The Blip Report for Monday, November 11th 2024
As the crow flies
So, I read a story that, apparently, 43 monkeys have escaped from a research institute, and they haven’t been found yet.
My feathered friend chirped, that if they want to find their location, perhaps they should start by searching the democratic voter lists, to see if they had voted in the presidential election.
And I read a story about the US election - “Who gave Trump a decisive victory? It was 'Biden Economics’ ”, and I thought that would make a good t-shirt slogan - ‘It was the Biden-omics, stupid!’
And I read alot of scare stories that Trump’s election will be bad for us peeples in Canada, and that he might put tariffs on everything, including the kitchen sink, and that somehow this might cause inflation!?!
But then I thought about how those sanctions on Russia were supposed to make the Russians fall on their knees as their economy collapsed, but it seems that it never happened, but Russia instead began to invest in and develop their own industries to replace their former reliance on foreign imports and it’s actually helped their economy grow and diversify.
So, perhaps all these tariffs on us might turn out to be a real blessing, if it forces us to build our own manufacturing industries, instead of just being the hewers of water and the drawers of trees - or was it the other way around? I can’t remember. Now that I’m retired, I haven’t drawn or hewn in a while!
And speaking of Canada, usually when world leaders place a phone call to Canada, they only get an answering machine, and a voice says “There’s no one home, but us chickens! So leave a message!”
So then I began looking for stories about chickens, and I read this fascinating story – ‘What Chickens Know: On Bonding with Birds and the Language of Hens’, that said that chickens have been around for a while, and that:
“Chickens have been living with people for a very long time (by some reckoning, as long as eight thousand years—longer than donkeys and horses, longer than camels or ducks, and by some accounts, even longer than pigs and cattle).”
and that humans have been listening to chickens, and to the birds, for a while too, and that in fact:
“The word ‘augury’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘bird talk’, for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.”
While most of our Canadian main-stream-media does indeed read like its bird talk from the augury, we shouldn’t become flippant about not listening to the birds.
As my feathered friend keeps telling me - ‘birds always know which way the wind’s blowing!’