Listening to an episode of background briefing, where they’re talking about how the Eastern quoll was wiped out in the 60s, and the Western quoll is endangered. So is it time to open up ‘captive breeding’ for quolls, and allow suburban dwellers to take in their own pet quoll.. instead of getting another cat?

Greg Miles reckons it’s an “anti-extinction” policy. A ranger from Kakadu, he has seen native animal populations ravaged by all kinds of ferals.

On one hand, the income could really help native animal breeders. On the other, animal rights advocates might say that marsupials shouldn’t have to live in captivity, with humans.

Good program, worth a listen.

Here’s the mp3 file on the abc site.

Sugar gliders sound like bad pets though. They bark, and their bark sounds like a mad car alarm. They will urinate on you as soon as they wake up. But in the US, people are hopping on the sugar glider bandwagon like kids lining up for sugar at a birthday party.

photo credit: pierre pouliquin

Dude you have no Qu’ran.

You’ve got to love the Autotune remixes.

i don’t know what’s going on in the USA at the moment. They’ve got a brilliant leader, and a whole bunch of intelligent creative compassionate people working for social change, but somehow there’s still idiots who want to burn Holy Books during a really ugly world war.

And then there’s the cool people who just run up and spoil the media event.
On top of that, someone is going to make an autotune remix out of anything these days.

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Thinking:

One of the comments on the youtube video page was this:
‘so, let me get this straight: hippies love to burn flags but can’t stand to see the Koran get burnt?’

Interesting point.

i think it’s a bit like Jewish jokes.
You can make all the anti-Jewish jokes you like, if you are in fact a Jewish person.

You can burn the US flag if you’re a US citizen.
(okay, it’s not legal, i mean under my rules which i’m making up right now)

You can criticise the heck out of your own relationship, tear yourself to shreds, burn the Bible if you’re raised a Christian, find the weak spots in your cooking strategies, etc.

But lay off other people’s business.

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How about this joyful piece from andrea dorfman in Halifax. The same woman who made that previous one.

Cycling is something i love too.

Thanks Andrea!

a beautiful film, via Angelina in the North of Italy, where her new yoga practice is making her seek out tranquility. She’s always had an eye for gorgeousness. This piece comes from people in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of my favourite places. A woman called Tanya Davis is the poet, and Andrea Dorfman the animator.

Here’s another by the same team, Tanya and Andrea. i like it.

(after the break)
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Here at the Grandview, we’ve just joined a very wonderful food co-op. Exciting times for foodlovers.

i deliberately used some bad English in an email.
(i mean grammatically non-standard English.)

My housemate was appalled.

So i took it all too far, with a genuine LoLcats poster from icanhazcheeseburger.

i’m fascinated by the way new language evolves in a new environment. LoLcats has become one of the latest new English dialects. If i put on my linguist hat for a minute, it’s easy to find a quote from David Crystal (one of the world’s most amazing academic linguist people), in an article at the BBC.

Word play
For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects – “LOLcat” – a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and “Leetspeak” in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

“There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games,” said Professor Crystal.

“They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games – and showing that they are very creative. I’m quite impressed with these movements.”

Okay that really belongs on my work blog, but hey, everyone loves the LoLcats, don’t they?