I was very sad to hear the report that North America’s oldest elephant died recently. The elephant, named Taj, was an old circus elephant before spending the last 33 years at the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California. This is that elephant that learned how to paint and the paintings had been auctioned off for charity. I’m sure you’ve heard of that at least. The elephant was 71 years old. So this elephant was older than America’s entry into WWII. I think that is just amazing.
I just think elephants are cool. They have wonderful attitudes and seem genuinely compassionate with others in their herd. Wild elephants are nothing to toy with for sure, they’ll trample you for snoring too loud, but in their own environment they have a seemingly ethereal quality. They appear to mourn their dead too, which is more than I can say for some humans. And that brings me to my next item.
A 14 year old boy in South Carolina used a rifle given to him as a birthday present to shoot and kill his father and great-aunt and critically injury his grandmother. He calmly called police afterwards and gave himself up but has yet to offer any explanation to the murders. I’m more than willing to bet there might be some severe psychological issues at play here, perhaps the family had been tormenting him for quite a while about his poor aim with a rifle and he finally just couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve seen Lifetime movies with worse plotlines. But the chilling thing is that the child has not had any explanation at all for his actions and his calm and concise manner of surrender to authorities just makes my skin crawl. I also would have thought arming your children was a bad thing, and I guess in this case it was.
Speaking of children, a 10 year old Romanian Gypsy girl has given birth in Spain. The father is a 13 year old Romanian boy. Now this kind of headline often spurs all kinds of horrified reactions, but let’s try to put it in perspective, how hot was this 10 year old? I’m kidding of course, but these Romanian Gypsies see nothing wrong with this as it is part of their culture for arranged marriages to start very young. I mean, that’s pretty young. When to girls start puberty these days anyway? The Spanish government is also in a difficult spot as their laws do ban such a union of minors, but the 13 year old boy is in Romania and there’s no way to prosecute him and according to the article I read, the 10 year old and 13 year old have broken up. There’s a joke here I know it but I just won’t steep to that level.
And finally, as follow up to a previous blog item, Mount Etna did erupt on Wednesday and lava did flow down the eastern rim. I know how worried all of you were and couldn’t wait to find out more. It is good to note that the volcano is still not threatening people or attempting to swindle billionaires out of their fortunes with complicated Ponzi Schemes.
All in all, the world keeps spinning and stuff keeps happening on this the third Wednesday of 2011. So stay calm and don’t panic, we’ve yet to see what Thursday will bring.
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