The Lost Realm

This has to be the strangest animal I'm seen in quite a while.

After avoiding SBS's initial broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest, Debs and I watched a delayed broadcast of BBC's coverage of Eurovision, including the sarcastic wit of Terry Wogan. Once again I was astounded at how brave some of these people were, putting themselves on an international stage and “singing” (I use that term loosely) such awful lyrics in the most ridiculous outfits.

Of course, I'm also quite thankful to them for a very entertaining afternoon. It was nice to listen to someone singing that wasn't Elmo. Come to think of it, given his high-pitched voice, his bright coloured fur and his simple, repetitive songs, he'd probably do quite well at Eurovision (should his current career not work out).

This time last week, I was almost dead.

Okay, perhaps that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but I certainly wasn't feeling all that alive (and it did get your attention). I had been up all night, my muscles were shaky and I was exhausted. This was all thanks to an unfortunately memorable encounter with food poisoning, most probably sourced from some Chicken Treat (first the chicken, then the treat!). This just happened to be the meal of choice while helping some friends move into their new house. In all, nine adults were inflicted with “The Chickeny Death”.

I won't fill the Interwebberynet with more stories involving bodily fuilds (it has plenty of those already), but I will say that I hope never to experience that again. Or to eat chicken.

We like to think of ourselves as clever and special, but we are now beginning to see that even mice may be a lot smarter than we've previously thought. Was Douglas Adams right, or is it just that mice exhibit behaviours that we would like to interpret as intelligent, such as the stigmergic cooperation within a colony of ants?

As for myself, I have trouble exhibiting intelligent behaviour most of the time (especially before my morning cup of coffee), so I'm hardly one to judge others.