Charles Darwin found on fossil fish, theory of evolution confirmed

If religious faith is bolstered by an image of the Virgin Mary in a brain scan, the face of Jesus on a seat cushion, taco shell or a grilled cheese sandwich, then the face of Charles Darwin on a fossil fish should do the same thing for the theory of evolution.

Take a look at this:

See ol’  Chuck yet?  If not, here’s a closer look at what’s left of the head on the one at right, fully un-retouched and non-photoshopped.  I’ve shifted the piece a little clockwise so the great man sits more on the vertical.

Those beady, deep-set eyes, the curvy mouth line,  that full-flowing beard – it’s all there top right!

Now, since this is my last post for about a month, I’m going to try something new: a poll.

PS: This piece has been sitting on a shelf in our bedroom for about a dozen years.  We picked it up at a roadside stand overlooking the badlands at Drumheller, Alberta.  That’s where you’ll find the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, perhaps the best collection of dinosaur bones you’ll ever see in one spot.  The Charles Darwin church it isn’t, but close.

Running with the bulls of CNBC

Exactly 10 years ago today I boarded a plane at Hamburg airport on a one-day all-expenses-paid trip to London for a job interview with CNBC, the financial news lies and bullshit channel.

I didn’t get the job, but that’s a good thing. It’s good to know what you don’t want as much as what you do.

Here’s how that day one decade ago went.

05:05. Get up, drink coffee, kiss wife, kiss little red-haired-girl, walk to taxi stand, taxi to airport.

06:45: Flight to London Heathrow.  CNBC could have flown me to City Airport, but I guess they were counting their shekels.

07:20 Arrival Heathrow. The arrival hall / cattle holding pen is already crammed with a party of Japanese when I get to the back of the line, soon to be joined at the rear by a 747 load of chatty Indonesian tourists from Jakarta.

07:35 A previously unnoticed man in uniform stands up on a chair, points excitedly at one of the Indonesians and screams at the top of his lungs YOU THERE! YOU! Put that camera down or it will be confiscated! THERE IS NO FILMING ALLOWED IN THE ARRIVAL AREA!

07:35:10 Silence.

07:50 You know how when you just get past the customs doors you’re suddenly faced with a wad of people, some of whom are dorks holding signs? This is the one and only time a dork was holding a sign with my name on it.

08:25 It’s years before the congestion charge, and London traffic is going nowhere. The interview is at 10, I’ve been sitting in the back of this crushed-velvet barge for a half-hour but we’re barely out of the first roundabout heading from Heathrow to the City.

10:15 About an hour after I could have arrived had I schlepped with the plebes on the tube, I arrive at their offices near St. Paul’s and shake hands all around. They have no time for me, so they say I should just go wander about the newsroom a bit and chat with the people on the desk.

10:30 I discover they’re friendly enough, but my tongue has grown thick in the throat, so I blurt out some inane questions to those gracious enough to pry themselves away from their monitors to pay attention to the guy who’s obviously there for an interview. I silently pray to be plucked as soon as possible from awkward small-talk hell.

10:40 Prayers answered. The boss has arrives and we settle into a three-on-one in his office.

10:44 It becomes apparent that my hopes of working for a big-league news organisation in London based on a show reel of my work I’d sent them a few weeks before is not going to come off.

“We’re looking for someone to report live from the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Do you have any experience doing live reporting?”

The honest answer would have been, “Yes, but I really suck at it.”   Instead I tell them I’ve done lives mostly on radio, but that the switch to TV shouldn’t be much of a problem.

The interview is fast-paced and covers a variety of topics. They would have me being the boss of the Frankfurt bureau, I’d be interviewing people in German but reporting in English and for one brief moment it sounds so appealing, especially to someone who’s been out of a job for a couple of years.

But at the same time, I’m thinking: no. This isn’t for me. I would have been willing to uproot the family for London, but Bankfurt? We were already living in Hamburg. Frankfurt in comparison has about as much to offer as a Gulag sentence, and besides, I couldn’t stand the idea of living away from my family just for the sake of work should we opt for me working down there while they stayed in Hamburg.

12:30 I am so dying to take a piss my back teeth are floating, but we keep it going for at least another half-hour before breaking for lunch at a nearby eatery.

14:15: Alone in the elevator after lunch with a man who’s attended the interview  but not said much looks at me out of the corner of his eye and asks softly in kind of a sly tone, “Do you play the market much?”

Again, the honest answer would have been, “Yes, and I’m dying to pad my retirement account with all the insider trading shit that guys like you have a direct line to every day,” but this time I’m even more honest.

