It is really eerie hearing the name of someone you respected in negative spotlight on the national news.

Joke

Why was the plant breeder so upset?

Because his plant breeding experiments were making him cross!

House-sitting

Wiener dogs and teenagers are both peculiar creatures in very different ways.

The sound of a cat barfing beside your bed is not a very nice way to wake up.

I've upload a whole bunch more pictures from my trip thanks to my travel mate Shauna. She definately took some good ones!

Orxy and Crake

Yesterday I spend some time reading through my blog archives. 2 years of blogging marks the longest I have ever journalled. Looking back, I am really glad to I take the time to post some random thoughts. My travel posts are definitely more interesting then my daily thought, but I do appreciate the latter.

In October of 2005, I wrote a slightly random post on purring people. I had forgotten this post. While travelling a month ago I read the book 'Oryx and Crake' by Margaret Atwood. In the book, a transgene-junkie (or gene jockey as we plant scientist tend to call them) named 'Crake' made some people possessed a feline vocal box that allowed them to purr. Purring wavelengths acted similar to ultrasound in healing wounds. I am not sure if she made this point up. Anyways, I was happy to realize yesterday that I am not the only person that considered purring people and that my mind had a single though similar to the great Atwood.

Question:

If you saw a quarter at the bottom of a clean semi-public toilet, would you pick it up?

I used the same toilet 3 times at work today, and the quarter never flushed down with the refuse.

I love Leaf Rapids!

Today marks the first day a Canadian municipality has implemented a ban on polyethylene bags. The town of Leaf Rapids Manitoba is following suit of many Asian countries, Ireland and the metropolis of San Francisco whereby selling or distributing plastic bags is illegal. After witnessing the effects of law in Bangladesh, I asked myself ‘if a developing country with a population of 500 million people can effectively function without plastic bags, why can’t Canada??’ I heard about the town of Leaf Rapids this morning on The Current and as all good reporters do, the host had a rebuttal from the plastics industry. It was a weak counter argument saying almost all plastic shopping bags are recycled. I would like to call B.S. as I have a garbage bag full of plastic shopping bags (from my grocery store trips where I forget my reusable bags) that I have been unsuccessful in finding somewhere to recycle. CBC News has a good online article about plastic bag bans which you can read here, but just in case you don’t follow the link, I wanted to insert an exert into my post that I found quite amusing:

“A cow found dead in the streets of New Delhi recently had some 35,000 plastic bags in its digestive system, according to Indian media reports. Cows are viewed as sacred animals by most Hindus.”

PS I don't find bovine death funny, but after seeing many, many cows eating out of garbage bins in India, the above statement didn't surprise me. The number or bags did surprise me. Poor cow!

PSS Even though Bangladesh has no plastic bag garbage, it is still a developing country therefore has a lot of litter, especially in the cities.