From the National Geographic (worth clicking through, the photo is priceless):

You can lead an elephant to a treadmill, but you can’t make her walk. That’s the lesson zookeepers are learning in Anchorage, Alaska, where they have been struggling to get the zoo’s resident elephant to exercise.

…

Zookeepers have used apples, carrots, birch-tree branches—and, yes, peanuts—to try to coax her onto the contraption. But so far she’s gotten just three of her feet on the belt before backing off.

Still, Maggie’s keepers are confident that she will come around in time.

“We have to be patient. Nobody has ever done this before,” trainer Beth Foglesong told the Anchorage Daily News.

“The instructional video didn’t come with [the treadmill].”

Smiling D and grumpy Maddy

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

I happened to get home before D & Maddy yesterday so I grabbed the camera to see if I could get a few shots of the trail-a-bike. Maddy’s uncharacteristically grumpy and it’s a little blurry, but cute.

Happy at the High Park playground

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

A much happier photo, from our High Park trip this past weekend.

QOTD for May 2:

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, author, professor at
Harvard and Princeton, who died April 29, 2006 at 97.

[Quoted on the BBC]

Even though they probably don’t know the meaning of “defecation” in Dundee, preferring a more Anglo-Saxon term pronounced in the Scottish way to rhyme with “bright”, the leaflet has been distributed to clinics and GPs’ surgeries in the region. A spokeswoman for NHS Tayside turned the other cheek to accusations that the leaflet was a waste of money and would be better employed hanging on a nail behind the bathroom door.

Times Online

Singing in public is not so fun

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

Maddy’s kindergarten Earth Day concert, which she’d been happily looking forward to, was on Friday. All three kindergarten classes at her school did a cute bilingual concert together, wearing cute flowery little Earth Day headbands, and all the parents were invited to the concert, which was held at the school’s outdoor amphitheatre.

This is a photo of Maddy loudly wailing “MUMMY!” as they were all getting ready to sing. I was way at the back, so (given that the wailing was much louder than the singing, and was distracting everyone) I had to make my way through the whole crowd to intervene — “Excuse me, the wailing one is mine” and the crowd parted like magic.

After much comforting and exploration of causes it turned out that she thought ONLY her dad and I would be there, and was totally freaked out to encounter a huge crowd. Poor bunny.

I paused to take this photo before heading up to comfort her, which is probably worth a few years in purgatory or a subsequent life as a cockroach or something.