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Wednesday Reads: Quickly, Part One

Posted: November 28, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: just because |38 Comments

Good morning, here is a quick drop of a few cartoons. Another longer thread will be coming later on today.

This is an open thread.

38 Comments on “Wednesday Reads: Quickly, Part One”

  1. bostonboomer says:
    November 28, 2018 at 11:56 am

    Why doesn’t Vice know that cows are female?

    • lililam says:
      November 28, 2018 at 12:05 pm

      For the same reason an old New Yorker article implied chickens actually had real mammary glands for breasts. City boys!

    • dakinikat says:
      November 28, 2018 at 12:05 pm

      He’d probably have to hold ‘Mommy’s hand” while around them if he thought about it too hard.

    • quixote says:
      November 28, 2018 at 12:53 pm

      I’m with you on this. The whole default male thing for animals drives me nuts. In this particular case though, the giant is a steer, neutered male, so “he” isn’t wrong, for once.

      And it’s not “too fat” for slaughter as it says somewhere else. It’s too *big* for the machines.

      I’m betting they’re wishing at this point they hadn’t neutered that calf. Can you imagine the genetics that could contribute to breeding programs? Maybe with some of the somatic cell + egg technology they have these days, they could still do it.

      • NW Luna says:
        November 28, 2018 at 1:34 pm

        Agree. It shows the ignorance — or lack of interest? — in biology (and probably science and learning in general). I rather wish we wouldn’t mess around with breeding animals, especially methane dispensers, for our convenience though I know humans have been doing that for thousands of years.

      • bostonboomer says:
        November 28, 2018 at 1:42 pm

        They called it a cow. Thanks for the info.

      • NW Luna says:
        November 28, 2018 at 10:21 pm

        LOL! The WaPo points out that a steer is not a cow, and that he’s only 4″ taller than usual for his breed.

        Meet Knickers, the giant cow that is neither a cow nor a giant

        “This story needs some perspective,” said Aniek Bouwman, an expert in animal breeding and genomics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

        For starters, she said, it’s important to note that Knickers [6’4″] is not a cow but a steer, and that males are typically quite a bit larger than females. (Note: Only females who have had at least one calf are referred to as “cows” in cattle circles.) But his breed is also important, Bouwman said.

        Male Holsteins tend to top out at just under 6 feet in height, while other breeds, like the wagyu cattle that surround Knickers in the now-famous photos of him, usually come in under 4.5 feet.

    • Minkoff Minx says:
      November 28, 2018 at 9:20 pm

      Or Disney….that movie with the cow that looked like a cow, with udders, but it was done with a male voiced actor…

  2. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 12:05 pm

  3. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 12:37 pm

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-defendant-shows-up-in-immigration-court-by-himself-hes-6/ar-BBQaHXi?ocid=sf

    A Defendant Shows up in Immigration Court by Himself. he’s 6.

    It was shortly before Thanksgiving in an immigration court in San Antonio, and the third defendant to come before Judge Anibal Martinez walked into the courtroom without an attorney, wearing a gray winter hat that was stitched with a pair of blue googly eyes and a floppy red yarn mohawk.

    When the bailiff asked his name, he piped up proudly: Wilder Hilario Maldonado Cabrera.

    “How old is Wilder?” the immigration judge asked.

    An attorney, who was there with other clients, came forward and volunteered to stand in for Wilder. She turned to the boy and in Spanish asked his age.

    “Seis años,” he said, 6, his legs dangling from a chair at the defendant’s table.

    Wilder, a smiley, pudgy Salvadoran boy, missing his two front teeth, was the youngest defendant on the juvenile docket that day. But that wasn’t all that made him special. He was one of the last children left in government custody who had been affected by the administration’s widely criticized zero-tolerance policy, and who were still awaiting reunification with parents detained in the United States.

