Secrets of Millipede Racing Revealed!

Benjamin, book pirate and new hero, has sent me a copy of the Minor Field Sports book I blogged earlier. It contains, as we know, some very, very minor field sports. Here, for your delectation, are some of its observations on Millipede Racing:

Millipede racing is an indoor pastime

It may be described as the most minor of all minor sports.

There are many millipedes, but so far as I have discovered, only one racing millipede.

It is a very handsome little beast about an inch in length.

It curls up in a small ring when at rest, and races best on a polished tabletop.

Once they start, on the removal of the ruler, they go like steam, with occasional brief pauses for enquiries, probably.

A pool or sweepstake may be arranged.

If it is proposed to keep an outstanding racer it should be placed in a dark box and fed upon bulbs and roots.

Strang birds

Brian at The Natural Stone has some cracking photos of Crossbills at Southey Wood. I've never seen one of these strange northern parrot-birds close up. Only far away, chittering in flocks at the tops of high pines in Scotland and Thetford. An irruption of crossbills in 1640 elicited this fabulous contemporary account. I've lost the correct reference, but it's reprinted in Ian Newton's book on Finches:

"...there was greate plenty of strang birds, that shewed themselves at the time the apples were in full rype, who fedde upon the kernells onely of these apples, and haveinge a bill with one beake wrythinge over the other... The oldest man living had never heard or reade of any such like bird... They were very good meate."

Look at that extra information, there. I never knew crossbills were yummy! A couple of years ago, while working on dictionary entries on 19th century zoologists, I kept reading how, for example, ichthyologists fried up new fishy discoveries at the end of a hard day's collecting. Important research.

Edibility is so rarely a feature of species accounts and taxonomic decisions these days...

Have you seen

The Fuertes visual archive at Cornell university? It's splendid. Addictive. I have been thinking about bird illustration lately, as well as writing the old thesis and walking a lot. Some very half-baked theories about bird artists are slowly baking away. If they seem to make sense on later reflection, I'll post 'em here. For now, though: Look! Lammergeier!

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Hello again

Back to the old brown design. Apparently the grey one looked atrocious in some older browsers. And much as I'd recommend everyone not use Explorer...

Do Androids Dream of Fighting Beetle-bots?

Plastic fighting robot rhinocerous beetles, complete with faux-log controller. I'm not sure what this means. I'm not talking about the Japanese script.

Wastrel Pluvialis

A childishly good time was had by me at the Mechanical Contrivium. Thank you Xtinpore...

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Fretmarks

1. Lightning strikes fretmarks over seven times every hour!
2. If you don't get out of bed on the same side you got in, you will have fretmarks for the rest of the day.
3. All shrimp are born as fretmarks, but gradually mature into females.
4. The canonical hours of the Christian church are matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, fretmarks and compline!
5. All swans in England belong to fretmarks.
6. Europe is the only continent that lacks fretmarks.
7. Snow White's coffin was made of fretmarks.
8. Julius Caesar wore a laurel wreath to cover up fretmarks.
9. Apples are covered with a thin layer of fretmarks!
10. Neil Armstrong first stepped on fretmarks with his left foot.

Eerie, some of those.

Historical Revisionism

In a fit of enthusiasm, and in homage to fatrobot, who's showing us all how it's done, I added, ahem, Haloscan commenting and trackback to this here blog. Like a dunderhead, however, I didn't read the small print of the install. All the lovely comments of the past have gone. Wiped away. Like Stalin's face. Oh, I'm such an idiot. But please forgive my raw technological incompetence. Because now you can slander me in fretmarks' exciting new comment pop up window! Huzzah!

(Stalin's face, btw, because of a story told me by a historian. He once produced indisputable evidence, in the form of a photograph of Comrade Someone standing next to Stalin, both smiling away, that Comrade Someone had not only met, but was probably best buddies with the Great Helmsman.

The recipient of the photograph shrugged, took a coin from his pocket, and before the horrified historian could do anything, handed the photograph back with Stalin's face completely scratched away. While deadpanning "no, no. He never met Stalin. Never."

