A couple of big news stories have been pouring in today from Denmark, and as Lois and I are drinking our first cup of tea in bed this morning, I spot this at first sight innocuous-looking story in the influential Danish tabloid "Ekstrabladet". It's hidden under the tabloid's rather (in my humble opinion) trivial "lead" story about an epidemic of elves in a little Zealand town.
Yes, the paper's "lead" this morning - the elf story - breaks the news that in the last couple of years, an epidemic of elves have been appearing in strange places all over the Danish town of Mørkøv and its environs. They've been spotted all over the place, including on road signs and lampposts etc, according to the paper's ace cub junior reporter Hans Christian Blønd:
Nobody knows where the elves have come from, but there are - like - billions of them, or nearly! Newsmen have counted 63 elves on the Mørkøv to Dianalund road alone. Suspicion has fallen on "Elfland", a nearby theme park. However Elfland's management rigorously deny that they are behind the outbreak.
Influential Danish tabloid Ekstrabladet's ace junior cub reporter
Hans Christian Blønd (right) interviews Conservative politician
Søren Pap Poulsen, trying to get an explanation of where the elves
might have come from. Poulsen says he "doesn't want to discuss it".
Lois and I want to know, however, whether this elf epidemic in Mørkøv is really the most important story to have come out of Denmark over the last 24 hours.
Influential Danish tabloid Ekstrabladet's
front page this morning with its trivial
"elf epidemic" story as today's big "breaker"
Lois and I say: isn't the really BIG news story the one sitting just underneath the elf story (see above) - the news that Danish Foreign Secretary Lars "Løkke" Rasmussen's house in Græsted is up for rent, as an Airbnb, at the "nominal" price of 1400 kroner a day.
You might object that 1400 kroner a day (about £160) is "a bit steep" for what looks like a pretty ordinary house, but Lois and I, incredibly, got to know Løkke for a couple of minutes in central Copenhagen during the Danish national election campaign of 2015. He shook our hands and asked if we would vote for him, and we had to confess, both to him and to thousands of Danish TV-viewers, that we were British tourists and didn't have a vote. Do you remember that day?
On the strength of that conversation, do you think that Løkke might let us have his house for a bit less than the 1400 kroner a day rental that he's demanding from people he doesn't know ?
The definition says that in the Viking age, the trolls lived together in small family units", being "rarely helpful to human beings". I think we all know that there are people like that too, aren't there!
As usual, Israel has this wonderful collection of graphics to show us - a picture is worth a thousand words sometimes, isn't it.
Flashback to 2015: Lois and I siting in a square in the middle of
Copenhagen, having lunch with our daughter Alison, when.....
..suddenly we hear a commotion behind us:
we turn our heads to try and see what's going on.
From round the corner Lars Løkke Rasmussen (right) appears with his
Liberal Party entourage, plus security men, pressmen and demonstrators:
"Løkke" shook our hands right there, in the middle of Copenhagen,
as part of the election campaign which later swept him to power...
I wonder......! It's worth a shot, we think, but I'll keep you up to date with whether our "offer" is accepted.
Watch this space!
Footnote: after shaking mine and Lois's hand in 2015 Løkke went on to make some other powerful friends, like UK Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Donald Trump. But we think it's probably best to concentrate on getting a rental on Løkke's house in Græsted first, before asking him to ask Donald to rent out Mar-a-Lago to us at a special "buddy price".
But what do YOU think?
After shaking mine and Lois's hands, and winning his election,
Løkke went on to shake the hand of British Prime Minister David Cameron...
...and the hand of US President, Donald Trump
And the really big question remains unanswered, doesn't it. Are the elves real? Are they "sexually active", and capable of propagating themselves?
The Vikings certainly thought so - they were called "trolls" in their language.
And the trolls - or "gnomes" as they're called in Australian English, have got their own actual town down there, "Gnomesville" in the shire (= county) of Dardanup, as comedian Bill Bailey discovered while doing a recent 'celebrity travelogue' in Western Australia.
I wonder.... !
09:00 It's nine o'clock but Lois and I are still in bed - well, the rain and wind are battering on our bedroom window, so there's little temptation to get up for the moment, that's for sure!
Under the bedclothes our mobile phones have begun diddling and beeping in unison - always a good sign, because it means that one or other of both our favourite "pundits" has been weighing in on some "meaty" subject on the quora forum website.
