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Everyone always tells me how nice it is ‘Down East’ and I have every intention of visiting there one year during their summer, which I understand is anywhere from six to ten days long.
The Victoria Day long weekend this year has meant shovels, icy roads and a record-breaking snowfall for many residents of central Newfoundland. In Gander, 58 centimetres of snow fell between Saturday morning and Sunday night, with peak snowfall on Saturday evening.
Seems that kid from Stratford got booed at the Billboard Music Awards last night. Some of the crowd at the 2013 Billboard Music Awards on Sunday night were not Beliebers! After Justin Bieber took the stage to accept the fan-voted Milestone Award, he was met with some boos from the crowd – but Justin took his critics head on. “I’m 19 years old. I think I’m doing a pretty good job,” he told the crowd.
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Why were a diplomatic outpost and the visiting U.S. ambassador left so poorly protected? Should the Pentagon have rushed jets or special forces to the rescue when the assault began? Did President Barack Obama‘s administration obscure the true nature of the terrorist attack to help him get re-elected? Congressional Republicans are poking for evidence of incompetence and cover-up in the ashes of the Sept. 11 anniversary attack. Obama dismisses their probes as a politically driven “sideshow.”
Attacking the Democrats over ‘inconsequential’ or even ‘imaginary’ issues has become a Republican hobby ever since the ‘Whitewater’ bullshit during the Clinton Administration!
————————————————A Typical’ Canadian summer is in the forecast according Environment Canada, although it’s still expected to be one of the top-10 warmest on record.
That means ‘hot’ for most of us, and about six to ten days of summer for Newfoundland!
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Folks, remember Dick Tracy’s wrist-radio? A couple of tidbits making the rounds Monday suggest that Apple’s so-called iWatch is ticking ahead.
The company has reportedly been examining 1.5-inch OLED screens built by Ritek subsidiary RiTdisplay, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of display panels, according to Taiwanese news source Economic Times.
Apple reportedly was initially eyeing a 1.8 inch display but felt that was too large and switched to a 1.5-inch size.————————————————–
I almost forgot to mention that we went to see the new ‘Star Trek’ movie on the weekend. I was reminded when they announced today that Iron man has topped one billion is sales and Trek didn’t do as well as expected.
What I found most amazing about the movie was the blind woman who came in with her seeing eye dog to ‘watch’ the show!
(We don’t make this stuff up, folks!)
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To the untrained eye, they look like hockey pucks. But from the passenger seat of a Partenavia twin-engine aircraft, Jay Hitchcock, with the rapid-fire delivery of an auctioneer, catalogues all the birds he sees on the ground and paddling in the water, some 45 metres below.
“Redhead, a drake, gadwall a pair, blue-wings a pair, Canada goose a pair, mallard a pair, Canada goose one, ruddy ducks a pair, redheads a pair, mallards two pairs,” he says, barely pausing to take a breath as he carries on for another 40 seconds listing dozens more ducks and geese.
This mammoth accounting – carried out by both the U.S. and Canadian governments in conjunction with state and provincial governments, First Nations, and with the help of special-interest groups – is designed to keep tabs on the continent’s waterfowl breeding populations and associated wetland habitat. Waterfowl counts take place each spring stretching from Alaska, across the Canadian Arctic, down through the Prairies all the way to the Maritimes and south to portions of the U.S. – in total covering about 5.4 million square kilometres, which is most of the main waterfowl nesting areas in North America.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HELP OUT, REPORT THE NUMBER, AND TYPE, OF WATER FOWL YOU SEE IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD BY ANSWERING A QUESTIONNAIRE YOU WILL FIND ON WWW.DUCKSANDGEESE.COM.
Thank You!
(Please remember that it has to be done now! If you’re in Newfoundland and you wait until the six to ten days of summer………, it’s too late!)
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And Finally:
That old question of which is smarter……………………., a dog or a cat, has finally been answered!
The genius of dogs was not immediately obvious, which is why cognitive scientists ignored them for most of the 20th century. After all, how smart can an animal be if it chases its own tail and drinks out of a toilet?
BUT, Dogs have evolved a specific kind of intelligence: the ability to flexibly read human gestures. (Human infants begin to do this when they are 9 months old — they start paying attention to what adults are trying to communicate when they point.)
This early communication skill is the building block for all forms of culture, including language, and that dogs exhibit a skill thought to be a building block of human culture is remarkable. Even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, can’t read our gestures as well as dogs can.
This extraordinary ability was probably an important catalyst for a relationship that has lasted thousands of years. Dogs are now the most successful large mammal on the planet — besides humans. And yet when you compare dogs to wolves in several problem-solving tasks, dogs look downright vapid. But if dogs see humans solve these same problems, dogs get it right away. It’s when dogs partner with humans that they become extraordinary.
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