Tornado in Kansas

For most folks living in the Ottawa area for their entire lives (like me) the idea of a really big tornado is certainly scary, but comfortably vague.  I saw Twister, neat movie.  But there’s no way a movie could prepare you for something like this.  The town of Greensburg Kansas is gone.

That’s just incredible.  Maybe the most amazing part is that so far only 9 people are reported dead out of a town of 1500.  The tornado that hit it was a mile-wide and awfully angry.

Amazing, and sad.

Tiny Terrier

Here’s a sad story about a pretty gutsy dog in New Zealand.  Apparently a Jack Russell terrier was playing with some children when two pit bulls tried to attack them.  The terrier leapt to the kids defence, but wasn’t a match for the pit bulls, unfortunately.

It’s sad, but it pretty much sums up the best and worst of what people can do to animals.  We can make them our best ally and friend, loyal to the very end.  Or we can make them into criminals, enemies, shunned and despised by everyone.  I guess that goes for people, too.

Link

Smile and Wave, boys

You’ve got to hand it to this crocodile… He looks rather smug. You can almost see him with his buddies, high fives all around. The story of it all is a vet had tried to sedate this spectacular beast, and apparently was unsuccessful. He reached through the bars to remove the darts and the crocodile showed him what 440 pounds of disgruntled prehistoric dinosaur can do.

And, as you can see the vet will still be able to play patty cake with the grizzly bears, thanks to the wonder of modern science, and the fact that the croc got tired of his new digit-al playtoy.

Crocodile gets a hand

Holy Crap this man is a moron

If you don’t want to ruin the good mood of an excellent sunny warm Spring Friday, then move along and don’t click on this link.  I tend to stay away from posting about controversial stuff here, but the terrible shootings at Virginia Tech have flushed out the crazies and I can’t ignore this.

It’s part of a point-counterpoint piece on CNN about gun ownership in the US.   This is the pro-gun part, written by the dangerous moron Ted Nugent.  This piece does nothing to prove that his points are valid, but it does give me a little shiver thinking about what kind of world he wants to live in.  It seems that he is happiest imagining a hail of gunfire in almost every circumstance in life.  I particularly think the pictures they used are appropriate:  the left anti-gun writer is a former editor of the New York Times who looks like an intellectual (albeit a fairly eccentric one), while Ted is pictured in camo wearing a shit eating grin and shades.  You can just imagine him wiping the Budweiser suds from his lip with one hand with his smoking AK-47 balanced in his other.  It makes me feel somewhat better that he is the best the pro-gun lobby has and they have no moderate, educated voice.  The only part that makes me worry is maybe the pro-gun lobby picked him on purpose because he might be more appealing to their core members than a moderate intellectual.

Man, it’s really hard to not just shake you head and be darn glad that you live in Canada.  Does anybody really really need to carry a gun with them everywhere they go in the hopes of trading some hot lead with the next guy trying to cut you off on the Queensway?  I think that most Canadians (and hopefully most Americans) would answer No.