just john

Apparently, "control e" closes the Explorer window and causes you to lose all your typing....

 I saw this article a while back; http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/070222_chimp_hunters.html and I've been turning it over in my head for a while because there was something about it that bothered me. Then I realized, monkeys are functionally retarded people. I apologize for the terminology but I am a child of the 80's and it is a huge pain in the ass to repeatedly type "severely functionally mentally impaired." No spell check either. So I'm thinking about the poor monkeys we keep imprisoned all over the place and the medical and psychological experiments that are performed on them. No plans to go high PETA on you but I did have an interesting wiener schnitzel moment this weekend in Munich which I'll get to later.

Now we've got little creatures running around the planet who aren't people, but have demonstrated advanced tool making skills. Odd, no? If said creatures were people, they would not be locked up and experimented on.  Thanks to the medical benefit cutting power of a conservative Senate over the last decade, functionally retarded people are allowed to roam free. Most people call them "the homeless."

Munich this weekend was a St. Patrick's Day parade, which I had forgotten, and some general Munich-ness. Munich-ness is differrent from Stuttgart-ness. They have a different local greeting and the accent is closer to high German so it is easier to understand. Munich is lederhosen central and where the stereotype comes from. Having recovered from the lederhosen my mother put me in for church as a child, I will probably buy another set this spring but in a larger size. Like the Calgary Stampede, it is entirely appropriate to wear traditional clothing during October Fest. So I shall.

Had my first wiener schnitzel in 20 years while I was there and I, for some reason, always thought it was pork. I was corrected and informed that I was eating veal. I choked on this information, and bite of food, because I do not eat American veal. Understand, I'm all for killing animals for food. I'd do it myself if Bilo didn't but there's got to be a line somewhere and I draw it at American  veal. I make the "American" distinction because what we call veal is a calf that has been raised in the dark, not moving, and kept nutritionally anemic. So nutritionally deprived that it is not uncommon to restrain the calfs head in a bovine version of a shackle. Why? Because otherwise it will lick it's own urine to try and compensate for the nutrient deficiency. The irony that Publix places a screen over "Cosmopolitan" to keep from offending people but puts "VEAL" in 12 inch high letters is not lost on me. Suffice to say, I do not eat veal in America.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out German veal is simply a calf. I will continue to enjoy the wiener schnitzel - which is not German by birth as they will quickly tell you.