One for the birds…

A local story from the Rhino House today.

The ducks on a small French smallholding may carry on quacking, a French court ruled last week, rejecting a neighbour’s complaint that the birds’ racket was making their life a misery.

The court ruled that the noise from the flock of around 70 ducks and geese kept by retired farmer Mme. Dominique Douthe in Gascony, southwestern France, was “within acceptable limits.”

“The birds have won,” Mme. Douthe told reporters after the court decision. “I’m very happy because I didn’t want to slaughter my flock.”

Damned blow-ins, always playing their horrible music, and they never shut up, the noise is driving me crazy…

The complaint was brought by Mme. Douthe’s new neighbour who moved from the city around a year ago into a property about 50 meters away from the enclosure where Mme. Douthe keeps her flock.

The dispute is the latest in a series of court cases that have pitted the traditional way of life in rural France against modern, urban values which, country-dwellers say, are inappropriate in France’s more rural Departments.

In a court ruling two months ago, a rooster named Maurice was allowed to continue his dawn crowing, despite complaints from neighbours who had also moved from the city to escape from the noise and bustle (apparently nobody had told them that rural France is largely given over to farming – animal noises – or the chasse – gunshots, yelling and rather too much celebratory carousing).

Mme. Douthe’s neighbours, who filed the complaint about the “quacking”, has not been publicly identified.

The neighbour’s lawyer said the noise exceeded permissible levels, and prevented the plaintiff enjoying their garden or sleeping with their house windows open.

The neighbour had asked for immediate steps to reduce the noise, and for 3,500 euros in damages, according to local reports.

BTW: Only ducks quack, geese honk.

Dead reckoning

More than 25,000 people have participated in mass “living funeral” services at Hyowon Healing Centre since it opened in 2012, hoping to improve their lives by simulating their deaths (sounds like trying to improve your swimming by pretending to drown). “Once you become conscious of death, and experience it, you undertake a new approach to life,” said 75-year-old Cho Jae-hee, who participated in a recent living funeral as part of a “dying well” program offered by her senior welfare centre.

Dozens took part in the event, from teenagers to retirees, donning shrouds, taking funeral portraits, penning their last testaments, and lying in a closed coffin for around 10 minutes.

Ready for the rush…

University student Choi Jin-kyu said his time in the coffin helped him realize that too often, he viewed others as competitors. “When I was in the coffin, I wondered what use that is,” said the 28-year-old, adding that he plans to start his own business after graduation rather than attempting to enter a highly-competitive job market.

South Korea ranks 33 out of 40 countries surveyed in the OECD’s Better Life Index. Many younger South Koreans had high hopes for education and employment, which have been dashed by a cooling economy and rising joblessness.

“It is important to learn and prepare for death even at a young age,” said Professor Yu Eun-sil, a doctor at Asan Medical Centre’s pathology department, who has written a book about death (bet he doesn’t get invited to many parties).

With death taken care of, do you think they might consider a tax course?

Better dead than red

Or maybe that should be “Better dead AND red”?

IN Bosnia Zorica Rebernik has spent her life in red and plans to stay that way, even after she dies.

After four decades dressing in the color from head to toe, the 67-year-old has had tombstones made for herself and husband Zoran (whom she married wearing a self-designed red wedding dress) from red granite imported from India.

The retired schoolteacher lives in a red house, where she and Zoran eat from red plates, drink from red glasses and sleep in red bedding, even her hair is dyed red.

“When I turned 18 or 19 there came a sudden,

What a way to go…

strong urge to wear red,” Rebernik told a Reuters reporter. “There must not be a single dot of any other color on my home decorations or clothes.”

Wearing shades like scarlet and vermillion gives her “the feeling of strength and power”.

Rebernik’s obsession with the color has made her a local “celebrity” (some locals suggested other less complimentary descriptions) in her hometown of Breze, in northern Bosnia.

“Everybody knows me. As soon as people see me, they offer me different red things,” she said, adding that she would reject any gift that was not red, no matter how precious.

She even goes to funerals dressed in red, eschewing traditional black.

The only problem is that her husband does not notice when Zorica wears something new. “I can’t tell the difference. Everything is the same,” he said, thus instantly identifying with husbands everywhere.

Hard cheese…

A celebrity chef is suing the Michelin guide because he claims his restaurant lost its three-star status for using English cheddar cheese in a classic French dish.

Marc Veyrat’s La Maison des Bois, near Grenoble in the French Alps, was demoted to two stars in January without warning, just a year after it secured the industry’s highest award.

The guide, the standard bearer for the world’s best cuisine, has not yet explained the demotion, said Mr Veyrat’s lawyer.

However, the chef says an inspector accused him of using cheddar in a cheese souffle rather than French Reblochon, Beaufort and Tomme varieties.

Marc Veyrat celebrating winning a three-star rating in 2018

Mr Veyrat, 69, said it was a fromage faux pas from a man with an unsophisticated palate.

“I put saffron in it, and the gentleman who came thought it was cheddar because it was yellow. That’s what you call knowledge of a place? It’s just crazy,” he told France Inter radio.

“It’s worse than a wound. It’s profoundly offensive. It gave me a depression,” he added.

The flamboyant chef made his name by championing his so-called “botanical” cooking, using wild herbs gathered around his restaurants in his native Haute Savoie region.

Famous for wearing a wide-brimmed black Savoyard hat and smoke-tinted glasses, he has previously won three stars from the prestigious red book for two other restaurants.

The chef learned of the downgrade “without any notification or advance warning”, his lawyer, Emmanuel Ravanas, said in a statement.

Mr Ravanas said he hoped a court would force Michelin to “clarify the exact reasons” for the restaurant losing its maximum three-star rating at a hearing in November.

Michelin said in a statement it “understands the disappointment for Mr Veyrat, whose talent no one contests, even if we regret his unreasonable persistence with his accusations”.

It added: “Our first duty is to tell consumers why we have changed our recommendation. We will carefully study his demands and respond calmly.”

PS. The picture is just some of the 2,500 French cheeses that are definitely not cheddar.

“The only way is up…”

It may not match the feeling of winning a world championship but Polish climber Marcin Dzienski’s feat of racing and defeating an elevator up 23 meters will certainly have given him a boost in life.

The 2016 world champion who is regarded by many as one of the top speed climbers, took 12.12 seconds to achieve the feat as part of a Red Bull event in Warsaw.

Few not amongst the cognoscenti would have given Dzienski a fighting chance in the man-versus-machine battle up six floors, but the 26-year-old defied all expectations to climb up a specially designed wall and pip the elevator in a closely fought contest.

Dzienski, who says he honed his skills as a youngster scaling apple trees in his grandfather’s orchard, is raising awareness about sport climbing which will make its Olympic debut next year.

The combined event in Tokyo will see athletes’ ranking across the three disciplines of speed, bouldering and lead climbing merged to give a cumulative score.

Who says the Olympics haven’t kept pace with the modern world, only a matter of time before this becomes part of the modern pentathlon?

Making America Groove Again

A Florida man who was found to have ecstasy pills shaped like U.S. President Donald Trump’s head has been charged with unlawful possession of controlled substances, according Pinellas County court documents.

Brendan Dolan-King, 23, was charged at the end of last week in Clearwater, Florida after police searched his apartment in June and discovered fentanyl and five orange pills shaped like Trump’s head, which were later found to contain the hallucinogen MDMA, or ecstasy.

The confiscation resembles one in Indiana in 2018, when the Lafayette Courier-Journal reported that police patrolling an interstate highway seized an orange tablet in the shape of the 45th U.S. president’s head, with his lips puckered on the front and “Great Again” printed on the back.

Amazing some of the things people seem able to swallow.

You looking at me?

