Nobel Peace Prize Panel, For Your Consideration...

Hens

The Super Modern Kalesa

Two Thai Boys and a Puppy

Something to perk up your Sunday. Two Thai boys spotted a dog trapped in an aqueduct. Through ingenuity (including holding the dog by the nose), they were able to rescue the dog. Here's the five photos in sequence. I will be Ninong to the 2nd child of my elementary classmate, Jose Gammad.

Meanwhile in Vietnam

In my earlier blog, I wrote about the culling of cats in Beijing. Meanwhile, in Vietnam there was a hamster craze because this is The Year of the Rat. There were so many hamsters bought as pet that the Vietnam government decided to curb it. Anyone caught with a hamster would be fined for as much as $1,800. Meanwhile, a London retiree (Nash, take note) who allegedly confessed to a pair of cats that he had beaten his partner to death was cleared of murder on Friday. David Henton, 73, was accused of killing Joyce Sutton at her home near Neath, in south Wales, in January 2006. He was arrested after police bugged his car and home and believed they had heard him confessing to Sutton's pets, Twinkie and Pudsey.

Tarsier in Excelsis

HItchcock's "The Birds" Reality TV News Style: Ack! Ack! Water!

How sweet it is!

Kiwi

This is a kiwi:

This is also a kiwi:

Perplexed, or as Choy would have it, conundrumized? This is the interconnection:

Obi Wan N Chip N Dale

No Tip Allowed

We used to think that once you tip a turtle, they're as good as soup. Not so, says this Argentinian snake-necked turtle. The secret is due to the design of their shells. Of course it will not help you in your daily problems but (at least for me) I can sleep better thinking that no turtle or tortoise would be slowly dying out there looking at the stars and cursing mankind:

Nokia

Another useless thing I learned but will make you win bar bets as well. The Nokia tone was taken from Spanish composer Francisco T´rrega's Gran Vals. Yes, it was chopped to a few bars and now we have the Nokia default tone which annoys almost everyone. This I learned while reading about villagers in India were able to fool wayward leopards by attaching cheap Nokia phones with the Nokia tone to annoy them. No, they have ring tones of cow mooing or goats bleating and the leopards would get attracted and fall on a net trap and they would be brought to the jungles anew. Eventually the leopards would wisen up and attack those holders of phones with Nokia tones. I think that is the lesson.

Friends for Life. For Now.

These four are orphans staying in a zoo. Somehow they have become friends and inseparable. Of course, adulthood will mess up this friendship. But for now, savor the moment.

Alex

Hey, you must have heard of Alex, the 31-year-old parrot, who died suddenly. Alex is so intelligient he can identify colors and numbers (up to 6). Sometimes he advised othe rparrots in the lab to talk clearly. It was only a few days ago that he was able to say, "seven." Which made me fear the number seven more.
Now I have a blue lovebird whose lover, a yellow one, died. Now we all know that the Mr. Blue should have died immediately but it's been seven months and it is still alive and funny. I will call it, "Alex."
Now there's a funny story I read about Alex and the less intelligent parrots who squeal on their masters' sexual dalliances.

Pigeon Love

This monkey, barely 12 weeks old, was abandoned by his mother. He was revived but he lacked the spirit to live, until he met this white pigeon. They are now good friends and we can at least find hope and love this weekend.

Mga Kuto ni Gabito

I love this passage from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobio, Living to Tell The Tale

Until I was five, death had been for me a natural end that happened to other people. The delights of heaven and the torments of hell seemed only lessons to be memorized in Father Astete’s catechism class. They had nothing to do with me, until I learned in passing at a wake that lice were escaping from the hair of a dead man and wandering along the pillows. What disturbed me after that was not the fear of death but embarrassment that lice would escape my head too in the presence of all my relatives at my wake. But in primary school in Barranquilla, I did not realize I was crawling with lice until I had infected the entire family. Then my mother gave me another proof of her character. She disinfected her children one by one with insecticide for cockroaches, in thorough cleansings that she baptized with a name of noble lineage: the police. The problem was that the sooner we clean than we began to crawl again, because I became reinfected at school. Then my father decided to use drastic remedies and she forced me to have my head shaved. It was an act of heroism to appear at school on Monday wearing a cloth cap, but I survived the mockery of my classmates with honor and completed the final year with highest grades.