This is all over the interwebs, as it should be, so I won’t apologize if you’ve already seen it.
Apparently in Sydney, Australia, there is a royal easter show that includes a runway fashion turn for ducks. My Modern Met has the story [met] and these photos are lifted from there.
I am also impressed that they got prince Andrew to pose in some of the shots.
I am sad that it’s too late to do an episode of Absolutely Fabulous where Edina and Patsy get suckered into flying down to Australia to serve as celebrity judges for this important event. Naturally, Bubble gets the flight arrangements wrong and somehow Saffy has to stand in.
I would try to put a Boris Johnson wig and a Donald Trump wig on another; perhaps dye the poor creature slightly orange. A duck in pope drag would also be quite impressive. There is a lot of potential in this contest.
Someone with good video editing and voice-over skills could have a lot of fun with this.
I was just thinking “It looks like someone developed a pattern and everyone just riffs off it” and then I realized that the ducks wings are trapped under the “dress” and perhaps the ducks’ experience of the event is that they are trapped and desperately trying to escape while predators surround them, staring and laughing with their teeth bared, “foie gras!”
Are those geese or ducks? Is there a sufficient difference that we can tell? I am pretty goose/duck-averse because of a run-in I had with an angry muscovy duck as a kid.
Cat on a hot satellite dish: Elon Musk’s Starlink antenna hits surprise problem
The ones in dark brown robes: are those fryers?
link
They look like runner ducks to me.
(I’ve been watching too much Morgan Gold…)
Reginald Selkirk@#3:
The primary way scientists differentiate between ducks and geese is based on how many bones they have in their necks
/makes Peking duck, “ah, yes, that was a goose. Let’s check that one next.”
I’ve been observing how the little hats are held on with glue strips. This may actually be horrifying.
I agree, pretty sure these are runner ducks. Runner ducks do not fly, they only run on the ground, so I doubt that they are distressed about not flying. It does look to me as though the wings are at least somewhat free, and actually it would be kind of hard to fully stop the wings from moving. Hard to say though without being able to see them more closely.
Strangely enough I could not find any information on the ducks. There is a little info on the owner who has apparently also trained some of his pigs to play musical chairs. It sounds as though the guy loves his ducks, so they would be more like pets. Runner ducks can live to twelve years old, maybe once he trains them for this he uses them over and over. Not sure.
The wings are visibly free in all the photos, so probably no problem for the ducks. I imagine the hats might be attached with a clip of some kind?
Reginald Selkirk @1, mentioning the cats on the Starlink satellite dishes:
Hmmm. I think a nice metal cage would keep out the cats.
I recommend a spacing of 2.65mm for the mesh.
Dems is ducks. I would think the poor things are feeling bad enough by all this forced anthropomorphism. Dressing them as herr dumpf would be just humiliating them for no good reason. (They can be quite tasty though.)
While I’ve never been a fan of dressing up animals, I have to admit, that lavender number is quite smashing. And the blue outfit below it is spot-on QEII cosplay.
I guess one could calculate the bandwidth absorbtion of a cat. Might come in handy for people building software-defined networks: “lets slow it down over there, put a cat on it”