The Friday Fillip

…comes on a Thursday this week, because tomorrow, Good Friday, is a holiday and, I suspect, no one will be reading Slaw, even a Slavian fillip. [Kudos to John Gregory for coming up with that perfect parallel to Shavian!]

Sheep’s the theme, as some of us contemplate the traditional dinner of lamb. And I’ve a flock of mostly silly stuff for you, which seems somehow fitting. But first up is Sheep 101, that course you avoided back in university in favour of The Comedy Film in Popular Culture, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1.30 p.m. But I’ll only detain you here, class, for the moment necessary to point out that there are 221 ovine breeds, including the tendentiously named Meatmaster and British Milk Sheep, as well as the spiral-horned Racka (no, not as in “rack a’ lamb”) and the minature Olde English Babydoll Southdown, suitable for cropping your suburban lawn.

The intersection of law and sheep is best avoided — I’m thinking of distress damage feasant — with perhaps this exception, possessing a degree of charm:

Yukon Order in Council 2000/05
Pursuant to subsection 14(3) of the Highways Act, the Commissioner in Executive Council orders as follows:

1 The portion of the old Blind Creek Road between the gates at Kilometres 9 and 10 as shown on Schedule A hereto is hereby closed between January 1 and May 31 and between November 1 and December 31 of each year to protect the Fannin sheep winter range.

Turns out that Fannin sheep are sufficiently special that there’s an annual sheep viewing festival at Faro, in Yukon. But I digress…

On to the promised silliness:

The Sheep Market is a website that lets you look at the 10,000 sheep (all facing left) drawn to order via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk at two cents a pop. Combined into a single graphic, a patch of which you see here, each portrait pops up as you move your mouse over it; a click reproduces the chosen sheep image on the screen. Hours of fun for the whole family.

Haik Ewe, as you might guess, mixes sheep and haiku. One Valerie Laws (NB) wrote these words on the backs of sheep, one per beast:

CLOUDS GRAZE THE SKY;
BELOW, SHEEP DRIFT GENTLE
OVER FIELDS, SOFT MIRRORS,
WARM WHITE SNOW.

She then noted the accidental poems that were formed as the sheep grazed in this or that formation. Some of the animals did better than Valerie. Thanks to someone named Kevan, you can try your hand at herding the sheep into poesy.

Speaking of herding sheep, you might like to have a go at a BBC game that tests your reaction time in what I can only say is a very odd way: various (cartoon) sheep graze peacefully at the left of the browser window until suddenly one of them makes a break for greener pastures; your job is to click a button that shoots a tranquilizer dart at the renegade; at the end of your efforts, you’re told what your reaction time is. Happy hunting… I guess.

In an effort to redeem the English, let me close with a U.K. video, “Extreme Sheep LED Art.” I think it’ll tickle your fancy.

Enjoy your holiday.