Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside

For some reason the topic of Green Acres popped up today at work.  I was surprised to find out how many of my coworkers really disliked the show.  As a child that show cracked me up.  As an adult, I can now see some humor I didn’t see as a child; such as Mr Douglas always wearing a three piece suit when farming and eveyone else had overalls.

Other thoughts:

  • The whole notion that a phone couldn’t be installed in the house because the phone company ran out of wire and that Mr. Douglas had to climb the telephone pole to make calls still cracks me up.
  • American male marries foreign lady who speaks with a thick accent and brings her to the states.  This reminded me of my folks, which is one reason why I think I liked this show.
  • I’ve ran into a lot of Mr. Haney’s in my day.
  • I think Sam Drucker was gay.
  • In real life, Eb became a preacher, but before becomming an actor he earned a BA in Chemistry and Biology and actually attended graduate school.  Link
  • Saying Hooterville makes me chuckle.

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Crow Makes Wire Hook to Get Food

To obtain out-of-reach food, the crow repeatedly took a piece of straight wire and bent it to create a hook.

New Caledonian crows living in the wild do create hooked probes from twigs, but the captive crow did something very different.

“To our knowledge, there are no confirmed reports of any animal making a hook out of unnatural material, such as wire, to solve a new problem,” said Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist who coauthored the report with Alex A. S. Weir and Jackie Chappell.

“The surprising thing about our crow is that, faced with a new problem, she worked out a new solution by herself,” said Kacelnik. “In the wild, New Caledonian crows make hooks by working on twigs, but they live in social groups and follow age-old techniques in response to problems that the species may have been exposed to for thousands of years.”

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Family searches feces of cash-eating dog

MENOMONIE, Wis. – Debbie Hulleman’s dog Pepper has been known to gnaw on lipstick, munch on shampoo bottles and chew on toothpaste. But Pepper got Hulleman into a real mess after gobbling nearly $750.

“This is probably the worst,” Hulleman said Thursday, recalling how she poked through vomit and dog piles left in the yard to recover the cash.

Pepper, an 8-year-old black Labrador-German shorthair, got into a purse belonging to her mother’s friend and chewed the cash from an envelope.

Hulleman’s mother recovered some of the money that Pepper spit out, thinking she had it all. But when Hulleman returned from the trip and went to clean up her dogs’ mess outside, she noticed a $50 bill hanging from one pile.

The chore of sorting through dog feces netted about $400, the 50-year-old dog lover said. Between that and other bills that Pepper had either vomited or simply chewed on, the family recovered $647.

“We have a $100 bill that can’t be recovered because you need three-fourths of a bill and it is only half of a bill,” Hulleman said.

The family swapped the soiled money for fresh currency at a bank.

“It wasn’t that bad. I soaked it and strained it and rinsed it. I just kept rinsing it and rinsing it. I had rubber gloves on of course,” Hulleman said.

“Everyone said, ‘I can’t believe you did that.’ Well, for $400, yeah, I would do that,” she said.

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