Flat Earth: Twilight of the okapi

'THE OPERA was as boring as only opera can be - that is, beyond all human endurance,' says one of Stendhal's heroes, and sometimes you know how he felt. But it's nothing to how the - I know this sounds odd - okapi at the Copenhagen Zoo felt when it heard the opera (Wagner) float from an outdoor concert in a nearby park: it fell down dead. Even that was not the end of its horrible day. Being a very rare antelope indeed, the okapi provides science with an interesting carcass. It was duly dragged off and skinned, and its flesh stored in buckets. Then the buckets disappeared. A group of students now stand accused of stealing and then barbequeing the meat to celebrate the end of their zoology course.