Spring is far away, but it is already a time of new beginnings – new creatures are starting to emerge into the light of day, blinking gently. Over the weekend, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=501040&in_page_id=1770
“>great blue heron was spotted in Britain for the first time. Being native to the Americas (and spending his winters in Florida, like many elder Americans), the poor fellow was more than 3,000 miles off course. Perhaps insensitively for the time of year, bird expert Nigel Hudson remarked:
“That sort of an experience tends to knock the stuffing out of you.”
The nation’s turkeys must be wincing as we speak. Also blinking into the light of man is the long-eared jerboa, a nocturnal creature native to the Gobi desert, and exceptionally cute for an animal that lives in such a harsh environment. Then again, look at the chiru – it lives in extreme cold rather than extreme heat, but doesn’t shirk on the cuteness stakes. Someone should create an equation relating fuzziness to temperature of habitat. Mathematicians, News Hour has lain down the gauntlet of challenge. Will any of you be tough enough to take it up?
In the human world, the London party season has been provoking unusual behaviour among humans, as presumed nice-man-of-comedy Alan Davies draws blood on a tramp’s ear during a drunken brawl outside the Groucho Club. Perhaps he is aiming for more edgy roles, and was advised by his PR man to commit an act of violence on the streets. He certainly isn’t happy being framed by his past fame. When the tramp referred to him as ‘Jonathan Creek’, embarked on a savage aural assault, combining a good old London ear-biting with the phrase:
“My name is Alan. You know my name- Alan. What’s my name? It’s Alan.”
So that’s Alan, then. But from Alan, to Anakin – more remarkable than any of this is the appearance of the lesser-spotted Jedi on the streets of Elephant & Castle. Not often seen since the brutal Sith policies of extermination were put into force, Jedi numbers in the wild had recently begun to climb. In 2001, they made up 0.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales. Late last Tuesday night, a Jedi sporting ‘long, flowing robes’ and a ‘rat tail haircut’ was alleged to have assaulted a man with his lightsaber on Newington Causeway. The man, known only as ‘Anakin Skywalker’ to local reporters, found that his mind control powers did not function on the local police, who put him behind bars for the night. With behaviour like this, how long before the Sith start another crackdown? Our Jedi friends, you have been warned.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 