The Emu Lied to Me. It's Not an Ostrich

10/4/2015

Ostrich, left, has two toes. Emu, center, has three toes. Bird on our deck has three toes. That's really all I know.

The statue swore to me that it was an ostrich, but Brian Savin wondered if it was an emu.
I looked it up. Emus have three toes and ostriches have two toes. (Ostriches are also bigger. Who knew?)

http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-emu-and-ostrich/

The bird my wife found at Home Goods has three toes.

Both birds' meat is red rather than white. At first, I thought maybe the emu was claiming it was an ostrich to avoid being eaten, but apparently both are eaten.
Either way, the bird on our back deck took a fearsome barrage of acorns in recent days.
We will take it inside for the winter, along with the stork and the penguin, also from Home Goods.

Brian Savin

10/4/2015 11:35:37 am

I turned on the tube this morning and found my only TV program, Sunday Morning, was displaced by the Jets in London. I like the Jets, but in the afternoon. They've got two big birds themselves in wide receivers Brandon Marshall and Eric Decker, with about the same characteristic differences as the ostrich and emu. One a bit bigger and runs a run faster, the other has the extra toe for mobility and quick slot turns. I think I'll nickname them Grief and Glory. Marshall (the ostrich) does all the hard work getting the team down field. He's Grief. With Marshall triple teamed in the end zone, Decker (the emu) get's to score the touchdowns weaving through crowds in the end zone.. He's Glory.

By the way, the Millbrook School, in Millerton, NY, is the only secondary school in the country to have its own zoo, and it's great. In addition to a lemur house (best visited around Halloween given their screams) they have a large number of emu. No ostrich.

Brian Savin

10/4/2015 11:38:51 am

Sorry, the zoo is in Millbrook. I got distracted watching another Jet's touchdown and mistyped.

George Vecsey

10/4/2015 05:16:01 pm

Brian, thanks. Wait, it's football season? GV

Josh Rubin

10/5/2015 09:57:46 am

Who does the emu like in the divisional series? And who would he(?) have pitch game 4?

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

The Emu Lied to Me. It's Not an Ostrich

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