Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Tail Strings?

My Swiss "there must be a good reason for this" moment for the day. I was flicking tv channels and there I see a Swiss cow barn. Swiss cows will bells round there necks in a barn eating hay. Fair enough - I get that bit.

The puzzling thing - each cow had a rope attached - descending from the roof to the end of its tail. The ropes were reasonably tight so if the cow was lying down the end of the tail was sticking up in the air.

Why was this so? Fly strike prevention, cleanliness, a kind way of making sure the cows have to share there food. Why is this so?

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Triple J in Fast Forward

Maybe it's just me. I use Google reader to look at rss feeds. I've got Dr Karl's podcast (science and funny) from Triple J as one of the feeds. I clicked on play just now and got Dr Karl as a chipmunk. For some reason all his podcasts were double time :-)

Friday, May 11, 2007

It's the Eurovision Song Contest

I have achieved a life long dream tonight. Ok it's wasn't really a dream - more something that I've never been able to do before (ok I just didn't think of it last time) and I'll never be able to do again (probably). I voted in the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final.

Australian's don't get to vote - unless you happen to be living in Switzerland :-)

Amazing. Everyone looks so happy to be there as though most people know that it will be the biggest audience they will ever perform to. It probably is too - people all over the world have Eurovision Song Contest parties - often with sequins.

Switzerland disappointingly did not get in.

Friday, May 04, 2007

May Day

Haven't blogged in a while. Busy at work and lazed around the house on the weekend so not much to say. The only exciting thing was May Day which is a public holiday in Zurich. We stayed in till about 6pm and then went for a walk over the hill.

At one point I thought I heard a roaring crowd not to far away. This was probably because while we were lazing around watching Blue Brothers 2000 in German (it works better) there was a crowd of people wandering around Zurich breaking windows, burning a few cars and being shot at with water canon, rubber bullets and pepper spray. Even better it seems that this is traditional. May Day and rioting seems to happen every year... I vaguely remembered hearing people talking about getting down wind of tear gas by accident and luckily linked with May Day which is why we didn't wander into town.