“… exploding German toads…”

I have to give credit to our graphic guru, Lindsay, for alerting me to this one. When she read about exploding German toads, she thought of me. I’m not entirely sure how to take that.

www.wral.com/irresistible/4425511/detail.html

Smoking Chimp?

Yeah.
www.wral.com/irresistible/4406522/detail.html
I know way more about chimps than I probably should.
Biologically we’re very similar. We’re different from the head up and the waist down, but our guts are basically the same.
If a monkey gets sick you take them to a veterinarian. If a chimp gets sick, you take them to a hospital for humans. That’s telling.
Culturally, they don’t write poetry and do calculus, but neither do I. Competing clans of chimps wage war. They use tools. They live in very sophisticated political environments.
Some scientists have even argued that chimps should be taxonomically reclassified to represent our similarity, changing their Latin name from Pan troglodytes to something in our own genus, Homo, right in there with Neanderthals and other folks.

Well, here you go with this week's column:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.
Yeah. You read that correctly. I said, “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.”
This park is no tame “Crowder’s Mountain” or “South Mountains State Park.” This is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site, a thirty-foot cliff in Canada hunters used to run buffalos off.
Because hey, if you’ve ever had to run up to a buffalo an poke a spear in him, you’d be looking to make the hunting process a little more user-friendly too.
The idea was pretty simple: run the buffalo off a cliff, let Newton and his pesky gravity do their thing, and eat the conveniently dead buffalo - much better than chewing on a live buffalo.
And if you want to see a moving computer graphic of an endless stream of buffalos leaping off an imaginary cliff, go to the website: www.head-smashed-in.com (I couldn’t make this stuff up).
By the way, I’ve heard lemmings don’t actually do that. Apparently the Disney film crew making the 1958 documentary that inspired the leaping-lemming myth induced them to jump (some reports say threw them) for the sake of some good footage. I don’t know if they then ate the lemmings.
And lemmings weren’t even indigenous to the area the film was made, according to the website I’m looking at. They had to be imported and were put on a snow covered turntable to film the migration sequence.
Anyway, Head-Smashed-In.com says, “Thanks to their excellent understanding of topography and of bison behavior, [hunters] killed bison by chasing them over a precipice and subsequently carving up the carcasses in the camp below.”
Not to crack on their knowledge of geography or mammalian biology, but how many times did someone have to run off a cliff before they figured out it could be fatal? This is hardly plate tectonics, quantum physics or molecular cell biology.
Now before I start seeming all educated about buffalos cascading off cliffs, I have to say that Dave Barry thought it up first. Or at least I found out about it from one of his books, “Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need.”
He describes Head-Smashed-In, just north of Shelby, Montana, in the section on touring Canada (Canadia? Canadae? How do I conjugate this?), which was in the chapter on touring the USA. Hmmm.
“When we called it up, a person answered the phone as follows: “Head Smashed In, may I help you?” This was probably the highlight of our entire life,” Barry writes.
The receptionist answered the phone the same way for me, much to the glee of surrounding college students.
Try it for yourself: 1-403-553-2731.
What do you mean you don’t conjugate Canadai? I bet you do in German.
Anyway, according to the website, natives have continuously used the site (one of 150 in Alberta - this was apparently quite popular) since 5,500 B.C., though it’s unclear if they still do, or if it’s just drunk college kids these days.
Over the millennia we got dumber with time and gave Head-Smashed-In its name.
According to legend, or at least the Internet, just about 150 years ago a young man (these stories always involve an adolescent male, don’t they?) wasn’t content with watching hundreds of large ungulates fly off a cliff from a safe, un-head-smashing distance.
He had to have a better view.
He’d have made a good photographer.
Crazy Canadaianses. 

Check out who Cleveland County Community College’s new poster boy is: www.cleveland.cc.nc.us/ .
Yours truly.
The college hosted a career day for the county’s four high schools and invited local professionals to speak about their jobs.
I volunteered to chip in about photography, thinking I’d be presenting with the other folks from The Star and would get to plug our Journalism Explorers program, a coed scouting unit that learns about different facets of journalism ever second Tuesday at 6 p.m.
But while my three coworkers at the career fair were lumped together, I was split off - left to face three 40-minute sessions of high schoolers on my own.
It looks in the photo like I was doing pretty well.  

Wanna win a flock of pink flamingos?

Here’s a fourth plastic lawn flamingo photo illustration. Do you know where in the Star’s coverage area our playful pink prankster was hanging out? If so, email me at john_derrick@link.freedom.com with your answer. And remember, the camera wasn’t flipped over - the photographer was.

