Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s time for end-of-the-week squee. This Japanese video of a carrot-nomming hamster comes with the translated title, “Mike’s favorite food is carrot.” I believe it! Matthew sent me a link to this video a while back.
Speaking of anthropomorphizing animals, this Guardian article will show you how low the Internet has fallen.
. . . water glasses, not spectacles!
You can find anything on the internet, e.g., this:
We could all use one of these (be sure to start the video):
Gis a hug pic.twitter.com/7LLwv56PTz
— Darragh Doyle (@darraghdoyle) December 18, 2015
The week is effectively over for most Americans, I think: even my department is largely empty, and tomorrow will be even emptier. So, as an end-of-the-week treat, here’s a short story from Neatorama about an activist woman who had an affinity for marionettes and squirrels, resulting in this adorable photo:
The whole story, and be sure to check at least the first link:
You may have seen this photo of 85-year-old civic activist Doris Diether of West Village, New York City, feeding a squirrel with a marionette that looks like herself.
The story behind the old lady and her “mini me” marionette is actually an interesting one. It all started one day at the park, where puppeteer Ricky Syers was performing with his handmade marionette, according to Nina Golgowski of NY Daily News:
“One day she comes up to me and whispers, ‘I have something for you,'” he recalled.
Opening a scrap book she revealed old newspaper clippings and articles she had written on marionettes back in 1974. Articles more recently added to her collection were ones she had seen on Syers’ work, which she cut out and saved for him.
The gesture floored him.
Syers proceeded to build Diether her own marionette, made to look just like her “featuring Diether’s short, white hair and rosy cheeks … complete with handbag, cane and floral blouse and skirt.”
“She’s … known as the woman who feeds the squirrels,” Syers said to NY Daily News, “Now, her little marionette feeds the squirrels.”
h/t: Ant
End-of-the week feel-good felid from Cycle World: a motorcyclist saves a kitten about to get flattened in a busy street. Kitten, eventually adopted and named Skidmark, is ineffably cute. And the whole thing was captured on a GoPro video affixed to the female rider’s helmet. Cycle World’s text is indented.
In a video self-effacingly titled “I sound stupid, but I saved a kitten”—a video that’s now gone viral enough that even GoPro took notice, calling the rider in question a “hero” and offering her a care package in appreciation of the deed—Reddit user Your_Brain_On_Pizza (seriously, I like everything about this woman) suddenly stops swearing at traffic and starts steering her bike toward a tiny, fuzzy lump in the middle of an intersection. After hopping off to wave cars away and scoop the petrified kitten up, she runs the little bundle over to a bystander before going back for her bike.
It’s an efficiently executed (if somewhat scary to watch) rescue of tawny cuteness, and in the two days since the incident, rider and kitten have fallen in love. Your_Brain_On_Pizza adopted the cat, had him cleared of ringworms, named him Skidmark (“Skids” for short), and posted the update below. In the sage words of Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer, “motorcyclists are kind of awesome.”
An eleven-second update on Skidmark in his Forever Home. There’s hope for humanity after all!
Let’s end the posts today with a feel-good piece, just as the evening news always ends on something upbeat after dishing out a buffet of bad news. This story, from The Dodo, is about a man named Darius who rescued a limping, one-day-old fawn (surely doomed to die), rehabilitated it, and put it back with its mother. It was accepted.
The Dodo link shows the whole thing quickly in a series of gifs, or you can watch it on this 16-minute video. The end of the post gives some extra information:
“Since day one I was hoping to release baby deer back to the wild,” Darius said. Over the course of her two-week stay, the deer went unnamed — Darius wanted to avoid becoming too close to her, since he knew he’d have to let her go.
“I really hoped that she did not get attached to me too much,” he said, “because that would make [it] very hard for her to survive in the wild. She would become [an] easy target for hunters and predators.” The wild is full of very real dangers for a deer, but Darius knew that the wild was also where the fawn belonged.
“[I’ve] seen [the family] many times after release, also seen them recently in the fall,” he said. “The mother deer usually does not go too far from the place where she feels safe, so she stays around the area.”
He concluded in his email, “It is [a] very, very good feeling seeing them safe roaming around.”
This video, arriving from Ziya Tong’s Tw*tter feed via Matthew Cobb, is touching, for it shows how a baby rhino is simply too ponderous to gambol. Or is it even trying to? And if it is, is it imitating or playing with the lamb?