Dead bird to be a permanent fixture at Hague Museum
Dutch Worship Dead Sparrow, Insanity Ensues
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – A sparrow that knocked over 23,000 dominoes and almost derailed a world record attempt before being shot dead will be enshrined in the Rotterdam Natural History Museum, the museum said Friday.
The ill-fated bird flew into an exposition center on Nov. 14 and began knocking over tiles that were being set up for “Domino Day” television program before it was killed by an exterminator with an air rifle at the urging of panicked organizers.
The shooting was seen by many as an overreaction, and caused a furor. A Web site was erected in honor of the bird; animal rights groups condemned the killing; and prosecutors opened a formal investigation.
“This sparrow has moved so many people,” museum curator Kees Moeliker said. “This was really a high point of Dutch culture, I say with a wink. This was the Netherlands at its smallest.”
He said the bird had been kept in a freezer at the Ministry of Justice, after its killing became a criminal matter.
related link:
Sparrow Exhibit
And here’s a beauty of a story
The sparrow shot by an enraged domino enthusiast after knocking over 24,000 dominoes lined up for a world record toppling attempt will join another historic feathered corpse, the victim of the first scientifically-documented case of homosexual mallard necrophilia.
Kees Moeliker, the Nature Museum’s curator of birds, who was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for improbable research for his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, took up the case of the sparrow, which convulsed the Netherlands.
The hapless sparrow interrupted an attempt to topple 4 million dominoes, setting off a cascade and so angering one of the participants that he shot it.
I think it was a protest–on the sparrows part. A brave stand to bring awareness to global warming to the idiot humans who spend time lining up dominoes. You did not die in vain, sweet sparrow!
Wow that’s hilarious. Next thing you know they’ll be offering sacrifices to it.
Whether it was 24.000 or 23,000 doesn’t matter. My sources tell me that the prankster bird is telling the birds in sparrow heaven that it was “over a zillion — just unbelievable”.
And just for information, the original story of the shooting was covered on the blog here:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3304
The museum development takes the weirdness of the story to a new level.
I don’t believe that animals have rights — per se — but I’m siding with the sparrow on this one.
The people who arranged this show are the ones to blame. I mean, didn’t they anticipate that a bird would land on the project? Birds are pretty common in large public buildings. Who hasn’t seen birds flying around in stadiums, malls, terminals, etc?
The birdbrains here are the people who set up this stunt without anticipating birds.
We have our own museum flakes here in the rust belt where I live. Dead industry is a big industry. The latest trend is old photography of industrial plants and mills. We also have a big bird sexing lab which fits into the local chamber of commerce boosterism (same folks on the museum board) of the biotech industry. There aren’t many birds out this time of year. It’s a cold day in the rust belt.
We have a Christmas bird count.
http://www.aswp.org/cbc.html
I still can’t figure out why they don’t do the bird count earlier in the year before most of the birds haul ass for the south during winter. All the nests are empty around my place, so counting birds seems like a waste of time. It seems like something the birds wouldn’t do themselves. The local bankers and economists here calculate the cost increase of the 12 days of Christmas birds. They never bothered calculating the cost of the lost industry. So what, keep borrowing suckers! If God wanted man to fly he would of given him hollow bones instead of a hollow head. Good luck with the bird counting. Don’t forget to check the airport, it’s only half empty.