I read a story about the Baltimore bridge collapse, by Richard Cook, – ‘Baltimore’s Frances Scott Key Bridge Disaster Declared a Crime Scene’, that if it’s being called a ‘crime scene’, then, were criminals involved in the collapse, or not?
And also, it’s being reported that it’ll take months before the wreckage is cleared, and that it may take five to seven years before it’s rebuilt!!!
Now, I seem to recall that it only took Russia two to three years to build the Kerch bridge to Crimea, and that after the Ukrainians bombed the Kerch bridge (twice), it only took Russia two to three months to repair it, each time.
So … if I was put in charge of re-building the Baltimore bridge, first I’d take a bird’s-eye-view of the whole situation, and then I’d probably fly the Russians over, to fix it, if they’re not still being sanctioned. And I’d probably use Chinese cranes too, if they’re not still being banned in the USA.
I mean, you’d think that we’d want to do it quickly and correctly, especially for a bridge that’s named in honor of the man who wrote the national anthem, eh?
Francis Scott Key
And a little birdie keeps asking me, what have they got against cranes? Are they part of an Anti-Avian League or something?
And so then I read a story about birds – ‘The Magic of Bird Brains’, that tells us how smart birds really are.
“For most of the twentieth century, psychologists dismissed the interior lives of birds because avian brains are smaller and differently structured than those of mammals. But it turns out that bird brains are much denser with neurons and consume less energy, giving crows similar cognitive abilities to large-brained mammals such as great apes, elephants, and whales ...
His study showed that crows not only retain long-term memories but also learn from their peers and pass behaviors from one generation to the next.”
Ok! there’ll be no more jokes about ‘bird brains’!
And so next, I wanted to compare bird brains to human brains, and I read a story about Britain – ‘70% of the land in Britain is still owned by 1% of the population, largely descended from William the Conqueror’s army’, that says that 160,000 families (less than 1% of the population), owns 66% of the country!!! But the real kicker is that most of these families are descended from the Normans, who took over Britain under William the Conqueror in 1066!!!
King Arthur must be rolling over in his grave at the thought of this, since it would seem that humans haven’t evolved much over the last 1000 years or so, because, at least in Britain, it seems that the humans there still live in a modern form of Norman feudalism!!!.
Hmmm … maybe, we could learn something from the birds!
And then I read two other stories about human brains – ‘Ukraine War Day #771: Gamblers – Part I’, and part II, that there is a real problem in the Ukrainian army with their soldiers becoming addicted to online gambling sites, and that they gamble away their paychecks and go deep in debt over these games.
But I guess, that after you’ve been thrown into the front lines of battle on the eastern front, like you’re just in a game of Russian roulette, you probably wonder whether it’s all just a game to the people running your country?
And all this reminded me that birds don’t play games, they seem to take life very seriously. But then again, I wonder if the birds make jokes about our ‘human brains’?