“No,” I tell him. ” I sold everything before leaving Hong Kong, and haven’t looked back. I sleep easier that way.”

A curious exchange.  Was that a test?  Was he trying to see whether I was financially interested in anything I might be reporting on, and therefore in a potential conflict of interest?  Who’s he kidding?   Or was he just asking innocently whether I had any personal experience in markets at all?  But wasn’t the latter already apparent on my resume and show reel?

14:30 Relieved it’s finally over, I shake a few hands and am out the door into a sticky London summer. Three hours to kill before heading to the airport, I head straight to bookstores to load up, grab a beer in SoHo, then the train to Heathrow and home.

21:00 Back in Hamburg. Did it even happen? Yes, it did.

And because it had to do with journalism, money and  farce, it reminded me of this:

Weekend massacre leaves thousands of wasps dead, cherry trees plundered

Thousands of wasps were too stupid to find the exit over the weekend, dying a horrible death by drowning in a trap filled with a mixture of warm water and honey. The wasps entered the trap carefully placed over the entrance to a nest they had built in the garden of Oma’s place out in farming country near Osnabrück, Germany.

“It was a wasp massacre,” said police spokesman Igott Heimweh, “but just looking at them, you just have to shake your head, cuz damn, they’re dumb.  I mean, they flew into the hole at the bottom, OK?  But then they didn’t turn around and fly out.  And once they hit that water, game over. They just flailed around a bit, then drowned.”

The bodies started to pile up almost immediately after the bell-shaped jar filled with sweet, alluring liquid was placed over the nest.  By next morning it was so full of dead or dying insects, it had to be emptied.

“‘Absolutely disgusting,’” one child with red hair was overheard to say as the dead insects were poured out.  “Iggit-iggit.”

The jar is a clever way to kill wasps without using the traditional Canadian methods of bombarding them with chemical insecticide sprays or smashing the nest open with a hockey stick to stomp on the enraged insects with lumberjack boots.

In a related weekend incident, a marauding band of cycling summertime fruitarians plundered Oma’s two nearby cherry trees.  The mostly immobile nonagenarian could merely sit back and watch as the intruders placed an extendable ladder to their upper reaches to gain access to the ripest fruit clustered on the heavily laden branches.

After stuffing as many of the dark, juicy orbs into their mouths as they could in a 48-hour period, the bandits filled their packs and set off on the train again north for an evening of cooking them up with a mixture of sugar and pectin.  Ten jars of the darkest, richest, most delicious cherry jam you will never, ever find on German store shelves are now safely stored in the basement of an undisclosed Hamburg location, to be consumed sometime over the next few months.

Power kiting in Hamburg fun til the cops show up

On a sunny and warm summer afternoon the other day I discovered that power kiting is LOTS of fun. With nothing more than a few square yards of lightweight fabric, ultra-thin yet strong cord and a bit of wind, you can have a blast.

A friend of mine has been taking a set of kites of different sizes to Hamburg’s Stadtpark for the last three years. When the wind is strong and steady enough, he’ll strap on a harness and fly a six-square-metre kite that gathers enough wind to pull him along the grass on what looks like a fat-wheeled skateboard.

I was hoping we’d get to see him ride it when I showed up for the first time to watch how it’s done, but the wind wasn’t blowing hard enough, and was never very steady.

But we had a great time anyway. It’s easy to learn and a lot of fun.

That is, it was fun until the cops showed up.

“I think they’re not here to offer us tips on how it’s done,” I said as they got out of their van and strolled toward us.

They were friendly enough about it, but firm.

“You can’t fly a steerable kite in the Stadtpark,” they told us. “You’re only allowed to fly kites that have only one string, not two.”

Hmmm… if we can steer them, isn’t that better than if we can’t?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that we were right under a runway approach to the Hamburg airport, and they’re afraid one of us might trip, fall and drop not one but both handles while the winds suddenly gust up at that precise moment to rocket the kite about 1000 metres skyward to be violently sucked into a passing jet’s engine, resulting in the agonizing deaths of hundreds of people as they’re consumed in a flaming ball of fire in the ensuing crash over a populated area?

I bet it does.

So we stood around for a while, threw the frisbee back and forth for a bit, packed up the kites, and headed off to grab a pizza and beer.

My friend in the meantime has done a bit of research. Apparently, if your kite weighs less than one kilo and has no metal parts, you can fly it in the Stadtpark.

So there, cops. See you next time it’s sunny and windy.