Odd news items!

Today has been a day of changeable weather. It was reasonably fine when I set out on my run this morning and then within five minutes it was raining steadily with occasional hailstones mixed in. It didn't last long but really that set the pattern for most of the day. Having said that, it did clear up somewhat towards lunchtime and managed to stay mostly fine, although windy, while I was in Manchester for my final Italian conversation class before heading out to Galicia next week. 

Curiously enough, as Phil and I are soon heading to one of the parts of Spain where they insist on the use of the local language (or is it a dialect?), we have been looking at Italian dialects. Today we read about the Lega Nord, a party made up of various regional political parties on the north of Italy, who are proposing that schools in their area should teach in the local dialect. I suppose there could be a number of reasons for wanting to do this: regional identity, a chance to gain support for their party from the local people and so on. But the main reason turns out to be a way of keeping teachers from the south of Italy from getting jobs in their area. To teach there you have to be able to speak Ladino. Now, that sounds like a familiar story! 

Here are some other odd goings-on that I have heard about over the last couple of days. 

In Waco, in the United States, a restaurant has been the scene of a shoot-out between rival biker gangs and the police. Like something from a violent film or television series, hoards of leather clad men on motorbikes turned up and had a battle, but with real guns. People were killed. I read that the restaurant was one of a chain of Twin Peaks themed restaurants. That in itself is weird enough, as anyone who saw the original Twin Peaks series on television long ago will understand. Even more strangely, the senior management of the chain is supposed to have commented about this event: 

“Unfortunately the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our company and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants. We will not tolerate the actions of this relatively new franchisee.” 

Since when do restaurants need to be able to ensure that their customers are safe from shoot-outs? As if armed gangs are normal! This is not quite like making sure there is a handrail so you don't fall down the stairs on the way to the loo. Health and safety gone mad?

Then I read something about legislation Obama has been trying to bring in which will prevent police being equipped with grenade launchers. Really? Do police need such high powered weapons? Do they even THINK they need them? 

On the one hand, then, we have extreme violence going on. On the other there is a move to protect the delicate sensibilities of some people from just such violence. I read about a lecturer in literature at an American university. For nigh on twenty years she has been teaching courses at university level but in the last couple of years has been receiving complaints from students if she has not warned them in advance of scenes of violence coming up in the books they are studying. Suddenly coming across the description of a rape scene, for example, leaves them traumatised apparently, and they feel that they should know in advance that this is going to happen so that they can be prepared. She thought long and hard about showing the film "Thelma and Louise" because of the attempted rape scene but, as she said, removing the surprise/shock element would seriously detract from the film as a whole. Here's a link to the whole article.

Much of that lecturer's course was about equal rights and the treatment of women. I wonder how she would feel about this. It seems that women have been turned away from screenings at the Cannes Film Festival because they were not wearing high heels. Not that the women turned up in trainers and track suits. No, they had posh frocks on and were all dressed up but were wearing flat sandals instead of killer heels that nobody can walk in. But it has been decreed that formal dress for women means high heels. So no entry for them! How silly! 

And finally there are the pandas. For years we have thought they only liked bamboo shoots. And now scientists have discovered that panda bears are poorly adapted for digesting bamboo, despite the plant being almost the only thing they eat. The research shows that two million years after shifting to a herbivore lifestyle, the giant panda still has carnivore-like gut bacteria, which is better at breaking down protein. There they are, cute and appealing, trying desperately to get by on indigestible (for them) bamboo when they don't have the kind of stomachs cows have which process such stuff properly. They really need a good chunk of meat but they don't know it. They went off it long ago. So they try all day to get a good square meal, eating every hour or so, to no avail. No wonder they have no energy left for reproduction. 

Life is just full of really strange things!