1) May 25th was International Tap Dancing Day.

International Tap Association – https://www.tapdance.org/

Fred Astaire called this performance “the greatest dance number ever filmed.”

Have you ever tried to tap dance? How did it go?

2) The 25th was also Towel Day, in honour of Douglas Adams, author of the The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Why a towel? From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

So in case you run into any Ravenous Bugblatter Beast you had better keep a towel handy at all times.

If faced with a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast from Traal what do you think you would do, if you forgot your towel of course?  

3) I have always enjoyed watching the animals at zoos, especially now that most zoos have enclosures that give the animals the opportunity to roam, and live in an environment that more closely matches their natural habitat.  I can’t tolerate seeing them penned up in cages anymore.

I also like seeing the kids getting to pet the animals.  The Beijing Zoo goes one step further than just petting them, now you can also eat them for lunch at the Zoo’s Bin Feng Tang restaurant.

From an article in the Christian Science Monitor by Peter Ford:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0520/Beijing-Zoo-lets-visitors-admire-eat-wildlife

Hey kids, wanna go to the zoo today and look at the crocodiles? And then maybe eat one?

The meat might be pungent, but the concept seems somewhat tasteless. The Beijing Zoo puts the same animals on its restaurant menu as it keeps behind bars.

Crocodile, kangaroo, antelope, and hippopotamus are among the species that visitors can go the zoo to admire on the hoof, and then savor at lunch – steamed, braised, or roasted – at the Bin Feng Tang restaurant.

This has been going on for years, according to the restaurant’s manager, who seemed surprised that a newspaper article this week about her establishment should cause a stir on the Chinese Internet.

The news has not gone down well. “How would you feel, watching animals imprisoned in a limited space while eating their siblings?” asked Zheng Yuanjie, a well-known author, on his blog.

The zoo restaurant apparently has the requisite license from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry (which would presumably prefer to see crocodiles and hippos in a soup than in their landscapes) and is quite legal because none of the species on the menu is endangered.

Nor, the restaurant insists, do any of the animals come from the zoo’s own enclosures.

Still, the restaurant’s menu makes some people wonder. “The zoo is where we teach children to be nice to animals,” Qin Xiaona, head of the Capital Animal Welfare Association told the daily “Global Times.” “How can we do this after eating them?”

I don’t have a problem with a zoo serving some of their animals for lunch.  People on farms eat their animals.  What is the difference?