So two penguins walk into the Javits Center…. And a sloth too. The Busch Gardens people had animals at the NYTimes Travel Show yesterday, where I was volunteering for the AMC. These were magellanic penguins, Spheniscus magellanicus, standing in some appropriately melting ice. (Enough with the frickin' irony already.) I’ve never been this close to the birds before. Mere inches. Their backs were made up of discrete little stubs, looking rather rubber-like. Vestigial feathers. Strong beaks, the kind I associate with the pelagics (those birds that spend most of their lives at sea). One wag said the birds, with their black and white coloring, reminded him of the nuns, only without the rulers. Obvious showmen (one male, one female, not that you can tell from this end), the penguins seemed nonplussed about all the simian gawkers. Now, I’m of two minds of something like this: I don’t like zoos and don’t think animals should be entertainment; separating specimens from their environment is wrong. But there’s the educational value… which often doesn’t get much past the oh-it’s-cute stage (the sloth hanging around the showgirl’s neck, for instance) as well as the gene-bank (since we’re extirpating them in the wild). Yet a bird in hand is not worth two in the bush…