Culture

If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness.

We got this story by way of the AP:

Coach Stops Runaway Horse by Biting Ear

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The coach of Oklahoma City's minor-league hockey team helped prevent a possible stampede of Belgian horses at the Oklahoma State Fair by biting one of the animals on its ear.
Doug Sauter, who coaches the Oklahoma City Blazers of the Central Hockey League, was at the fair Saturday attending the Centennial Expo's Draft Horse Show when he saw a Belgian horse break free from its reins. That caused a chain reaction that spooked other horses, he said Monday.
He bit the ear of one of the spooked horses to stop it from stampeding.
"That's how you stymie a horse," he said.
"You bite as hard as you can, and it won't move."
Sauter said he was only one of many people who aided an unidentified 62-year-old woman, who was injured after a wagon pulled by a team of horses tipped over and fell on her. She was taken to a local hospital in serious condition, according to a spokeswoman for the Emergency Medical Services Authority.
Sauter said the driver was able to get the horses turned and steered the wagon into a circle, which the coach said is a common way to prevent a stampede.
"If he had not gotten them turned, who knows where they would have gone," Sauter said. "The driver stopped them from a basic runaway."

Now, we here at HPO have never claimed to be horse experts, but we had no idea that the way to stop a horse was to bite his ear - hard. We are pretty sure that we always knew that the easiest way to get a horse to kick you in the head was to bite his ear (or put a cigarette out on his hindquarters).

Bears love garbage.

Most people's bear knowledge consists of bits of pieces of camping stories and old Yogi the Bear cartoons. Funny as they may be, those cartoons are not necessarily representative of the truth about bears. As it turns out, your average bear will sooner go for a trash can than your "pic-a-nic" basket.

Last week, a brown bear in Bulgaria got himself into a bit of a difficult situation when he broke into a building in the middle of the night and got his head stuck in a trash can.

According to the article, the bear "entered the building in the resort of Predeal through a window, found some food in a garbage can, and proceeded to lick its way to the bottom before its head got stuck in the bin."

When the bear was found at dawn the next morning, he was shot full of bear tranquilizers before being released: "Lightly groggy, the bear stumbled into the neighbouring forest after it was freed."

And everything is back to normal, just like nature intended: Bears under the influence of heavy sedatives crashing through the woods, wild and free.

And, we finish today's post with an excerpt from our favorite Middle-Eastern politician, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in America recently giving a speech to the bright, flowering young students of Columbia University.

Cleverly dodging questions about the comically ridiculous opression of women in Iran and his desire to "wipe Israel off the map", Dr. Ahmadinejad finally cracks when asked about the treatment of homo-sexuals in Iran.

In all fairness, as crazy as he is, we appreciate the fact that the email we sent him back in November was responded to by some fig-eater that works for Dr. Ahmadinejad.

Classy move on their part.