Gladiatory

Check out Minor Field Sports by L. C. R. Cameron. Published in 1900, this book contains a wealth of by now almost totally illegal countryside pursuits. Look at the contents! Hawking insects with jackdaws! Sniggling eels! Millipede-racing! Beetle fighting!

Millipede-racing should be revived. At once.

Fat, respiration, gulls

Three words used by my friend Rob to describe the work of sculptor Stephen Dilworth. I first saw Dilworth's work in a gallery in the comfy, leafy fox-hunting county of Rutland, far from where Dilworth lives and works. Which is right at the narrow north-westerly edge of Britain, on the Isle of Harris, a world of rock, machair, weather and sea. In Rutland his sculptures played hell with distance, felt like relics from impossibly remote and distant places. Like narwhal tusks, or tiny, threadbare scraps of silk torn from one of Scott's expedition tents and framed behind glass.

Dilworth's sculptures are magical. I'm not being flippant. He seals phials of mountain air inside stone. He encloses the found corpses of birds in hand-built caskets of wood, metal or rock. Each is unsettling as hell and yet at the same time as right as rain, as natural and uncomplicated as a pebble is.

I can't imagine what it would do to a house to own a Dilworth Sculpture, but I'd like to find out.

You can see more of his work here

Wren, 1993.

Duck and cover

Mr Bodio has said some Very Nice Things about this here blog on his there blog. Thank you Mr Bodio!

Covers again

Again! I'm probably starting to resemble that querulous and worrying type, the old fashioned British "enthusiast". Ahem. But don't worry, this is the last bit on falconry book covers. And I promise not to continue by enumerating 1930s train timetables, or explaining at length the wing formulae of tricky western palearctic warblers.

But I like these covers. They are funny. Because falconers are an intransigent and self-willed bunch, and so are publishers. These covers are often the debris left behind after a pitched antler-locking, sword-swinging battle between the two. Sometimes one wins, sometimes the other. Sometimes, one suspects, they both gave up, stormed out, and left the design to the 16 year old work-experience kid.

They didn't with this one. It's beautiful:


That's because no falconers were involved. Richard Blome has been dead for a very long time. It's also unusual in that this is a falconry book with a green cover that DOESN'T have the title in bright red. Bright Red Letters on Green Background = Hurt Eyes/Unreadable Title. Both not so good for the impulse buyer. Should I buy this book? What's it about? Ow!



The second one is funny, too: look at that Very Cross Falcon. Someone removed the astroturf cover from the top of her perch, and she's sitting in the hole.

Right, on to another rare example of a green falconry book without a red title. And this one's just great. Pretty much the model of a good falconry book cover. The no nonsense title: Falconry Basics. And your basic model falconry bird, too: red-tail. Admittedly, looking a little less than happy; but I guess that's the state most beginners see red-tails in, most of the time. Helpful.


No idea what the book is like. I've never read it. My loss, I suspect. OK, here's the British version.


I think William's made a mistake, here, putting a common buzzard on the cover. It's British, yes. But seeing as us British falconers only fly captive-bred hawks, why not a bird that actually CATCHES things?

I've spent a lot of time tetchily putting up with digs from American falconers about our 'puny buzzards'. True. True. American has red-tails. Redtails will haul down hares the size of dogs, chase squirrels around treetrunks and slam through six foot deep briars to catch rabbits. Here, in Britain, we have common buzzards. Like this one. I flew one when I was a very young falconer. It caught nothing. In desperation, I once cast it off into a leafy oak overlooking a field full of young rabbits, and hid. HID! It looked confused for a while, craning its neck trying to see me, and then started mewing piteously. Where are you? What am I doing here? And then it actually came looking for me. Pee-yow...pee-yow...the mournful cry of an insecure partially-imprinted common buzzard. So I'm never going to read this book, Lee William Harris, because I wanted a redtail when I was a kid, and I never got one.

Ahem.

OK, so I should do more work now. But here's a delightful case of a book cover that, alas, is entirely laughable, even though it's absolutely beautiful and has been designed and produced with obvious care. Answers why it's so laughable, anyone?

