The Bells Have Made Me Deaf

A white bear with brown patches shot dead in northern Canada is the first grizzly-polar hybrid found in the wild, DNA tests have confirmed.
Canadian wildlife officials say it is the offspring of a male grizzly bear and a female polar bear.

There have long been stories of oddly coloured bears living in regions where the two territories overlap.

But until now, grizzly-polar hybrids, dubbed “grolar bears” or “pizzlies”, have been found only in zoos.

The hybrid bear was shot last month by an American big game hunter on Banks Island, Northwest Territories, Canada.
Source

Here’s the pic of the proud heroes posing with their prize dead, extremely rare animal. Big game hunters… brave men with guns who brand killing animals unnecessarily ‘a sport’. It makes me sick. What was the point?

All of you who find the black theme hard to read have ‘Ganching‘ to thank for giving me a prod to install some others. I hope there’s something there to suit all eyes.

It’s over there somewhere —->>
<---- unless it's over there!

But to make things really easy

• Batavia 1.5
  Black-LetterHead
  Blue-Bye-You
  Cub Reporter
  Gentle Calm
  Journalized Sand
  Journalized Winter
  Ocadia
  Pool
  WordPress Classic
  WordPress Default
  

I’m fairly disgusted that most of the report into this man’s demise is more to do with the wealth of his family than the horrible circumstances in which he died. He must have been in terrible mental turmoil to have done such a thing to himself.

Of course had he not been from a wealthy family, it may not even have been considered news worthy. It’s a sad reflection on what the public want to read.

Source

In the past couple of weeks I’ve developed a mysterious rash all over my face and neck. Unable to pin point the exact cause I blamed the obvious menace of sprayed on FR treatment on fabrics.

Lethal stuff, more toxic when alight than non FR fabrics and banned in most of the rest of the Universe besides the UK. I wonder how they can differ from EU regulations and insist that all upholstery fabric is treated with flame retardant toxicity. Of course this may not be the cause of my particular affliction but it makes a satisfactory scapegoat for now. It’s disgusting stuff. Leaves a sticky residue all over everything it comes in contact with.

As if it isn’t bad enough that my face is producing a leprous kind of snow for the past fortnight and my eyeballs are lost somewhere deep in the recesses of swollendom, I have friends who feel it’s a laughing matter and suggested I work with a pillowcase over my head… or a plastic bag tied at the neck. It’s good to have friends. They kindly sent me a picture in case I didn’t get the idea and tried to charge me £642 for a protective suit… I laughed till my face cracked… literally!

Alfred Hitchcock got it all wrong in his film The Birds. He should have used swallows. Little stealth bombers that float in on silent wings flutter around your head without so much as stirring the air and exit again at warp speed leaving you wondering did you imagine them or was it real. On such a beautiful spring day as this, windows wide (or at least the ones which will open) they fly in and out cleaning up the spiders or looking for new nesting opportunity but find no privacy here with me staring at them… mesmerised… contented by their presence. Welcome guests.

“So what does pignut look like?” he said. I think he’d seen Ray Mears dig some up on one of his tv programmes. Walking along the road the closest thing I could see to it was sweet cicely. So I said, “It looks a bit like this only more spindly and the leaf is more sparse”. Well… I’m not a botanist! It would have been easier to get the books out when we came home and show pignut in photographic form. I didn’t think anything more about it until long after my inquisitive guest had gone home and I discovered on checking Richard Mabey’s book, that it is now illegal to dig up pignut tubers without the consent of the landowner. You can always collect the seed and grow your own.

The tuber is edible and looks a bit like a walnut. Although I’ve seen it growing from time to time, I’ve never gone to the trouble of digging up the tuber to eat it. It’s supposed to be quite tasty… according to Richard Mabey, somewhere between hazelnuts and celery. I find that hard to imagine. And of course foraging for it would be all the more exciting now that it’s illegal. I can almost imagine the PSNI on pignut patrol… it’d be so much easier than chasing joy riders.
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Overcast threatening rain with buffeting winds and just as I got me lawnmower blade sharpened and raring to go. Lawn (if you could call it that) is quite pretty covered in daisies forget-me-nots and dandelions… all waiting to have their heads chopped off but they’ve won a reprieve for the day.

There was some sort of Kite festival on Monday at Crawfordsburn Country Park. I didn’t go but if it had been today an anchor would be advisable for anything bigger than a hankie. Some of those big parafoils can lift you off the ground if it’s too windy so be sure to tie yourself to a car or a tree or something heavy. Even more fun is trying to bring it down once it’s up there. Just let go … buy a new one.