The Institut Alpin Videmanette in Rougemont is, sadly, not effective for everyone.

She’s preparing her husband’s dinner. hoping to make him blind. Little does she know that soon, she shall drown.

This koala disapproves of your music, your movies, and your games because they do not match the values with which he was raised. He does not understand the technology you use or what you do with it. He misses having a job that he liked where he was more important that most everyone else. He wants the world to go back to the way he remembers it being, even though it was never that way and his memories have been carefully forged by a deliberately shoddy educational system and untrustworthy media.

This koala has been abandoned by the systems created to protect him. He has been abandoned by those who used to spend time with him. He has been abandoned by those who could try to understand his concerns and help him to make sense of the deluge of changes he faces. He feels worthless and confused … and he hates that feeling.

This koala has many friends who feel exactly the same way and who have nothing to do during the long, slow, and lonely Tuesdays.

This koala is going to vote for that rhetoric that is understandable to someone who feels lost in this new, scary, world and is afraid of further change. No amount of discussion will change his mind because, to him, there only one who seems to care. Lectures will not change his mind. Logic will not change his mind. Impassioned pleas will not change his mind.

Listening might.

It is common for young elephants to be asked to learn the “Little Teapot” dance before they are allowed to advance to more complex routines such as The Hokey Pokey, The Electric Slide, or Limon’s Moor’s Pavane.

I chose not to photograph the handle.

Not a weeble.

We are told that big, sharp, pointy teeth mean that the animal is a meat eater and that long, flat, teeth means they eat plants.

For contemporary animals, we can easily identify the exceptions to the rule but, barring fossilized stomach contents, it’s much harder to know about ancient extinct species.

So take a few minutes and visualize a tyrannosaurus rex as it hunts it’s native prey … celery.

I’ve been staring at this picture for weeks, trying to come up with something either funny or a story that needed some sort of hairy, hulking character in it. Instead, as I had it up at the convention, within less than a minute, one person asks how I got a photo of her cousin and another asked how I got a photo of her husband.

So I guess I’ll be going with those.

Insert eucalyptus here.

The Hippo of Change is hard to see from above, because change is often hard to see coming.
The Hippo of Change has eyes as dark as the depths of its soul, because change if frightening.
The Hippo of Change glows with an inner light, because large changes can light your way even while you feel you cannot breathe.

This bird is bright red, bright green, and has a bright purple crown. It is the only rain forest bird in Fiji to learn how to live in cities. It is the only species in its genus. It lays its eggs in rotting coconuts.

So, of course, it’s going to be named after a truck with a collar.

This was going to be a story. It was going to be a touching coming-of-age tale in which a young man felt trapped between his youth and the man he should be. He would not have yet learned to let things go, and would have been constantly reminded of mistakes made in his past. He would have been frustrated at not being appreciated in his job. He would have struck out at the dating scene many a time, only to see his childhood bullies being successful. He was going to be frustrated and angry. Then, at an appropriate crisis point in the story, he was going to meet his former childhood friends and, being teased by them, and burning with embarrassment, he would have angrily walked home, having lost his car in an accident earlier in the day.

Once home, you would have learned that he was also brilliant and had been building a time machine. There, somewhat drunk, he would have made a poor decision. He would have stepped into the machine and gone back to fix his mistakes. From there, one chapter at a time, he would have revisited each haunting memory. There, through the eyes of an outsider, he would have slowly discovered that his enemies were even more screwed up than he was. One would have recently lost her father and was taking out her pain on all of those around, not just him. Another would have been realizing he was gay and was afraid of not having his feeling returned, and was placing a false up between himself and our time traveler. Still another had contracted a deadly but invisible disease from a blood transfusion, and was trying to deal with the likelihood of an early death, which was driving her to work ever harder to achieve success at a very young age, though such efforts sped the progress of the disease.

Each trip, and each visit, would alter his memory. He would remember the event, of course, the pain would be blunted as the changed events were layered over the originals. As he reached the end of his journey, he would find himself in precisely the same position, for sometimes one’s circumstances are due to larger forces than one’s immediate past. However, he would no longer have any friends remaining as, to them, due to his own intervention, his life seemed blessed. He had grown up without hardship and without the sharpening of personality that such hardship provides. As a result, he hadn’t been interesting enough to attract new friends and, because he dodged their interactions throughout his own timeline, he had lost even the acquaintances of his past.

The story was going to end with him slowly realizing that what had once mattered no longer did and he was going to just stare at his time machine trying to decide whether to risk another trip and overlay his rapidly fading memories with new ones that could be better … but could also be significantly worse.

The story was going to be touching and sad and funny. It was going to be one that you were all going to live and share with all of your friends.

Alas, the story was never written because as he took his third trip through time, he watched his first and second lives from a distance, he discovered a plot hole.

Don’t let your daily dip cause ‘dry hair’.

POMADE

This is Allen’s swam monkey.

They are many like it … but this one is Allen’s.

He really should keep better track of things.

The pangolin is one of the very few animals that I deeply, yet have (almost) never seen. They are, basically, a walking security metaphor. They are predators, but not apex predators, so they must also engage in defense. They are covered in scales that protect them when they curl into a ball. The edges of the scales, though, are razor sharp and basically fight back against the attacker. They’re not the most impressive, but they are extremely well adapted to their environment.

Or, well, they were. Like security, their biggest enemy is people. There are eight species of pangolin, and they are endangered. They survived for over fifty million years. They’ve had to change their diet. They’ve had to evolve different types of scales. They’ve had to evolve to live in different climates and different habitats.

They did not, however, evolve to not be yummy.

This is the best view I’ve ever had of a living one. If I travel to Asia or Africa, I can probably get a better one. In but one human lifetime, even that will likely not be possible.

This is the southern hairy-nosed wombat. At some point in history, the following conversation must have occurred:

“Crikey! I just found a new critter!”
“Looks like a wombat to me.”
“Well sure, but look how hairy it is!”
“Eh, I’ve seen hairier.”
“Yeah, but check out that hairy nose!”
“I saw a wombat with a hairy nose just the other day.”
“Oh yeah!? Where!?”
“I dunno. Up north somewhere, I think.”
.
.
.
“Fine.”

When I was younger, the bonobo was a type of chimpanzee that was special because they liked sex (a lot). Today, though, they are apparently their own species. One thing that makes them special (besides all the sex that people can’t stop talking about), is their use of tools. I had read about bonobos using branches and twigs to get ants out of their nests, but this is the first time I had seen it.

The zoo has a fake ant mount and provides twigs. I am not sure if they are actually getting ants out of them or if they are dipping the twigs in honey (which seems more likely). Either way, it’s one thing to read about animals using tools. It’s quite another thing to actually see it.