Goodbye anonymity

In the cause of celebration. Because my book is out! It just hit the bookstands! Now I just have to finish my thesis, and I can REALLY celebrate!

Haggard

I've been productive as hell this morning, work-wise, and I need a break. So, here, as part of my interlude, is a survey of the best and worst of.....FALCONRY BOOK COVERS!

So here's a typical one. Why do you buy a falconry book? The same reason you buy an aeroplane book. It has a BIG PICTURE of one on the cover. The more glamorous the falcon, the better the book. If you're a falconer-artist (so many are, so many are woeful) you can even get to do your OWN cover! huzzah!


It's kinda arty...get the white gyrfalcon on a white ptarmigan on a white background thing? Martha Stewart would do this kind of book cover, if she was into falconry. Which reminds me...according to a friend of mine (who knows, this might be a totally bogus tale) of the day Martha held a big summer celebration partay up in Maine. It may have been on a boat? Can't remember. What I do remember is that it involved a wicker basket of white doves. Ahhhh. At the summit of the celebrations, the doves are released, and everyone applauds. Before a wild peregrine falcon decides to catch one, smacks into a fleeing dove right over the partygoers, and drops it, dying and bleeding, right into the white-on-white colour scheme of the beautiful celebration dining table. Ooops. Martha was clearly impressed. She insisted on having a peregrine on her tv show afterwards, it seems. Look...can you see a 'we're both predators' glint in her happy eyes? (Only joking, Martha: you are a goddess).



Right. Back to the covers. Now this next one is perfect, I reckon, considering what it is. Air force blue, white gyrfalcon mascot, square jaw, stripes, white gloves, the awesome chapel in the background: god, falconry, the US military and a nice gold box round the photo. Peace is our profession, and all that.



The US Air Force has F-16 Fighting Falcons. American falconry has Hunting Falcons. This is what I call a classic bit of Frontier Spirit Falconry Book Design. No messing about. Hunting Falcons. Big no-mess-with-me font. Big picture of a mean falcon, holding something it's killed. Feathers on its beak, snowy mountains in the background. It's so damned aspirational. The aspiring falconer thinks: I want this falcon, I want to eat the duck, I want to live in the mountains, wear coonskin caps and drink shed-loads of whisky. And love it. I am no greenhorn at heart! Long live frontier Ameriky!



This is a far more subdued version, designed for the sensibility of the English falconer. No dead things. No mountains. You don't even get to see the falcon's ankles. Just her fine, aristocratic features. She's not even looking at you. You, the mere reader, are simply not worth her time. Of course, this is such a hook; the English would-be falconer has to buy the book, because, well, la belle dame sans merci is the model for English falconer's relationships with their birds.



And sort of in the same vein, ahem:



That was a cheap shot. She's a great falconer. And there's a long tradition of putting yourself on the cover, with a hawk. Look! the photo says. I know what I'm doing! See? I'm a falconer! Trust me!

And this is my favourite EVER example of this. My god, this cover just makes me laugh out loud whenever I even THINK of it. It is so bloody ridiculous in every single respect that I can hardly drag my eyes away:



I must stop for a bit. Ha ha ha. More later. This is fun...

Also cool

It's an immature peregrine eating its raw breakfast on the deck of an Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge research vessel. I guess it grabbed that bird out of the air at sea and made for the boat to eat. Those blond fringes and streaks on its crown mark it as a arctic race, Falco peregrinus tundrius.

Peregrine means wanderer, and arctic-breeding peregrines migrate insane distances! A South African chap I know has trapped Siberian peregrines wintering on his local beaches. Alaskan birds head down right into South America. And they cross hundreds of miles of open water on their way. If they bump into ships on passage, they might spend a while cadging a ride. Sensible birds.

A map of the routes of satellite-tracked peregrines here.

Off to the office now. Work beckons. Not quite so far. Only five minutes walk, but like the peregrine, I may well pick up breakfast on the way.

Cool

Thanks to Reid Farmer at Querencia for a link to a story that might, if you were so inclined, suggest that the reason we're so fascinated by birds of prey is the same reason we're mesmerised by sharks, tigers and crocodiles. They might eat us.

