A group working to make eggs un-palatable to everyone has a video showing baby roosters killed by being tossed into a grinder. Male chicks apparently have no market value.

No, I didn’t watch the video. Yes, I think I’d have a problem killing cute little chicks, though I could get over it. A friend told me about killing quail for the first time recently, and he was rather disturbed going into it. But sanity returned to him, and he learned that quail come apart like they are made to be eaten. Fancy that.

About the chickens, I know the animal group thinks killing or eating animals is essentially cruel, but I don’t think most people do. A video like this will probably disturb those who are so completely removed from the land or natural processes that they don’t think where their food comes from and that any blood, dirt, or sweat is unnice and unwanted. (Unnice should be in the dictionary. It’s a good, modern word.)

I would think farmers have killed roosters for years, and I see that claim made on this blog post talking about city people keeping chickens in their city yards. Roosters fight with each other and make a lot of noise. That’s very unnice, but you can’t talk them out of it, so you have to grind them up. Someone from the hatchery shown in the video, according to USA Today, says this type of “instantaneous euthanasia” is standard for the industry and acceptable as humane by vets. It’s the industrial angle that makes this yucky, I think. Who wants to think of any animal being tossed in a grinder? Anyone would rather the company wring the chicks neck with their hands.

From our Thomas Jefferson Desk on Political Discourse and Civility: In a video just released or noticed, an Obama adviser says Republicans who are resisting the president’s agenda are doing so because they are–well, I won’t type that word here. You know that word repeated too often in the movie Hancock? That’s the word.

Woman in New Zealand is fired for using BOLD, RED, ALL-CAPS in email to co-workers. She has sued and won a wrongful termination verdict. Seems to me a little personal communication would have helped here. Just to fire her after the bosses take an email the wrong way is so mechanical.

In other news, hackers are targeting Christians on Facebook. Watch your privacy settings.

Filmmaker Patrick Courrielche has been doing the rounds lately because he was on a conference call with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in which the government agency called on us, the artists of our times, “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

In other words, if we could do a variation on “Yes, We Can” or put together another one of those cool Hope posters on the theme of government-run health care or obeying the Feds without question–all volunteer work, you understand–that’d be great. It’s for the cause, you know.

Now, the NEA is denying it coordinated that call, and of course, it doesn’t see anything wrong with it’s blatant politicization.

It was a strenuous weekend, by my standards. And quite a lot of fun, all in all.

A while back a fellow I know through Viking reenactment alerted me to an event coming up in September in New Ulm, Minnesota. It’s a battle reenactment, in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (something that only happens once a millennium. I did the math). They’re bringing in a bunch of Roman reenactors from various places in the U.S., and they needed something approximating Iron Age Germans. Vikings are close enough for the purposes of the exercise.

You can read about the battle of Teutoburg Forest here, and about Arminius, the German chieftain who made his name there. Whatever it was. We don’t actually know what he called himself, but Martin Luther (who got pretty excited over the story of a German who smashed the Romans) decided his name must have been “Hermann,” and “Hermann the German” he has been, in popular imagination, ever since.

I drove down with a (different) Viking friend, and we managed to show up only about an hour late. (We wanted to avoid Highway 169 because the Renaissance Faire tends to back it up pretty awful on Saturday mornings in season. So we took a roundabout route, and managed to miss every intersection we tried to find. But eventually we made it, mostly by process of elimination.) Continue reading My Roman holiday →