Skip to main content

I did a good deed today

Image
By
Lest anyone accuse me of being a complete waste of Peace Corps money, for the defense I present the following.  With God as my witness, for Uncle Sam and freedom and democracy, for peace and love and harmony and low trade barriers, today I rescued a baby goat with her head caught in a rusty tin can.
Kinda funny, but pitiful.
I was walking back along the riverbed from the neighboring village, where I have been helping with a world map project for the past couple days, blasting some Opeth on my headphones.  The poor thing was totally helpless, and tried to run when I approached but didn't know which way to go so I caught her easily.  The issue was her little horns—maybe an inch long—had gotten wedged under the lip of the can, which was bent into an oval shape.  (God knows what enticed the thing to stick its head in the can in the first place.)  At first I couldn't get both of the horns out.  The goat was panicky and panting hoarsely into the can, and kept trying to escape.  After a time I tried wrenching the can into a better shape by main force, and managed to succeed enough so I could get both horns out.  Then when I held the can and she tried to escape again, she got loose.
Freedom!
The goat's clan seemed to have left her behind, so she immediately set to bleating and looking around for them.  I hope she found them. 

It was a reminder of the benefits of arms and opposable thumbs.  The other day I was thinking of the very few number of animals that can touch themselves basically anywhere on their body.  Being human does have its perks.
The face of the abyss.
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 19, 2010 at 7:49 AM

    Go Ryan!! :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sara J.November 19, 2010 at 9:47 AM

    Hahaha!
    This gave me a good laugh first thing in the morning--thanks. I will be thankful for my opposable thumbs all day.
    Kudos for the good deed, RyGuy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. RyanNovember 19, 2010 at 1:07 PM

    That's 40,000 taxpayer dollars well spent.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Setswana Grammar Manual

By
One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .
6 comments
Read more

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

By
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...
4 comments
Read more