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Here’s Reason Number 2 why not to leave your dog in the car unattended. Kind of self-explanatory, that. Now I like dogs, but they have no class.
On a somewhat related note, here’s a link to a song by Pinkard & Bowden, presented as an introduction to this episode of The Overnight Open Thread.
Ceramic figurines of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, called “caganers,” are seen at the Santa Llucia Fair in Barcelona, Spain, in 2005. Statuettes of well-known people defecating are a strong Christmas tradition in Catalonia, dating back to the 18th century. The figures symbolize fertilization, hope and prosperity for the coming year.
Holiday traditions such as wrapping gifts and eating fruitcake may suck, but nothing is crappier than a bizarre Christmas custom practiced in Spain.
While a typical Nativity scene in most parts of the world usually includes figurines of baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary and their entourage of Wise Men and farm animals, folks in the Catalonia region of Spain add their own weird twist.
If you look really closely at Christmas Nativities in Catalan cities like Barcelona or Tarragona, chances are you’ll find a strange figurine of a man squatting and pooping somewhere in the manger. There’s even a little pile of poop right next to the figure to prove it.
That’s right. Someone is taking a crap right in the middle of baby Jesus’ birthday, but in Spain, it’s no big deal.
Ceramic figurines of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, called “caganers,” are seen at the Santa Llucia Fair in Barcelona, Spain, in 2005. Statuettes of well-known people defecating are a strong Christmas tradition in Catalonia, dating back to the 18th century. The figures symbolize fertilization, hope and prosperity for the coming year.
The pooping peasant figure is called “el caganer ” – which translates to “the defecator” – and has been a stinky staple in Catalan Christmas culture since the 18th century, according to Spaniard Ana Ramiro, press manager for the Tourist Office of Spain in Los Angeles.
Ramiro told AOL News that el caganer is a very popular and common holiday figure all over Catalonia and in parts of Italy, France and Portugal, and is often hidden somewhere obscure, like behind a tree, in public Nativities.
In fact, she said Catalan kids have been known to make a festive game out of spotting the pooping peasant this time of year because it is that likely that he’s in there somewhere.
It’s like playing “Where’s Waldo?” – only with poop.
But why in the name of you know who is there a man relieving himself in the manger?
Well, Ramiro cleared the air and revealed that the reasons are really quite simple.
“There are many interpretations of what el caganer stands for, but the most popular belief is that he’s fertilizing the earth to bring forth a good harvest. It’s to bring good luck and abundance in the new year,” she explained. “Some people also think that just like a birth is natural, going to the bathroom is too, so he fits right in.”
Either way – No. 1 or No. 2 – Ramiro said el caganer is here to stay, and is even tolerated by the Catholic Church.
“I remember visiting my grandmother’s church as a child and seeing el caganer squatting and pooping in the church Nativity. I’ve never heard of people being offended by it, since it’s such an old tradition,” she said.
El caganer has become so widely accepted, figurines are sold all over Catalonia. A version of President Barack Obama as el caganer is even available online.
Hello Kitty might take a minor issue with the caganer figure of herself. She’s a gata refinada y amable and would answer nature’s call only in an appropriate location, most likely a litter box. In the future, she might prefer that the litter box be included in the sculptural rendition.
Politicians, on the other hand, are only too happy to do Number Two all over everybody, and not only at Christmas.
Just for starters, here’s Barack Hussein:
And Hillary:
We’ve all heard about the Russian wildfires, and the baking summer heat in Asia. I’m a little surprised to find a reasonably good article on the cause of all of this in the New Scientist.
Raging wildfires in western Russia have reportedly doubled average daily death rates in Moscow. Diluvial rains over northern Pakistan are surging south – the UN reports that 6 million have been affected by the resulting floods.
It now seems that these two apparently disconnected events have a common cause. They are linked to the heatwave that killed more than 60 in Japan, and the end of the warm spell in western Europe. The unusual weather in the US and Canada last month also has a similar cause.
According to meteorologists monitoring the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere, unusual holding patterns in the jet stream are to blame. As a result, weather systems sat still. Temperatures rocketed and rainfall reached extremes.
This is all because of an unusual but not unheard of phenomenon where the jet stream just stalls. Without any air motion either on the ground or aloft, things stagnate.
Renowned for its influence on European and Asian weather, the jet stream flows between 7 and 12 kilometres above ground. In its basic form it is a current of fast-moving air that bobs north and south as it rushes around the globe from west to east. Its wave-like shape is caused by Rossby waves – powerful spinning wind currents that push the jet stream alternately north and south like a giant game of pinball.
In recent weeks, meteorologists have noticed a change in the jet stream’s normal pattern. Its waves normally shift east, dragging weather systems along with it. But in mid-July they ground to a halt, says Mike Blackburn of the University of Reading, UK. There was a similar pattern over the US in late June.
Notice they haven’t mentioned global warming yet, because it’s got nothing to do with this weather phenomenon. Well, they couldn’t resist.
So what is the root cause of all of this? Meteorologists are unsure. Climate change models predict that rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will drive up the number of extreme heat events. Whether this is because greenhouse gas concentrations are linked to blocking events or because of some other mechanism entirely is impossible to say. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado – who has done much of this modelling himself – points out that the resolution in climate models is too low to reproduce atmospheric patterns like blocking events. So they cannot say anything about whether or not their frequency will change.
In other words, they don’t know diddly squat. Shit just happens. Someday they may be able to model this with enough resolution to see this kind of micro-detail, but right now, they’re trying to do calligraphy with a paint roller.
I guess the attempt to tie it to AGW was mandatory, like how Soviet books all had to have a preface that explains how the book supports the revolution.
Anecdotally, the jet stream in North America hasn’t been doing its normal thing, either. Normally, it heads north in late June, and ushers in a period of glorious bone-dry weather in the PNW that lasts until mid-September. But every five years or so, we get a real crapper of a summer, and this is one of them. The jet stream needs viagra, and can’t get it up and keep it up. I’ve had to run the fan about twice, and have damn near had to start burning firewood in the stove a couple of mornings. So something unusual, but not terribly unusual is going on in North America with the jet stream as well.
In the past, we used to say “shit happens”. Now we say “billions will die!!!!!11”. They call that progress.
The Diary of Daedalus
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