Britain’s seaside towns are at war with their seagulls, urging visitors not to feed the birds in an effort to stop them snatching titbits like potato chips from tourists’ hands.

Warning signs deck promenade railings from Scarborough to Broadstairs and beyond but now research from the University of Exeter has suggested an easy way for holidaymakers to deter the gulls – just stare at them.

The research showed that with a human staring at them, herring gulls took 21 seconds longer to approach a bag of chips then when left apparently unobserved.

“Gulls are often seen as aggressive and willing to take food from humans, so it was interesting to find that most wouldn’t even come near during our tests,” said lead author Madeleine Goumas, of the Center for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

The researchers tried to test 74 gulls but most flew away or would not approach. Just 27 approached the food and 19 completed the “looking at” and “looking away” tests.

“Of those that did approach, most took longer when they were being watched,” Goumas said. “Some wouldn’t even touch the food at all, although others didn’t seem to notice that a human was staring at them.”

Trust the damned gulls to be fussy eaters when a bag of chips was offered; try half a dozen oysters and see how many fly away without a nibble then!

Revenge is a dish best served cold, or at least cold-blooded

An Indian man who was bitten by a snake got his revenge on the reptile by biting it back and killing it, the man’s father said at the beginning of this week.

The man, Raj Kumar, was relaxing at home, enjoying a drink on Sunday, when a snake slithered into his house in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, and bit him, said his father.

“A snake bit him. So, in turn, he bit it and chewed it into pieces,” said the father, Babu Ram.

The man’s family took him to hospital where media said his condition was critical. The snake that bit him was reported to have been a rat snake, which experts regard as usually not venomous.

“This is definitely weird,” said Raj Kumar’s doctor, N.P. Singh.

“I’ve seen people coming in with snakebites, but never somebody who bit a snake and then brought it with him in a bag.”

I wonder what would have happened if he had been bitten by a crocodile?

Hop to it…

Swarms of grasshoppers have descended upon Las Vegas in unusual abundance this week, disrupting weather radars, deterring tourists and invoking hysteria on social media.

The clouds of insects, whose migration through the Las Vegas Valley scientists say is the result of a wetter-than- normal winter, were big enough that the National Weather Service detected them on its radar.

“Radar analysis suggests most of these echoes are biological targets. This typically includes birds, bats, and bugs, and most likely in our case…grasshoppers,” the National Weather Service in Las Vegas said on Friday on Twitter.

These migrations occur every few years and should not cause alarm since the insects are not dangerous, Jeff Knight, state entomologist for the Nevada Department of Agriculture, said at a news conference. (Now there’s a job title!).

Some locals were not reassured.

“This is the wildest thing in nature I’ve ever seen,” one resident, Caitlin Sparks, wrote on Twitter on Sunday, posting a photograph of a street lamp illuminating a night sky filled with grasshoppers.

Attracted to ultra-violet light, the insects have been clustering around the city’s brightly lit tourist district, a concentration of resort hotels and casinos along The Strip. The Luxor Sky Beam, a pillar of light that rises from the Luxor Hotel, has attracted huge swarms at night, according to videos posted to Twitter.

The Best Western Plus Casino Royale on the Strip shut off its lights on Friday and Saturday to avoid attracting the bugs, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Deliveroooooooo…

A clumsy driver led police to a A$200 million ($140 million) drug bust in Australia after he crashed a van laden with 270 kg of methamphetamines into a patrol car parked outside a police station in suburban Sydney.

The man, 28, slammed the drug-filled van into the empty police patrol car at Eastwood in the city’s north on Monday morning, crushing its bonnet, before speeding off, CCTV footage shows. He was caught by police less than an hour later.

A search of the vehicle turned up 273kg of ice, said police, who released footage of the drugs neatly packed in cardboard boxes, taped up and loaded into the back of the van. Police said in a statement the drugs had a street value of A$200 million.

The driver was arrested and charged with drug supply and negligent driving and is due in court today (Tuesday).

A new high for the “gig” economy?