Valleys and Troughs

Bear Gryllls raw animal medley, including the infamous goat testicle.

One of our favorite aspects of Man vs. Wild, and the reason we'd pick Bear Grylls above Survivorman Les Stroud any day of the week has always been the stiff-upper-lip British pluck with which he will eat literally anything he finds, be it living, dead or of indeterminate status. Stroud's greatest claim to glory is that unlike Bear, he allegedly does all his own camerawork. Which does impress. But would he give himself a fetid-water enema if trapped on a raft in the ocean? We can't say for sure. But Bear Grylls would. The best part of the above video is the glimpse of the crew's perspective - "definitely needs... more garlic." If we ever find ourselves trapped in a remote wilderness, we will only momentarily hesitate before chomping down on some goat balls. Oh, and the fetid-water enema, just in case:

VALLEY?

Morning Marginalia: World's biggest catfish.

The above leviathan is a Mekong giant catfish, caught by fishers in the Thai river of the same name. Weighing in at 646 pounds and almost 9 feet long, it has been equated in size to a grizzly bear. Experts (which experts we would like to meet, just to sort of size up) believe it may be the largest freshwater fish on record. Though an effort was made to keep the fish alive for the purposes of captive breeding (the species is endangered) it died, was butchered, and likely made for a pretty memorable meal. We have eaten catfish once, and it tasted like something you damn sure wouldn't want to cook 646 pounds of. An acquired taste, we suppose.

VALLEY?

via NGnews

Heating costs too high? Try burning rabbits.

In these uncertain financial times, we all need to be able to think outside the box to some extent. Officials in Stockholm, Sweden have certainly done that, developing a pretty novel solution to deal with both rising energy costs and the explosive growth of a non-native rabbit population: shoot them and use their little bodies to heat homes. The rabbits that are evidently taking the city by storm are the consequence of citizens releasing their no-longer-wanted pets, because everyone thinks a rabbit is a fun animal to own until they are struck with the dawning realization that it mainly entails shoveling out boatloads of urine-logged wood shavings that have been sitting for about five days too long while the rabbit stares at you with cold hateful eyes and tries to bite your finger every time you touch it. Thus the Swedes have devised a method to kill two rabbits with one blistering inferno:

It's not just rabbits that are being used to heat homes. Reindeer, moose, horses, pigs and cows are all thrown into an incinerator run by a firm called Konvex near Lake Vanem, southeast of Stockholm. Using a new method that was developed with the help of E.U. funding, raw animal material is crushed, ground and then pumped into a boiler where it is burned together with wood chips, peat or other waste to produce heat.

The impetus behind this particularly pleasant municipal operation is a relatively new E.U. law forbidding the disposal of raw meat or animal carcasses in landfills. Thus, we have rabbits - and whatever else can be found, apparently - heating homes. We want to be able to intellectualize this to the point that we can appreciate the good sense in letting nothing go to waste, that these animals were going to be destroyed anyway, and that now they are at least (unwittingly) providing a valuable service. And technically this counts as an alternative fuel source, which we've been led to believe is always a good thing. But still, the karmic implications of setting rabbits on fire seem pretty staggering. We are all about the future here, but it seems like there almost has to be a better way. We expect better from you, Europe.

TROUGH

via Time