Khar Bii is a televised ovine conformation show/Senegalese Idol/beauty pageant  on the air in (obv) Senegal. I heard about it this morning on NPR and loved it sincerely; I enjoyed Ms. Quist-Arcton’s report (she is always excellent), but I could have done without Inskeep’s mocking tone during the intro and outro. Yes, Steve, livestock are important to a lot of people, even in the developed west! Off to Youtube where a lot of the Khar Bii episodes have been posted. Here’s what’s billed as the finale:

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Francophones, help me out. I can pick out a bunch of French – mouton is, for example, prominent and I pick out bits of the explanation of toxoplasmosis, but I’m mostly lost. Is it because my French skills are so horrible, or are the presenters speaking a mix of French and Wolof? Or perhaps Dakar-Wolof? I think I heard ‘nyami’.

TIL (things I learned, in internetspeak):

• How to spell Ofeibia Quist-Arcton’s first name. A lovely name.
• “Wolof words in English are believed to include yam, from Wolof nyami “to eat food”, nyam in Barbadian English ^[3] meaning to eat (also compare Seychellois nyanmnyanm, also meaning to eat ^[4] )” *
• Concours Culinaire sounds much more inviting that Cook-off.
• Fufu! Disclosure – I knew about fufu previously. I am loving the notion of a beauty contest where cook-the-contestants is a prominent element.

• Cat Urbigkit posted an extraordinary sequence of photos showing a coyote and a badger hunting together (tiny amt of background here). Coyote and badger are important characters in western Native American myth – sometimes they cooperate, sometimes the trickster coyote tries to take advantage of badger and occasionally he succeeds.

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• A very interesting post at The Atlantic by Emily Badger (I’m not making this up – check the by-line) on urban coyotes in Chicago and some speculation on what predator will citify next. I’m voting Black Bear – as Emily mentions, it’s already happening out west and in addition bears are happy omnivores & they’re well into exurban spaces here in the east (apparently Provincetown has an entire week during which they honor bears *grin*).
• And proof that bears are here in the semi-rural east (aside from the bruin the dogs rousted out of my back yard a couple years ago) – we had a bit of excitement at work yesterday. There was a bear cub running around the grounds; no sign of mama bear, but everyone came inside for a bit. Baby bear was convinced to reverse direction: back to the woods and away from the highway he was originally pointed at. S/he seems small, but my knowledge of ursine development is pretty dang sketchy.

The cub came off the tree, made a break for it, got scared and…

…went back up the tree for a bit.

I wasn’t the only one snapping pics.