    The policy, which was announced with great fanfare in April and was scuttled two months later in the face of bipartisan opposition, required immigration authorities to file criminal charges against anyone caught crossing the border illegally and separate them from the children they brought with them.

  4. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 1:01 pm

  5. NW Luna says:
    November 28, 2018 at 1:24 pm

    OT, but a poignant essay on what was destroyed and how we can, possibly, renew it. Quixote, you may be interested in this if you haven’t heard of the author.

    Tallgrass

    Conservation biologists have given us a term for what we already knew – that many people are simply oblivious to the natural world, especially plants. Charismatic megafauna like polar bears and pandas get lots of attention, funding and research – while less obvious green beings may slip away with scarcely a nod. They’ve called it plant blindness. We’re blind to so much more.

    The grasslands we know best are our lawns, where grasses are tortured to an ideal of shorn uniformity at the price of endless labor, energy and chemicals. This residential grassland bears no resemblance to wild grass. The grassland you may never see.

    I was once blind to prairie. When I was a young plant ecologist, a girl from the forest on the way to the American Midwest, I confess that I didn’t see what all the fuss was about prairies. I imagined a big field of unmown grass, one-dimensional and as dull as mid-western people. I was wrong on both counts. The moment I slid into the head-high flow, and inhaled that grass perfume, all my senses recalibrated. I could see, hear and feel what I never could have imagined: grass hung with tiny pink stamens and feathery stigmas clothed in dew, the thrum of a thousand bees, the brush of butterflies, the rising of flowers.

    • quixote says:
      November 28, 2018 at 1:52 pm

      Bio-blindness. Good god, yes. I put up a purple martin house once, and there would be tornados of them swirling above the house. A neighbor remarked on the number of “sparrows.”

      I just stood there, opening and shutting my mouth like a goldfish.

      • NW Luna says:
        November 28, 2018 at 7:19 pm

        Sparrows look like purple martins? Reminds me of the time a climbing partner and I were hiking through an alpine meadow filled with lupine (oh the wondrous smell of blooming lupine in the sun!) — I remarked on how pretty they were and he said “What are lupine?”

  6. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 3:21 pm

    I spread this around my friends back in Omaha and was hoping at least Vets there would show up …

    Hundreds brave the cold to honor Vietnam veteran who died with few known family members

    https://www.omaha.com/news/military/hundreds-show-up-to-support-a-vietnam-veteran-who-died/article_07958f10-636f-5a19-8237-552ba6585871.html

  7. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 3:24 pm

  8. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 6:47 pm

    • RonStill4Hills says:
      November 29, 2018 at 8:04 am

      Klaymsn is that Judicial Watch Nutjob Who hounded Bill Clinton in the 90s. No credibility.

    • RonStill4Hills says:
      November 29, 2018 at 8:04 am

      Klaymsn is that Judicial Watch Nutjob Who hounded Bill Clinton in the 90s. No credibility.

  9. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 7:41 pm

  10. dakinikat says:
    November 28, 2018 at 9:16 pm

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/28/ted-malloch-wikileaks-information-trump-campaign-mueller-investigation?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3qJqVvIMKJs0tt_ubKbcKzKZ7VFTSxz9EYQ2EW1wlXMNy8HLu9qtWnf_4

    Trump adviser sought WikiLeaks emails via Farage ally, Mueller document alleges
    Ted Malloch was allegedly passed request to get advanced copies of emails stolen from Trump’s opponents by Russian hackers

  11. Minkoff Minx says:
    November 28, 2018 at 9:21 pm

    So, I was going to do a part two, but I got a major migraine…good night.

  12. NW Luna says:
    November 28, 2018 at 10:01 pm

  13. NW Luna says:
    November 28, 2018 at 10:07 pm

    I think this makes 41 now!

  14. NW Luna says:
    November 28, 2018 at 10:15 pm

  15. NW Luna says:
    November 29, 2018 at 8:34 am

  16. NW Luna says:
    November 29, 2018 at 9:09 am

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