Tagamet

No-one's tagged me. I've been waiting, but in vain. Sod them all, I'm going to do it too. Even if no-one's interested. It's 11.06 pm, Terminator is on tv, the parrot is asleep in his nestbox and C is upstairs having a bath, so no-one can prevent me from tagging myself. Tag. Tag tag tag.

Four jobs you've had
1. falcon breeder
2. curmudgeonly second-hand bookseller (turkish cigarettes, black coffee, anomie).
3. supermarket checkout girl
4. I'm sorry, I can't stop thinking about (3). It was traumatic. I was such a baby. The nasty rough boys in the butcher section at the back of the store made a giant male member out of sausagemeat and left it on my cash register for a joke. Ha ha ha. Ha.

Four movies I could watch over and over
1. Bottle Rocket
2. Best in Show
3. Napoleon Dynamite
4. Lawrence of Arabia (the first half, before it gets depressing. Up to the train bit).
There are others.

Four places you've lived
1. Camberley, Surrey. See (3) under the jobs section for a taste of what that was like.
2. Boise, Idaho! (it needed an exclamation mark).
3. Wales.
4. Cambridge.

Four tv shows I like to watch. Sorry, love to watch:
1. Black books. See (1) under the jobs section. It's not a satire, it's all true.
2. Firefly
3. Father Ted
4. Sherlock Holmes. With Jeremy Brett.

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Iceland.
2. Kennebunkport, Maine.
3. India.
4. The Seychelles.

Four blogs I visit daily
I don't do anything daily except drink coffee and sleep. But I like the blogs on my linklist sufficiently to click on the little words that make up their names an awful lot.

Four of my Favourite Foods
1. Kedgeree
2. I can't answer this now, I'm not hungry. I'll come back and finish it later.
3.
4.

Four Places You'd Rather Be
1. Over there.
2. Out hawking, anywhere.
3. Dining at Rules
4. On a beach, north-west coast of Scotland.

Four Albums You Can't Live Without, Lately
1. Grateful Dead, Aoxomoxoa (not a deadhead, but this album is very, very cute)
2. Benjamin Britten, Complete String Quartets
3. Led Zeppelin IV
4. Evolution Control Committee, Deconstructing Beck.
But I could live without all of them, truly. A ridiculous question, even if an ironic one. Note: this is why you've not been tagged, you cynical monster.

Four Vehicles You've Owned
Four renault fives, of differing colours.

a sparrow's flight

So there I was, having a bowl of leek and potato soup in the cafe of Minsmere RSPB reserve. Cold, but happy. A long walk in bitter wind makes drinking soup (spoon held in freezing fingers) a particular pleasure. And there, on the other side of the cafeteria, a couple were having lunch too. Something about them seemed familiar. I mused for a bit, munching my bread roll, and suddenly realised that I knew them. That chap was a poet, a very good poet indeed, one I'd met last about a decade ago. I went over and ... huzzah, I was right! And ten minutes later, walked with them around the reserve again (much more delightful the second time, in such very good company) before zooming back to their house in the local village of Bramfield for tea and parkin and warmth.

We walked up the road to visit the local church. Next to a round, free-standing flint-faced tower, a thirteenth-century thatched building as beautiful inside as out. We went to see the memorial to Arthur Coke and his wife Elizabeth by sculptor Nicholas Stone. Elizabeth died in childbirth. Her alabaster figure lies supine under the recess where her husband's marble statue kneels. She holds her baby close to her breast, the whole figure quietly shining in glorious fluted folds of cloth and figured lace. It's a terribly sad and moving sculpture, and quite unforgettable.

