LIFE is yummy

All is right in the world.
I have started watching a new nature series called LIFE which is hosted by my idol, Sir David Attenborough...
who if I am not mistaken, believes that he is invisible to other animals.

Unfortunately, because I live next to the United States, I am forced to view the americanized version.

The original Beeb version was tailor-made for the zany over-the-top animal-lovers in the United Kingdom. 

As many of you are aware, the Brits annihilated 99% of their own fauna millenia ago and to this very day, the entire island nation remains safe for enjoying picnics in the woods.

Regrettably, the largest creature to be found in jolly old England is the Badger.

Even as I write this fascinating-informative post, back in jolly old England, hordes of inbred, gin & tonic fueled members of the upper class are wreaking havoc on the remaining 17 Badgers!

These shameless scoundrels are making short work of those nasty-little-buggers ever since Fox Hunting on horseback with golf clubs was banned in 2008.  

Trapped on a desolate animal-free landscape is precisely why the Brits now go absolutely gaga whilst catching a glimpse of a f*cking bird?

"I say Penelope, I do believe I've caught a glimpse of a Great Tit "
"Oh Charles, r e a l l y, must you be so crass?" 

However, on this side of the pond, Merkins are more "into" killin' and eatin' critters.

So, thanks to extensive market research, the producers made some alterations and have wisely chosen to tweak the show and present the new program as; 

LIFE "tastes like chicken"

After seeing the episode on FISH,

I'm not sure if there is going to be a sequel?

TOMORROW PEOPLE

Since I will be repeating my expedition to the memorial services at the Legislature I thought that I might as well re-post;

I have three World War One connections.

First and foremost is my Paternal Grandfather, Joseph Coppens, who left Nederbraakel, Belgium, in 1929.
He told me that a big part of the reason was because of the occupation of his village by the Germans during WW1 and he never wanted to live through that again.

He was only 23 years old and the only member of his family to emigrate to Canada.

The second connection is that I had the medals of Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae who wrote In_Flanders_Fields .

I sold them in 1997 thinking that they would be better off in the care of a Collector.
The medals soon went to auction and sold for nearly $500,000. The new owner donated them to a Museum, McCrae_House , where they belong.

The incident became a national story and you can read about my ordeal in my archive June 8, 2006.

Willy Coppens, who was the Flying Ace of Belgium.

My third connection to WW1, is my Grandfather's distant cousin, or so he told me when I was a lad,

Archive Aug 19, 2006.

So this Rememberance Day my good-lady-wife, youngest son and I went to the Legislative Grounds to pay our respects.

The canon fire was so terrifyingly LOUD

that I thought that all of the windows in the surrounding office buildings were going to shatter.

We decided to tour inside the Legislative Building after the ceremony.

Afterall it is a magnificent edifice.

Our Provincial mascot is the Bison which were "once the most numerous single species of large wild mammal on Earth" which were so mercilessly slaughtered in North America from 1820 to 1880 that their numbers were reduced from an estimated 30 million to 1,000...a fitting metaphor for the plunder of the New World eh?

We took a photo of this incredible "mural depicting Canadian army life in France during the First World War painted by Frank Brangwyn of London, England, one of Europe's finest muralists. The mural portrays the carnage and tragic sacrifice of war but bright flowers in the foreground herald the coming of peace."

I started to imagine what it would be like to work there...

...hmm

I could be a model of society..

no really..literally..

like a wax figure of the average citizen?

No. I must aim higher!

I couldn't be Minister of Healthy Living..

as a germaphobe I nearly barfed just thinking about all of the germs on that doorknob.

Water Conservation only reminded me about how badly I needed to find the biffy.

We passed by Family Services so I teased my son about trading him in if he didn't behave!

No  answer.

I pretended to be the Minister of Science & Technology as the other Tourists wandered by..



Wow!

Working on a Civic Holiday, what dedication.

I told a young couple passing by that I was working on providing free internet

heh heh heh.

I'm afraid that I prolly wouldn't do well in Government because of all the bloody rules that the guy in this office tries to enforce..

hey protocol this!

