Australia: Cannibal Horses

Holy gods, this place: 

As Don Driscoll returned from a snow trip in Kosciuszko National Park this winter, he was confronted with a disturbing sight.

At Dead Horse Gap, the Australian National University environment professor chanced upon a dead brumby, with three other brumbies standing around it. 

"Two of the horses had their snouts inside the gaping stomach cavity of the dead horse and they were eating out the insides of it," he said. 

"We were really quite shocked to see that, we just couldn't believe our eyes.

Pretty sure we'll soon find out they're venomous. And can fly. Because...Australia.

I must also note that "Dead Horse Gap" - well where else would you find cannibal horses?

• Photo, not of brumbies, from here.

Random Thought: We Are Their World

You don't get to succeed at the game of rolling out wholly invented, manufactured, international super-celebrities along the lines of Justin Bieber, the Kardashians, and the latest iPhone, unless you've successfully created an international framework through which and in which those products can so massively, and so perversely invasively disseminate and flourish, like so many maggots, parasitic wasps, and bacteria in a corpse bloating down by the lake.

Most unfortunately, and obviously: that framework has been created. And it's made of us. Countries and countries and countries of us. Just waiting for the next super-celebrity to come rolling out of the factory.

We are losing this one.

Update: This graph says so much about what I just wrote:

This is the most remarkable chart that I've seen in some time. An extraordinarily important trend: pic.twitter.com/p5CpqdAc6k via @ryanlcooper
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) September 24, 2014

Yow! Blast From the Past: 1985, Athens Version

An old friend just time-machined me, sending me a fragment from a time long ago:

Annabels was a legendary place in Athens, a fairly rundown favorite of buskers from all over the world, run by an English expat couple, John and someone. (Amanda?) I stayed there for some months in 1985, in the midst of a several year busking blur. (Counts to himself: 29 years ago. Ow.) We'd play on the city trains for a few hours in the afternoon, make enough for another night in the hostel, food, retsina, beer, ouzo, whatever else we needed, then—the night. Yow. Mostly unshareable memories. Beautiful, wonderful, musical, friend-filled memories.

Annabel's is long gone, unfortunately. Glad to see the street name, though! Koumondouro Street, properly spelled, was a hell of a location, just a walk north of the Acropolis. Perhaps C. and I will walk down it one day in the not to distant future.

Thank you, Sara F. B., for that completely unexpected blast from the past!

Photos: Beach, Sign, Grass, Dusk

Collaroy, September 2014