And yes, this morning it's our old friend and biopsychologist pundit Israel Ramirez weighing in on this "doozy" of a talking-point:
This one shows the distribution of light-coloured hair:
[???? - Ed]
[????? (again) - Ed]
Israel adds, finally, by way of conclusion, "Natural selection can make a mutation more or less common. But no one has ever shown that there’s an advantage to having blonde or red hair. There’s definitely a disadvantage for red hair, because people with that trait are prone to sunburn and skin cancer. Overall, scientists suspect that hair and eye coloration do not fall [strongly] under ... natural selection.
"That’s different from skin colour which has been affected by natural selection.
"Light skinned people in the far north have an advantage over those with darker skin, whereas the opposite is true in the tropics."Sexual selection could make blonde or red hair more common if men or women preferred marrying people with blonde or red hair. But that doesn’t explain why these traits are common in Northern Europe but not elsewhere. Why wouldn’t Asians have the same preferences as Europeans?"
And what's Israel's big "takeaway" from all this?
He says, "Maybe hair colour variation is the result of pure dumb luck. Geneticists call that neutral variation or genetic drift. It’s a real possibility!"
Fascinating stuff, isn't it. And interesting for Lois and me, because red hair is certainly rife in our two families: my father and 2 of my siblings had red hair, as did Lois's brother - her only sibling.
flashback to 1962/3: my brother Steve, aged about 10,
practising his batting strokes in our back garden in Bristol
flashback to 1966: my sister Kathy, aged about 17:
sitting on the little wall outside our back door.
Well, wouldn't YOU if you had the chance? Be fair!!!!
It's been a whole 2 weeks since we were last there, so why not, we say !!!
flashback to February 7th: our last visit to the
Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee Shop
At last we'll have a garden path that actually goes somewhere, and not just to our neighbours Matt and Timera's fence, which will be satisfying!
flashback to January 30th: our back garden,
featuring the famous "path to nowhere"
- what a madness THAT was !!!!
But the seemingly everyday question of "which ungulate animal has the most [medicinally] useful urine?", a question that most of us hear at one time or another during the working day, turns out to have the surprising answer of "It's the blue whale of course!".
But, next question, is the blue whale - the largest creature on earth - really an "ungulate"?
"Surely not!", I hear you cry, "Who's ever seen a blue whale with hooves?"
But who knew that a common ancestor of all hoofed mammals includes the ancestor of whales and dolphins. About 60 million years ago they had a common ancestor, but some descendants no longer have the hooves, including whales and dolphins, and also elephants, who have toenails instead of hooves.
This creature was about 140 ft long (42.6m), Sandi says.
But let's get back to the urine, shall we? [Do we have to? - Ed].
The urine of Blue Whales produces over 300 imperial gallons (100 litres) of urine a day, which is vital for the health of coral reefs. Who knew? Similar the urine of white bears is vital to the health of forests - they eat lots of salmon, and this generates urine that is particularly vital for tree health. Again, who knew?
[That's enough "urine facts" ! - Ed]
Moving on, but still on large animals, here's another question from this week's show:
There are other such chalk figures on other hills in the south of England, but I didn't realise that the White Horse of Uffington is the only really old one, at 3000 years. The others are much more recent, and only date from the last 300 or so years. The second oldest, the Westbury White Horse in Wiltshire, is only about 300 years old.
According to Sandi, it's thought to have provided a ritualistic centre for the local community. They had to make it, then keep working on it together, year after year, to keep it shiny white and stop it getting overgrown etc. And the belief was, it's thought, that as long as the horse survived, so would the local community.
I wonder...... !!!!
But why did they create such a big horse, at 150ft (46m) ? Rhod Gilbert, one of the contestants on this week's show, argues that they could have done that with a 6ft horse.
Alan Davies speculates, however, that the unreasonably large size of the horse could originally have been a mistake.
And I didn't know, either, that during World War II, the Uffington White Horse had to be disguised, in order to prevent it becoming a landmark and a navigational aid for German bombers.
But exactly how did the authorities "disguise" this huge 150ft chalk figure? Alan Davies, again, thinks he might be able to guess the answer to this one.
Sounds plausible. Or maybe they kept it as a horse, but altered it slightly, do you think?
21:30 Lois emerges from her zoom session, and there isn't really time to watch anything else, so we opt for an early night. Well, wouldn't YOU if you had the chance haha!
[Oh just get on with it! - Ed]
22:00 Zzzzzzzzzz !!!!!
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