So as you can see, I enjoyed many of my freedoms today,

but I did not forget the terrible price that it cost others.

"If you don't know your past,
you don't know your future.

Tomorrow People,

today is here."

Ziggy Marley.

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE "WHETHER"

We're Climate Primates

We Earthlings love to talk about the weather. It is a unifying and universal  "safe" topic because it affects us equally and determines how we survive. 
Scientists are now uncovering evidence that the weather was the catalyst that propelled Humans to become bipedal problem-solving omnivores.

The biggest obstacle preventing us from working together is the hardwired impetus of our natural inclinations to dominate other groups and steal their resources.
One of the primary weapons in our arsenal has been religion.

In the grand scale of our arrival, religion is a very recent invention. Our petulant narsecissim demands some cosmological structure..a reason for "being" and an order of where we fit in. All of the geographically oriented gods were invented to justify that specific group's concept of it's superiority over the animal kingdom and other humans.

The pantheon of gods always reflected the geographic and climatic peculiarities of their territory. What surprises me, well sort of, is how unwilling most modern humans are to abandon the supserstitions of their ancestors? 

I understand the psychological Fear...the thought that we don't fit in, the Universe just IS, and that there may very well be nothing after DEATH, are all anathema to our being special.

Even though we now have so much convincing evidence of the How?What?When?Where? and Why? we humans became the dominant species, the majority refuse to forsake the relics of our struggle to eliminate or dominate and enslave others.


At the moment I'm following two episodic TV shows;
 BECOMING HUMAN &
 DARWIN'S Brave New World

Charles Darwin was devastated when his daughter Annie died from tuberculosis in 1851.

It was the last spike in the coffin of his dwindling Faith and enough to dissolve his fears of publishing his theory of Natural Selection; that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors.
Victorian England was NOT amused and even the Scientific Community was still in the vice-like grip of the Biblical Creationists.

Darwin "could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering such as the ichneumon wasp paralysing caterpillars as live food for its eggs." In the program Richard Dawkins opines that the death of his beloved Annie pushed him over the edge.

Fast-forward a Century to present day and we discover that the majority of Humans still believe that they are "magical/special Creations" and vastly superior to the other members of the animal kingdom.  

Others cautiously sit on the fence and imagine themselves as a kind of APEGEL..part mystical being with an eternal soul carried around in a mortal-physical package which is disturbingly similar to simians.

What really may have "created" us was the weather.

Recent discoveries have uncovered evidence of extreme climatic fluctuations in Africa where homo sapeins were forming. By then our ancestors had split from our nearest cousins 3 million years earlier and several prototypes of people had taken shape. The winner was the line that was the most adaptable. The extra protein acquired from scavenging bone marrow and meat from other carnivores probably sped up the process of growing bigger brains.

Africa was once a huge tropical rainforest but it has been drying up for 10 million years. Encroaching savannahs provided new opportunities and walking upright not only better visibility and protection from predators, but it freed up the hands. Walking is also far more efficient than knuckling.


Our brains began to expand to allow for more problem solving and our hands gave us a leg up on the other apes. Evidence of dramatic shifts between drought and deluge forced the early Humans to think up ways to acquire food and avoid predation.

This version certainly isn't as sexy or special as the garden of Eden myth. Since the time that humans invented their regionally-specific gods we have been at war trying to establish dominance over territorial ownership of goods and services.

Darwin was well aware that his discovery would spark a never-ending schism in society. I am shocked, well sort of, that so many people in the 21st Century still exist with the notion that there is a Creation-EVEsolution_controversy ?

This controversy is virtually none existant in the scientific community and most people who are literate and have access to this information are slowly coming around...but travel around the globe and you'll find that most Earthlings are still enslaved by a handful of self-appointed, fear-mongering, zealots who wield their authority based on religious precepts.

I'm old enough to know that achieving "World Peace" is impossible. Even without the intrusion of religion and all of it's divisive devices the natural instincts of our ancestors that we carry in our programming make it impossible to stop coveting our neighbour's natural resources and their goods and services.

That's why it's easier to just talk about the weather :)