My Lion Story

 For about 30 hours here in Germany....we had this worried situation developing....over a lion being loose.

So to tell the story.....a woods-sort-of-guy set up a camera on a trail, and a photo was taken....in the region between Berlin and Brandenburg.  To be honest, it's fairly wooded and what you'd typically see is wild boar.  

This photo comes off the guy's camera.....appearing to be a female lion.

I've seen the digital photo....kinda grainy, and for me....having seen around 50 female lions in my life (between zoos, and a South African safari).....I judged it to be a female lion.

This got people highly disturbed and the cops were active.....telling folk to stay in their house while the professionals hunted for the lion.

The big question....where did the lion come from?  No zoo or private folks (circus crowd) admitted any lost 'cats'.

This AM, the anti-lion-believers stood up and said 'no way'.....it can't be a lion.  

By noon, the anti-lion-believers had convinced the local mayors and police of this....so the 'hunt' was called off, with the word being that whatever we saw in the photo....was a wild boar.

On the wild boar idea....one-to-ten belief for me?  I give it a '3'.  

Could it have been a hoax?  Well....yeah, I'm leaning toward some guy having a pet female lion, and working with some crew....this camera was known, and they had the lion walking up to the path.  

Now?  Lot of Germans still walking about the lion story, and there's probably 10-percent of folks who still hold a conspiracy-belief that the lion is real, while the anti-conspiracy folks hold the fake lion belief.

Footnote: I'm probably one of the few Alabama folks who has been to twenty-odd zoos and safari parks in my life.  If you asked me from 500 feet away to judge if this was a lion or not....yeah, I could do that.  But once I noted it was a lion....that 500 feet wasn't enough space between me and the lion, and I'd be looking for a tree, or a tour-bus to enter.  

Blackouts?

 

I sat and read through this story...one single time.  Basically, the journalist has pumped-up the idea that maybe if we did have an occasional blackout.....this might in some minor way change the perceived climate problem.

My issue?  Well....lets say that we went to a blackout for 12 hours every two weeks, and after a year.....we determined that it barely did anything.

Would the same crowd then suggest a blackout every week....mostly at night....for a year?  And if that had marginal change....would it go to a blackout once a day for three hours?

My belief is that after five years of playing the blackout game...we'd reach the point of agreeing...there wasn't much of anything gained.  

But here's the problem....there are people willing to talk about radical changes without much of a realistic 'gain' being shown as a fact.  

My dad was born in the early 1930s, and it's basically a couple of years into this era that electricity finally arrived.  I'm of the first generation of this family to have grown up since day one of birth....with electricity being 'normal'.  I'm also in the same generation having air conditioning being 'normal'.  I'm also of the generation where ice cream isn't considered a luxury.  

Convincing me of the blackout idea?  It's going to be awful hard.