As was this ledger stone on the floor. Grim and strange. The inscription reads:

Between the Remains of her Brother EDWARD, And of her Husband ARTHUR. Here lies the Body of BRIDGETT APPLETHWAIT. Once BRIDGETT NELSON. After the Fatigues of a Married Life Born by her with Incredible Patience, for four Years and three Quarters bating three Weeks; And after the Enjoiment of the Glorious Freedom of an Easy and Unblemish't Widowhood, for four Years and Upwards, She Resolved to run the Risk of a second Marriage-Bed. But DEATH forbade the Banns—— And having with an Apopleptick Dart (the same Instrument with which he had formerly Dispatch't her Mother) Touch't the most Vital part of her Brain; She must have fallen Directly to the Ground (as one Thunder-strook) if she had not been Catch't and Supported by her Intended Husband. Of which Invisible Bruise, after a Struggle for above Sixty Hours, with that Grand Enemy to Life (But the certain and Merciful Friend to Helpless Old Age) In Terrible Convulsions, Plaintive Groans or Stupefying Sleep, without Recovery of her Speech or Senses, She Dyed on ye 12th day of September in ye year of Our Lord 1737 and of her own Age 44.


As we left the church, a small bird flew from the vestibule, where it had been trapped, out of the door and into the darkening sky.

Mush

I like tv adverts. Of all kinds. I like comedy adverts, I like serious adverts. I have a special love for adverts for products marooned in their own advertising cliches. All 1990s British shampoo ads had a middle eight section of computer-animated molecules zooming into strands of hair, transforming them from sisal to glassy rope. And don't even get me started on the joy of facecream adverts! De-creasing! Contains Boswelox! Contains Biospheres! Contains Co-resistium!

Witty, kitsch, or embarrassing. Until last week, these were the unspoken categories of my advert watching.

But I have discovered another category! The evil advert! The advert that's so wholly, irredeemably, smugly and nastily horrible, and in so many ways it just freaks me the hell out.

New Range Rover Advert: Go Beyond

Speechlessly noxious.

I used to drive an old landrover once. It was very handy in the field. The muddy fields of sheep, and the muddy fields of falconry. A colleague and I drove it up to London once, parked it in Pimlico. There were other 4x4s in the street. But they were sleek, shiny, scary monster Range Rovers. And they didn't have half a roll of barbed wire and sheeplicks in the back, and neither (I assume) were they filled with the rich and penetrating smell of a very dead sheep that we'd hauled from the top field the previous day.

The hypocrises of 4X4 marketing, holds Robert Macfarlane, are dark, multiple and pernicious:

Everything about the product urges us to the wrong relationship with our environment. The vehicles themselves are the gargoyle of a rampant and acrid form of individualism: gated communities of one. They bespeak the urge to dominate and crush which is at the root of what Ivan Illich called "the 500-year war on sustainability". They expound a vision of an unspoiled and untroubled land, even as they market the tools of its further wreckage.

But it's not just nature they drive over! Look! It's so funny! Indigenous peoples slapstick! Laugh at the Inuit falling over! And drive on! Drive on!

I am going to post something POSITIVE later. I promise.

Workwear

More Firefly posts. Boy, this series has got its hooks into me and C. I've been exploring the massive, baroque web-presence of its fan-base. Everything from the familiar (t-shirts, bumper stickers, hats, books) to the delightful (like a box of juggling geese). One particular line, a parting shot uttered by psychotic-but-sweet-ballet-dancer- assassin-in-motorcycle boots River Tam, is funny as hell in the episode. But taken out of context, and printed on 100% cotton, whoa! This must be the ultimate t-shirt to wear to a university lecture or academic seminar. Or a job interview. I must order one immediately!

I want a holiday

and I want to spend it here.

The World's Greatest Science Protecting America

I love Los Alamos National Laboratory's new slogan. The World's Greatest Science Protecting America! Fantastic concept. With such reassuring relevance to LANL's main job of maintaining America's nuclear arsenal. You know, the one The World's Greatest Science circa. 1945 invented.

LANL has the best people doing the best science to solve problems of global importance.

That's what it says on their website. Raaaah! So, today's question. How does that stirring statement relate to this LANL research program? (a treatment pulled from this article here, from which there's a link to the actual paper). Just how? In a game-theoretical sense? In a symbolic sense? In no sense at all? Either way, and any way at all, it's more than a little ... worrying.




"It's just not cricket, Grovesy"

Perverse