To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
10
Jan
2018
I have no sentimental feelings about California quail. But in my experience, they make chickens look like candidates for Mensa.
We joke about chickens crossing the road. Around here, quail move in flocks. Sometimes so many they give an impression of the earth itself rippling in waves.
There is no such thing as a single quail. So if I see a solitary quail at the side of the road when I’m driving, I slow down. That quail will certainly try to cross the road in front of me. At the last possible second. And it will equally certainly be followed by the rest of the flock. They could fly, but they won’t. They’ll erupt from the grass and underbrush like nerf balls, and scuttle on Roadrunner legs across the blacktop.
Except that when they’re almost across, they will decide they didn’t want to go there after all; they will turn, en masse, and head back — sometimes actually underneath my car.
No, I do not have a high opinion of quail intelligence.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Quail, Mensa, intelligence
7
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” New York Yankee’s famed catcher Yogi Berra once said. Berra may be right about baseball; he was wrong about wars. Wars don’t end when someone wins. They end only when the last generation of victims dies.
That’s what makes the recent UNICEF report on child victims so disturbing. Child victims will live longer than adult victims.
UNICEF’s statistics are staggering.
The deaths are bad enough: 700 children killed by conflicts in Afghanistan; 135 children forced to act as suicide bombers in sub-Saharan West Africa. But – pardon me for even saying this – at least they’re now dead. They won’t carry their experiences with them for the rest of their lives.
Not so the survivors. In Ukraine, 220,000 still play amid landmines and unexploded ordnances. In Yemen, 5,000 children have been injured by war against terrorist factions. In Myanmar, almost half of the 650,000 Rohinga refugees forced from their homes into Bangladesh are children. In the (grossly misnamed) Democratic Republic of Congo, 850,000 children have been driven from their homes.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: rape, UNICEF, Somalia, Yemen, Congo, abuse, PTSD
3
very day, the local TV channel fills a few seconds in its parade of commercials with a speeded-up panorama of downtown Kelowna. Clouds skid by, showers form, daylight darkens into night. On the highway through town, headlights blend into a fluid stream that ebbs and flows like waves on a shore.
When we’re in that stream, we see only the immediate moment. Traffic either hurtles onward, or it goes nowhere.
That’s because we live in the “now”. We know there’s a past, through which we have come. We know there’s a future, which will probably arrive sooner than we want. But generally, we’re aware only of this moment in time.
The charm of historic sites -- like Barkerville or Vernon’s O’Keefe Ranch -- is that they let us see now, what was then.
Tags: anniversaries, Time, Isaac Watts, Thomas Hobbes, birthdays