A man
and his
Dog
A COUPLE of years ago, a German hunting enthusiast was shot by his own dog. A loaded rifle was lying in his car and the dog somehow activated the trigger. The hunter was wounded in the arm.
The Bavarian authorities revoked his firearm licence and hunting permit because of carelessness with the weapon. A Munich court has now turned down his appeal, according to Huffington Post.
What next for this as yet unnamed man who is said to be a "passionate hunter"?
Maybe he needs to just continue with the role inversion – get himself established as a human pointer and retriever while his dog trains up for better proficiency with the gun.
INVESTMENT analyst Dr James Greener notes in his latest grumpy newsletter the totally astonishing nature of events in South Africa these days.
'The complex but vital task of allocating chunks of radio spectrum to satisfy the non-stop growth in demand is one of the tasks handled by Independent Communications Authority of South Africa. Because this is a resource freely provided by physics but worth a great deal to the users, it is a task that needs to be done extremely fairly and transparently by technocrats who understand the product, and how it is used.
"But ICASA seems to have few people like that on their staff. What they did have is a newly fired chairman who has just been sentenced to 20 years for fraud, and so becomes among the few so far caught and sentenced for misuse of public money.
"The twist is that the crime was carried out in his previous job as acting CEO at the Land Bank. You can't make this up."
WHY does a zebra have stripes? Is it really a donkey in a football jersey? Scientists continue to give it their serious attention, As we discussed recently, scientists in Europe discovered that when mannequins were smeared with grease and placed in a field of horseflies, those that had also been painted with stripes failed to attract flies. Those without stripes fairly buzzed with them.
Now in England they've put horses on a farm in Somerset into striped coats and the results are exactly the same, according to Sky News.
And the Somerset scientists have picked up something interesting. The horseflies zero in on the stripy coats the same as they do on the plain ones, but they fail to make a landing.
They filmed the horseflies and found that they approached the equines – striped or unstriped - at similar rates but seemed to get confused by the "zebras" They failed to decelerate and flew past or bumped into the zebras and bounced off..
It seems stripes dazzle the horseflies, much as pilots can be dazzled by the sun.
Other theories are that zebras' stripes provide camouflage for protection against large predators or that they have a social function like individual recognition. No two zebras have identical stripes.
Yes, and they could also be looking for a football to kick around.
Tailpiece
AN ARCHAEOLOGY professor and a group of students are examining a 3 000-year-old mummy.
"He died of a heart attack," says the prof.
"How can you tell?" asks a student.
"He had a parchment in his hand. It was a betting slip. It said: '5 000 shekels on Goliath'."
Last word
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
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