Today is December 1.  There are only 24 days until Christmas.  Are the cookies done yet?  Have the Christmas peeps from last year gotten hard enough to eat?  Do you have all the groceries for Christmas dinner?  You’d better get going!  Today we recognize the birthdays of Francesco Stradivari, Alfred Cellier and Bette Midler.  In 1804, on this day, Emperor Napoleon married Josephine of Martinique, in 1917 Boys Town was founded by Father Edward Flanagan, west of Omaha, Nebraska and in 1959 the first color photograph of Earth was received from outer space.  It is Restoration Day in Cape Verde, Independence Day in Iceland and Matilda Newport Day in Liberia.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving with their families.  I hope the food was good, plentiful and that there were lots of leftovers.  For those of you looking for something different, our friend Pat’s daughter, Kate, found a great idea.  Cook leftover stuffing in a waffle iron and then use the waffles as a base for the rest of the leftovers.  I tried it with leftovers on Friday and it was great.  Thanks for the idea Kate!

Recently, the lovely Elaine and I were driving home from our kids’ house and the scent of a skunk wafted into the car.  This made me start to wonder about animals like the skunk.  What exactly is the purpose of the skunk?  The only thing I can see that it does is stink up the house late in the evening after some other animal has bothered it or it has been run over by a car.  What could the skunk possibly have been used for?  I doubt that it was caught and eaten, unless you were extremely desperate and had no family or neighbors left to consume.  In all the paintings and pictures I have seen from history, I have never noticed anyone wearing clothing made from skunk or men wearing skunk-skin hats.  You start to wonder if maybe this was a mistake that never got corrected.

Consider some of the other animals that exist.  For example, the zebra.  Is it just a horse that was crossed with a skunk?  Did it develop stripes so that it would show up better against the brown and green background of Africa?  You wonder why the zebra, the mule, the donkey and the horse all came to be.  Why not just the horse or just the mule?  Which one was first?

Another animal that I always wondered about is the giraffe.  Why does that animal have such a long neck?  Did it develop over time because the other animals could not see what was going on behind the bushes and hills?  “Hey was that something dangerous over there behind that mound of dirt?”  “I don’t know.  I couldn’t see it.  Too bad we don’t have something with a really long neck that could see what was going on over there.”

There are many other animals that I wonder about.  Camels for example.  I don’t really see the entire purpose behind them.  I suppose that they developed as a method of crossing the desert.  But why not just use horses.  Or were the camels first and then the horses came along because camels were less attractive?   Why are there one-hump and two-hump varieties?  Were the two-hump camels for longer trips and the one hump was an extra storage tank for water?  Or was the second hump developed so people could sit between them because riders kept falling off the one hump?  I heard once that the camel was actually a horse that was built by committee.

Another issue that puzzles me is the need for alligators and crocodiles.  They are both ugly and dangerous.  Did we really need both?  What is their purpose?  Were they developed just to eat the slow-witted people who tried to play with them?  The only time I have ever seen alligators doing something worthwhile is when I watched one of those Top 20 shows and saw some lame brain trying to do tricks with one and the alligator got the guy’s head in its mouth.  But why both?  I think that one ugly, 10 foot long reptile that can run up to 35 mph should be enough.

Here is another puzzle.  We have deer. We also have elk and moose.  Why?  What could possibly be the need for all three?  Deer were a source of food a long time ago and still are in some areas.  What is the purpose of the moose or the elk?  If they serve the same purpose, then why do we need more than just the deer?  If all you want is variety, try beef or pork.

Recently I heard someone referring to an act as someone’s swan song.  The meaning was that this was a final act by someone before they left where they were.  What does a swan have to do with this final act?  More importantly, what does their song sound like that makes us think of the end of someone’s activity?  Does a swan even have a “song” or is it just a honk, like a goose?  And why a swan?  Why not a penguin or a lark or an eagle.  Or, considering it is the end of something, why not a vulture’s song.  “Yes he did that.  It was his vulture song because he was leaving.” 

I have heard someone being told he was acting like a horse’s ass.  What does that mean?  We know what that part of a horse’s anatomy does.  Does that mean that is what the person was doing?  How does one act like a horse’s ass?  Does he go out into a field and drop a large dumpling (or on the street if he is pulling a carriage)?  Why a horse and not a dog or a platypus or a lemming?  Doesn’t the horse have enough problems being confused with a zebra without stripes? 

This week our fact tells us that 315 entries in Webster’s 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.   Not a very comfurting thaught when you consider that one of the uses for a dicshunary is to chek speling.

Have a great week and don’t forget to wish a Happy Independence Day to all your Icelandic friends.