“It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana. We are paying the price for preserving these animals for the world,” the president of the southern African country said.
“We want our elephants to roam freely. The German weather is bad enough for them,” Masisi said. “If you like them so much, then please accept this gift from us.”
I think we can all agree that this would be wonderful. Angela Merkel could come out of retirement to utter those famous three little words “Wir schaffen das!” as the first elephants parade through the Brandenburg Gate. Olaf Scholz could make sure he travels everywhere by elephant in an effort to seem even slightly interesting. The government could promise to send Ukraine some battle elephants instead of Taurus missiles. And imagine the joy of taking a stroll through Munich’s Marienplatz and spotting a family of elephants! It would be like going on safari but with greater sausage options!
It would also make the expression “we need to talk about the elephant in the room” (which doesn’t really exist in German but that’s not going to stop me from making a labored joke) much more interesting because there would often be an actual elephant in the room.
And now a message from our Tenuous Links Department…
You know where there would be plenty of room for elephants? The moon! And soon the moon (and its large mammals) may have its own time zone. The U.S. government has asked NASA to establish a moon-centric time reference system, which is being dubbed Coordinated Lunar Time. That’s a little tricky as time does, of course, move more quickly on the moon because there are loads of exciting things to do there (or maybe because of gravity).
