Rescheduled Again/Joke/Emboldened Rheas
RESCHEDULED AGAIN
The Ostrich Festival, Chandler, Arizona’s, annual fair whose organizers simply refuse to accept reality, was supposed to be this weekend. Actually, it was supposed to be in March, but they had to reschedule it at the last minute (literally —the tweet announcing the change was sent 1 minute before the festival was supposed to open). They rescheduled it for Halloween weekend, figuring the whole pandemic thing would be over by then.
Well, it’s not and so the festival has once again been rescheduled. Now it’s going to be next March, also known as the date the festival would have been all along since it’s held every March. That’s not a postponement, it’s a cancellation. Tickets purchased for the March 2020 event will be “honored” in 2021 (assuming it happens at all) which probably means you still aren’t getting a refund on those tickets. People are going to have to put those tickets in their wills at this point since we all know that festival isn’t happening again until 2035.
JOKE
We could all use a little humor these days, right? Well, buckle your comedy seatbelts because Starts at 60 (“the coolest community of over-60s online”) has one for you! It’s way too long, so I’m only posting the beginning here:
Ok now go to Starts at 60 to read the rest. I’ll wait!
Did you read it?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! A great joke. One-of-a-kind, right? Actually, no.
Well well well. Starts at 60 is re-using its own (great) jokes but swapping in different tall birds (and food prices)! Did they think seniors wouldn’t notice? Maybe they shouldn’t have put a link to the emu version of the joke on the “you might also like” list on the ostrich version’s page. Oh and guess what else is on the “you might also like” list:
Shoddy work all around. I expected better from Starts at 60. It is not the “coolest community” after all.
EMBOLDENED RHEAS
FUN FACT: Rheas are South America’s ostriches. LESS FUN FACT: They’re also Germany’s ostriches now, because someone decided to raise them on a farm in Northern Germany 20 years ago, seven of them escaped, and now the area is overrun with rheas, according to this recent Audubon article. A group of scientists and conservationists are trying count the rheas and determine the invasive species’ impact on their new-ish habitat.
Germany has changed the rhea, it seems. An Argentinian biologist who studies the birds told Audubon that the South American rheas are “timid” but the German ones are “emboldened.”
So emboldened, in fact, that the rheas are trampling on and/or eating farmers’ crops — one farmer lost half of his yield! — so now Germany is allowing hunters to kill them. Good luck to all.
OSTRICH MULTIMEDIA OF THE WEEK
Baby rheas make cute little whistling noises even before they hatch from their eggs!
After they hatch, too, as this video shows: