Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/20/wild-elephant-found-gingerly-w.html
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Well are you going to tell it to leave? Cause I am not telling it to leave.
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This new version of VVVVVV is so weird now that the levels can turn 90 degrees.
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I confess, I’m an engineer. I couldn’t help noticing that the floor is very, very sturdy – the reflections from it are not distorted at all when stepped on by an elephant.
Oh, yeah. Besides which the elephant and people are very cool about it all.
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Clearly the biggest takeaway from this video is that if you decide to switch from portrait mode to landscape mode in the middle of recording, the camera doesn’t care.
Just another case of :If you can’t lead by example, at least you can be a cautionary tale".
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Room Service! Did you order “The Elephant in the Room” ?
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Who asked the porter to bring up his trunk?
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How does he get inside?
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A lot of hotels in that general part of the world [1] have very wide and high lobby entrances.
[1] In my own experience, Singapore and Bangalore.
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if he was colored pink i bet a lot more customers would be doing some hilarious double-takes.
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Yes, but which room? They might want to bill him for the broken lamp.
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How much do you think elephants weigh? I wouldn’t have thought a concrete floor would visibly deflect from, like, 10 adult humans standing close together. It’s not like it’s a robot elephant although that would be cool
Adult Asian elephants weigh in between 2000 and 5000 kg. and run between two and 3.5 meters at the shoulders. That one looked to be a fair bit over 2 meters and lacks tusks (despite being referred to as “he” might be female or juvenile.) At a guess, call it 3000 kg.
That’s a lot more then ten remotely normal sized people. It’s well above most commercial live-load limits, too, and quite a few (especially older) hotels aren’t reinforced concrete. So, being the kind of geek I am, I took notice that the floor didn’t shift even the small amount that you can detect from oblique reflections from a shiny floor.
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Sri Lanka still has wild Asian Elephants, mostly in national parks and other quite remote areas. The wild population is under pressure because there’s an expanding population and well, elephants need a lot of space. I don’t know how one wound up in a city: that would be pretty far off from their usual haunts. But when humans push animals out of one place, they go to another. There are also captive elephants used for tasks like hauling logs, and there’s an annual elephant parade that is part of the festivities at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.
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“Your honor, my client the elephant says he can’t remember if he broke anything in the hotel. If he did, he says he’s forgotten all about it.”
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Looks like a xenoanthropological away team, investigating an artifact site.
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And here I thought they were pretty anti-tooth in Kandy… ducks
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American tourist: Martha! call room service. There’s a goddamn giant mouse roaming the corridor. I can’t get to the ice machine.
