The Lighter Side of the News

[Rusty Edge]

Thanks, Gwilly. Interesting article.

I'm still holding out in protest. I did hear from my last legislator this fall.

[gwillybj]

sorry, BUncle, no pictures

Kitten survives car crash, fends for self before being found
The Associated Press
Published: December 14, 2016, 10:52 am  Updated: December 15, 2016, 9:23 am

PENDLETON, Ore. (AP) — A gray housecat named Cleo is finally going home after surviving a car crash and fending for herself in unfamiliar territory for several days.

The 7-month-old kitten ran off after her family was involved in a car crash while moving from Utah to Washington on Nov. 28, reported The East Oregonian . Amanda Egan said she was driving with her three children, Cleo and Irene, the family’s Chihuahua-pug mix, when one of the van’s tire gave out.

“The van started to shake. The tire on the driver’s side blew apart,” said Egan. “I tried to move to the side, but we swerved and rolled over and landed on the top.”

Egan and her daughters were not hurt, aside from scratches and bruises. She learned later that the dog ran into traffic and was killed.

The family stayed in Pendleton, Oregon, for three days to regroup. They rented a trailer and searched unsuccessfully for the cat before setting off for their new home in Bellingham, Washington.

The girls — 5-year-old Elinor, 3-year-old Molly and 1-year-old Adeline — cried for several nights, Egan said. Molly slept every night with two stuffed animals she got from the EMTs the day of the crash, both of which she’d named Cleo.

She didn’t know it, but about a mile north of the crash site, the original Cleo had taken shelter in a hay barn. Pendleton resident Robin Harris said she saw a blur of motion and spotted the kitten scampering into the rafters. When she noticed the polka-dotted collar with bright pink tags, Harris climbed onto a stack of hay to get a closer look. The kitten snuggled into her arms.

“I don’t know how she survived for two weeks with the temperatures we’ve had,” Harris said, “and I saw two coyotes just recently.”

Two weeks after the car crash, Harris called the number on the tag.

“I have this gray cat,” she said. “Her name is Cleo.”

Egan said she was both incredulous and exhilarated when she got the call, and quickly shared the news with her daughters.

“They were so excited when I told them Cleo had shown up,” Egan said. “Their mouths were wide open.”

Harris serves on the board of the Pendleton Animal Welfare Shelter and is working on a way to get Cleo back to her family. If she can’t find someone headed to the Seattle area soon, a board member will likely add Cleo to a group of animals she’s taking to Portland and meet the Egans somewhere nearby.

___

Information from: East Oregonian, http://www.eastoregonian.com

[E_T]

Awwww... I am happy to have read this.

[gwillybj]

Budweiser Sees Clydesdale Baby Boom with Nine Foals and More on the Way
WCMH Staff
Published: March 12, 2017, 7:13 am

(video, length 1:51)

BOONVILLE, MO (WCMH) – Budweiser has welcomed nine new members of its Clydesdale family so far this year.

The youngest is just over a week old, and all nine are curious and playful.

“We’ve got nine of them so far, five little girls and four little boys.  And they’re doing really well. We’ve had a very good year so far. We’ve got six more babies coming,” said Warm Springs Ranch supervisor John Soto.

There’s nothing little about these babies. KTVI reports at birth, they can weigh 150 pounds and stand three to four feet tall.

“By the time she’s [a] year old, [she will weigh] in the neighborhood of eight [hundred] to one thousand.  And then by the time she’s full grown she’ll weigh anywhere in the neighborhood of 1,800 to 2,000 pounds,” said Soto.

Warm Springs Ranch is the company’s Clydesdale breeding facility and is home to more than 100 Clydesdales.

The tradition of the Budweiser Clydesdales started in 1933 when they made their first-ever appearance as a gift from August A. Busch, Jr. and Adolphus Busch to their father in celebration of the repeal of Prohibition.

http://news10.com/2017/03/12/budweiser-sees-clydesdale-baby-boom-with-nine-foals-and-more-on-the-way/

[gwillybj]

https://www.newscientist.com/subject/life/
REVIEW  3 May 2017

We may have the evolution of beauty completely wrong
Many male animals sport dazzling displays to attract a mate. But a new book says we may have misunderstood Darwin – and this is all about arbitrary aesthetics

It is hard work sporting exuberant plumage like this bird of paradise
Nick Garrett/naturepl.com

By Adrian Barnett

“THE sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests. Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.

As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin. In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

“Female love of beauty has got nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution”

Clearly Prum is, to put it mildly, bucking a trend, even if he is in good company. But his career has been diverse and full, so that reading this fascinating book, we learn about the patterning of dinosaur feathers, consider the evolutionary basis of the human female orgasm, the tyranny of academic patriarchy, and the corkscrewed enormity of a duck’s penis. Combining this with in-depth study of how science selects the ideas it approves of and fine writing about fieldwork results in a rich, absorbing text.

Not all of Prum’s analogies or counterexamples worked for me, and the attacks on the prevailing view often seemed strident. However, the book deserves to be read, just as the idea of pure beauty evolving unallied to selection and unalloyed by function deserves to be examined and considered. You may not end up agreeing with the reason for its existence, but the dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms.

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world – and us
Richard O. Prum
Doubleday
 
This article appeared in print under the headline “Useless beauty”

Adrian Barnett is a rainforest ecologist at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus

Magazine issue 3124, published 6 May 2017



https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431243-100-we-may-have-the-evolution-of-beauty-completely-wrong/