Pablo Escobar's Hippos

Things we have talked about today:

• The current state of the hippos in Colombia. In case you missed it, Pablo Escobar imported four hippos to his estate in Colombia in the 1970s and they escaped after he died. There are now about 200 of them and they love it in Colombia. There is currently an aggressive TNR program to sterilize them, but as of a few months ago they were neutering 1.5 hippos/month and they need to reach 40 hippos/year (3.3 hippos/month) in order to keep the population from expanding.
  
  
• Associating the correct books with the correct author for Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Charles Dickens.
  
  
• Whether the opening line of Pride and Prejudice is more famous than the first line of Tale of Two Cities. Sure, everyone knows "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." but it doesn't end there. Dickens was paid by the word and it shows.
  
  
• The Italian guy who went to somewhere in Africa as part of an NGO, and planted tomatoes which grew better than any tomato in Italy. He was convinced he'd singlehandedly solved hunger until the week before harvest, at which point the hippos came out of the river and ate all the tomato plants. The people who lived there basically shrugged and said, "Yeah, we could have told you that would happen if you'd bothered to talk to us."
  
  
• The hilarity of trying to remember Kafka's name and searching for "dung beetle story", only to have all the results be about the children's book I Eat Poop: a dung beetle story, which I have heard read aloud twice in the past two days.
  
  

Then things headed back to politics and no amount of hippos could help us so I fled.

Elegant in Black and White

This lovely tuxedo kitten is a foster from over two years ago. So cute!