more knut, the dreamer & a winning design

I like this one more than the one with the hollow guts.

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knut, siku, human zoos & sculptures

Knut, 2007

Siku, 2011

Knut proponents are riled up about Siku at the Scandinavian Wildlife Park, Denmark. Siku is cute, but it's not Knut. ('The new knut' whose mother had not enough milk is not really an orphan.) Knut fans are mustering a memorial tribute with voting until January 8, 2012 on 42 entries: Pick a knut memorial sculpture. Be prepared, some of the submissions are underwhelming.

Footballer turned curator.  Lilian Thuram's 'Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage' --- "traces the history behind circuses, stage shows and 'zoos' in which people were the exhibits, dating it back to 1492 when Christopher Columbus displayed six 'Indians' at the Spanish royal court" (Daily Mail article). The exhibition is at Paris' Quai Branly, France, from Tuesday 29th November to Sunday 3th June 2012.
See more, including a video and the museum's website. Following his retirement in 2008, he established the Lilian Thurman Foundation.

In politics, Thuram made headlines during the 2007 French elections by calling out the institutionalized racism of Nicolas Sarkozy. (Article: France World Cup player Lilian Thuram now fights racism, November 11, 2009.)

Speaking of, there was a nazi encounter with swastikas and death threats on Christmas Eve for a biracial couple in Newmarket, Ontario. The man, from Nigeria ('nigger'), and the white woman ('whore'), are considering moving. The couple has already spent $6000 repairing damages. It isn't the first time.

An Occupy sculpture was hauled away from an encampment in Calgary, Alberta.

You can sign the Petition: Keep the “Heart of the Beast” sculpture as a permanent part of Olympic Plaza.

Knut the polar bear RIP and mysterious zoo deaths

Like Knut at the Berlin Zoological Garden, who was born in captivity and suddenly died on 19 March 2011, convulsing and drowning in front of hundreds of people, there have been a lot of recent deaths at the Calgary Zoo. Before this, there were only sometimes mass butterfly problems, due to heating failures in the old conservatory. It started with the cownose stingrays, which sadly succumbed to something mysterious - even the police investigated - that turned out to be poor oxygenation in the tank of the popular new exhibit (May '08), most likely. I don't know what happened to the second batch after the 1 died in shipping. One day the kids love the critters, in the next days the critters are dead. The capybara (one of my favourites!) was crushed accidentally; they are big rodents, like giant guineau pigs or cavy-deers.

Better days: Knut and Thomas Dörflein (1963–2008)

A baby elephant, a hippo, a wild goat, four gorillas and 41 stingrays. Next, at first unpublicized, a couple of spider monkeys, four feather-tailed sugar gliders, several mule deer, dozens of sebas and pallas bats, woodland caribou and muskox. Injured: African wild dogs and other animals. Since then, an endangered zebra, some Siberian tiger kittens, and 2 engangered whooping crane eggs that froze in a spring blizzard at the zoo's Devonian Wildlife Conservation Centre south of the city. It used to be lousy at catering and a better zoo.

It does seem strange now, over the last 15 years: very restructured and very involved in the special events and banquets, new buildings that are architecturally lovely, and interactive displays that make a lot of noise with crowding on the walkways and Mrs. Harvie's ghost in a Children's Zoo that went missing with the snake & bird building. I'll miss the beautiful old conservatory - many of the plants and little ecosystems didn't make it either. See: Zoocheck

Thomas Dörflein, 44, the Berlin zoo keeper who raised Knut from cub to full maturity,
was found dead in mysterious circumstances in a friend's Berlin apartment.