Year: 2014

Hypocrisy of animal lovers over a dead giraffe

OK, so by now I think everyone and their mother have heard of a giraffe that has been killed in the zoo.  Then it was chopped into pieces, which were used for feeding other zoo animals and, partially, sent off to research centers.   Now Cyprus Mail reports that there were death threats to the zoo staff.

COPENHAGEN Zoo’s scientific director and other staff have received death threats after a healthy giraffe was killed to avoid inbreeding among the long-necked beasts there, the zoo said on Monday.

Oh, the hypocrisy of this!

People look on as a veterinarian prepares to dismember the giraffe Marius after it was killed in Copenhagen Zoo

Let me try to get this straight:

  • First of all, we are talking about the an animal that was living in the FREAKING ZOO!!!  Oh, is that OK with you?  Fine.
  • Parts of the giraffe were fed to OTHER ANIMALS.  And that’s quite a natural for many of them to survive.
  • It was a public autopsy.  Why?  Why? The kids are watching!!!  Yeah, right.  If you don’t want your kids to see – simply walk away.  Just remember, that not everybody is like you.  And sometimes, to learn more about animals – you need to kill them, open them up and study.  Not only animals, by the way – we do the same to birds, fish, and even people.
  • There are countless cases of animal cruelty, abuse, and accidents in the world.  On a larger scale.  Many times on industrial scale (are you a vegetarian already?).  And yet – this giraffe is special.  Right… Go adopt a stray dog or something.
  • And last, but not least, seriously?  Death threats to your own freaking species?  Over a justified (arguably, somewhat) kill of a single animal of totally other species?  I don’t get it.

I’m all for animal loving and preservation of species.  But this giraffe has nothing to do with it.  Let animals leave in their own kingdom, rather than be a toy and public spectacle.  Let them practice their natural selection.  Oh, and watch them once in a while to see how beautiful and elegant they are.  Just make sure you are at a distance and you have a loaded gun.  Or it will be about your natural selection.  Cause animals eat other animals (including humans).  And nature is quite a cruel lady.

The most elegant TODO list

Yesterday I came across a really elegant solution to the TODO list problem.  I tried it out and got immediately hooked!  If you are one of those people who practice variations of Zero Inbox approach – especially with your Desktop icons, I strongly recommend you try it out.

After using it for a few hours, I however patched it up a bit.  Here is mine.  It’s the same approach, just slightly more tilted towards my needs.  More specifically:

  • Use directories instead of empty files.  Empty files are handy for any notes you need to throw into the TODO item, but directories are even more useful, cause I can drop related files into there and then get rid of all of them in one go, once the task is done.
  • Run “todo” without any parameters to get the list of TODO items.