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6 comments
I missed the Paralympic Opening last night, so I’m catching up today.
And the very first act is none other than Chilly Gonzales (the musical genius), one of my all time favourite musicians/entertainers. Awesome start 🙂
Did you watch it? Did you like it? What were your highlights?
In today’s news, I heard the whitetail deer population in my region is down by 20% since last year, thanks to effective hunting.
If the choice of words (“thanks to”) makes you wonder, it’s an imported species – roughly a hundred years ago a couple of dozen were imported from the United States. An American business tycoon had befriended a Finnish man, and they got along well enough for the American to literally ship deer to Finland.
Now, neither of the two were biologists, and they imagined the deer would simply end up hanging around the mansion of the Finn, as Finnish winters would keep them dependent on feeding. Fast forward about 90 years, and the population is now hovering at around 200 000.
There’s a weird balance going on: farmers are literally feeding these animals with crops that do not meet quality standards, and have permanent hunting structures pitched up so they can harvest any deer they want. At the same time they also complain about the crop damage these animals do.
My uncle is in Paris for the Paralympics.. he’s a coach of the Italian para badminton team.
Interesting to read his messages about the atmosphere there, the Opening Ceremony, the Olympic village etc.
He is Italian so he complained about the food of course 😉
I think I need to get a scraper and some mittens for my oven. The towel and spoon aren’t very good at the job.
Another good news regarding invasive species from me! Since a week or so, we have a lot of box tree moths in the house at night (I don’t know why, since we have no box trees). Good thing is, my cats absolutely love hunting them. So, they are doing a small contribution to fighting this invasive species 🤣 and can entertain themselves. Luckily they eat them, so I don’t have to clean up anything, either.
There was a big conference in Cape Town which ended last week. I chose not to go, because of… reasons. I don’t regret my choice as such, but a few colleagues who went there are now back with pics and oh wow, it’s really stunning. Would love to go there some day, too.
There have been stories in the news the last few days that several Danish women’s social media pics are being copied without permission and then abused by presenting them as Trump supporters in the US election campaign. It’s really creepy, and I’m so glad I barely have any pictures of myself out there – the thought of being used as a puppet for an agenda like that is really unsettling to me. Have similar stories hit your news?