derek is putting a new hat on…. Help of gorblindme ?..l also note great overtures are being flagged up for Manchester to get real close to Scouseland. The Great Northern Power House along with Leeds & Hull.
Interesting to know what he has been doing in his abcess from the media.
There are plenty of folk around would love to see this nation fucked up.
Work still to be done when Mayornot has gone
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We hear much howling from research scientists about what a Terrible Thing Brexit is. Now I can’t help but wonder if Dr McElligoat’s vital study was financed by a nice fat grant from the hitherto bottomless coffers of the ever beneficient EU.
What’s your guess?
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Them being Honey Badgers….
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Given their amazing ability to escape any enclosure they are confined in, I’m surprised no one has thought to put them in charge of Brexit. Don’t believe me? See ’em in action on You tube….
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Best consult Dr Dolittle instead.
When I was young, I was reliably informed that he was an authority on all such things.
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Hasn’t the UN taken upon itself to be responsible for tackling Global Warming?
If so, the UN needs to have a word with itself.
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John
This morning on TV : A bunch of senior edookaters, from West Sussex ( would you believe?). Expressing concerns that they are having a problem keeping up with the increasing demands …from those who are full entitlement?……….Well, I thought ………….
Were they experiening an input of new commers complete with tropical and cutural problems? (Monkey pox plague and faith springs to mind, amongst other problems)?.
I use Morcambe as a test to make some judgement as to what is causing all this concern.
My wifes eldest sister is the only relative we have left in working class Londistan!
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the best name for a tv show, by the beeb incidentally, tells us all we need to know – Pointless Celebrities …
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My 11 yr old lad likes going to kids petting farms where they have a selection of furry, slimy and feathery critters to entertain and educate the kids.
He likes Goats and finds it hilarious that they seem to relish and prefer eating the paper bags that the animal feed come in more than the feed itself.
One whiff and look at it and I dont blame them.
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Brill, JW. Absolutely brill.
It’s comforting to know that all those Ph.D-types are using their qualifications (and presumably what passes for intelligence these days) for the betterment of both mankind and the animal kingdom.
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Didn’t Dr McElligott appear in Old Blossom’s Book of Farcical Scientists by TS Gruff?
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WHO offers an advertisement for cancer, eh, growfth. (with bad DNA)
Whom do we book our trip with, the SecGen?
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It is rarely difficult to know when the vast majority of mammals have got the hump. A male chimpanzee will bristle his fur until he looks about twice his normal size, sway back and forth as he builds up a head of steam, then begin tearing up small trees by the roots and belabouring all and sundry with his new WMD. A tiger will go into slo-mo, ears flat against his skull, eyes pouring hatred by the bucket-load (I know, I’ve been on the receiving end) and growling hideously. But there are those species where it’s difficult to know what they’re thinking: bears, for example, may be as happy as Larry or as miserable as Sin and they look the same. No change of expression, no altering of body language – one minute they’re accepting tomatoes like a labrador eating cheesey titbits, the next they’re trying to drag you into the cage the better to explore your intestinal tract. The same with sheep and goats; to quote Pelham G (again), “he looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow” describes every member of those species to a T.
So I call boll0x on Dr. McElligoat, he has taken anthropomorphism to a new level … and been fooled by a species whose single skill is to escape from any enclosure designed to contain it.
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