Then keep an eye out for one more flamingo photo illustration with an accompanying query. And scroll down for three previous flamingo-cam shots (you can still email me the answer to them). In the end, a random drawing will be made from the folks with the most correct answers and the winner will get five pink flamingos they can pose however they like.
 

Viva Cardinal Sin!

We are told the seven cardinal sins are pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth.

But I’ve found an eighth Cardinal Sin: Cardinal Jaime L. Sin, Archbishop emeritus of Manila.

Really. His bio is at www.catholic-pages.com/hierarchy/cardinals_bio.asp?ref=29

John Paul, George Ringo

The college of cardinals voting on the next pope is sooooo eighth century.

They could decide it kind of like an episode of “Survivor”. Put all the cardinals on a small island and come back in a few weeks. I know you can’t live on bread alone, but I wanna see a robed octogenarian catch a fish with his teeth.

Wait a few more months, and if the smoke from the signal fire is white, they’ve decided on a new pope. If it’s grey and greasy, the cardinals got hungry and drew straws.

Or maybe they could hold a WWF cage match (“Can you smell what Cardinal Pappalardo is cooking!!”).

But what’s really sad is the toll the competition takes on their bodies. And when their natural talent fades they turn to…. Juicing.

Post Game Celebrations -- all dressed up with no fire to jump over

As a recent UNC-Chapel Hill alum, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself after my school won the national championship.

A few years ago I’d have mobbed Franklin Street with tens of thousands of my fellow students, but trying to turn over a burning car all by myself on Marion Street just doesn’t feel the same.

Wanna win a flock of pink flamingos?

Here’s a third plastic pink lawn flamingo photo illustration. Do you know where in the Star’s coverage area our batty bird was soaring? If so, email me at john_derrick@link.freedom.com with your answer.

Then keep an eye out for two more flamingo photo illustrations with accompanying questions. And scroll down for two previous flamingo-cam shots (you can still email me the answer to them). In the end, a random drawing will be made from the folks with the most correct answers and the winner will get five pink flamingos they can pose however they like.
 

Wanna win a flock of pink flamingos?

Here’s a plastic pink lawn flamingo taking a dip recently here in Cleveland County. Do you know where our feathered friend was? If so, email me at john_derrick@link.freedom.com with your answer.

Then keep an eye out for three more flamingo photo illustrations with accompanying questions. And scroll down for a previous flamingo-cam shot (you can still email me the answer to that one). In the end, a random drawing will be made from the folks with the most correct answers and the winner will get five pink flamingos they can pose however they like.
 

"Make a little birdhouse..."

Here you go with some pretty detailed birdhouse-making directions I put online quite a while back on my college website. They're pretty simple houses really, leaving out the whistles and bells. But they might be giant fun to make for families.

For a while I was using them like Hallmark cards -- signing them and giving them instead of sympathy cards, thank you cards, get well cards.... More useful than a card, it doesn't get shoved away in some drawer -- it's always near on some tree and in memory and it doesn't rest, always attracting new birds.

Enjoy....

http://www.unc.edu/~jderrick/birdhouses.html

" ... scandal begets Pulitzers."

Well, I didn’t win anything in the last NC Press Photographer clip contest. I dunno. Maybe I should stick more to the standard photojournalist fare of cute puppies/kids.

Instead, I gave them a picture of me getting nailed by a football. I gave them a picture of a Bengal tiger walking into and striking my lens. Heck, on my online gallery, http://www.shelbystar.com/Portal/Photo_gallerys/johnderrick.htm, I’ve got an African elephant kicking a heavy beach ball straight into my lens/camera/face. That left a mark.

So I have to ask myself – what sort of picture do I have to take to win an award? Judging from the winners, I need to catch someone crying.

Maybe I just don’t want it enough. Maybe I need to use pepper spray.

And scandal begets Pulitzers. So which is better for my career – catching a politician in bed with a live boy or a dead girl?

And a cute puppy.

Wanna win a flock of pink flamingos?

Well, here you go with a plastic pink lawn flamingo taking a gander at a constellation in this photo illustration that was shot near the Broad River recently. Do you know what the constellation is? If so, email me at john_derrick@link.freedom.com with your answer.

Then keep an eye out for four more flamingo photos with accompanying questions. In the end, a random drawing will be made from the folks with the most correct answers and the winner will get five pink flamingos they can pose however they like.