With my ornithologist’s hat on, I keep telling you that swans are savage, murderous, semi-aquatic monsters. Now, with thanks to reader Dan Fuchs, unassailable evidence that I have been right all along…

A man whose job was to maintain and care for the swans at a suburban condominium complex in Des Plaines, Illinois was killed yesterday in what appears to have been a freak attack by one or more of the birds.

Nothing freakish about it, when, like me, you know what you’re dealing with… feathered fiends!

Just back from seeing a splendid set of Delft tiles on display in a house in Spitalfields. You can see more here.

I am grateful to Glyn Webster for alerting me to the latest fiendish schemes of the US Navy:

the lamprey’s body contains a single wavelength of oscillation at any given time, and thus always maintains an S-shape during swimming. Speed is proportional to the frequency of this wave, and can vary by an order of magnitude. Lampreys can even swim backward. Ayers is building an autonomous robotic lamprey that can do the same thing.

Ayers is not new to this. He’s been building robotic lobsters for years, and he’s basing his lamprey’s technology on those

“Now we’re almost to the point where theoretically we could begin building whole platoons of robotic lampreys and putting them on operational maneuvers in the water,” says Dr. Joel Davis, “A robotic lamprey is ideal for stealthy underwater search and identification missions.”

Her own people were mostly miserable. They wrote long glum books and sang glum songs and went on glumly about the extent of winter and the sound of the rivers freezing and the shortage of meat – not just the serfs who had had every reason to feel thoroughly depressed, but the rich and privileged. They worried about their souls and stared deeply and hopelessly into the depths of themselves. Well, that was how they had always carried on in the past anyway. It might be different since the upheavals, but Aunt Irene doubted it – circumstances did little to alter the nature of populations. They were probably worse, if the truth were known.

Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom (1982)

After four nervy months, [Gladstone] came close to proposing at the Coliseum on a moonlit January evening. A few days later he did it instead by letter. It was not a proposal to sweep a young girl off her feet.

“I seek much in a wife in gifts better than those of our human pride, and am also sensible that she can find little in me,” he wrote, in a single long-winded sentence, “sensible that, were you to treat this note as the offspring of utter presumption, I must not be surprised: sensible that the life I invite you to share, even if it be not attended, as I trust it is not, with peculiar disadvantages of an outward kind, is one, I do not say unequal to your deserts, for that were saying little, but liable at best to changes and perplexities and pains which, for myself, I contemplate without apprehension, but to which it is perhaps selfishness in the main, with the sense of inward dependence counteracting an opposite sense of my too real unworthiness, which would make me contribute to expose another – and that other!”

On receiving the letter Catherine pleaded for time, no doubt hoping it would give her the opportunity to work out exactly what Gladstone meant.*

*”He really was a frightful old prig,” wrote Clement Attlee… on reading this letter in a biography of Gladstone, “Fancy writing a letter proposing marriage including a sentence of 140 words all about the Almighty. He was a dreadful person.”

from The Lion And The Unicorn : Gladstone vs Disraeli by Richard Aldous (2006)

Further to yesterday’s postage about the RMS Titanic, here is the title page of a 1912 book about the disaster. I miss the days when books had lengthy and descriptive titles. More sunken gigantic ocean liner material at The Public Domain Review.

Dan Chambers brings to my attention a splendid example of sober and sensible news reportage.

Chaos in Barnstaple as cows escape from broken down trailer

“Chaos,” says Dan, “is a formless maelstrom of whirling matter. In this story, four cows escaped from a trailer and went missing for a short while.”

Another magnificent snippet from Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry by Alice Thomas Ellis (2004):

[The vicar’s wife] has had bad luck with hens: she lived for a time on Tristan da Cunha and says there are few things more dispiriting than seeing your poultry being blown by the wind out over the Atlantic.

A certain Mr Beale, in the nineteenth century, was collecting shells on the shores of the Bonin Islands when he encountered “a most extraordinary animal” creeping on its eight legs towards the water. “It seemed alarmed and made great efforts to escape, but the naturalist had no idea of consenting to the termination of so unexpected an interview with the odd-looking stranger,” so he trod on one of its legs and then grabbed hold of another one and then “gave it a sudden jerk to disengage it” (the poor thing was clinging to the rock). “This seemed to excite it into fury” which by now was hardly to be wondered at and, “it suddenly let go its hold of the rock and sprang on its assailant’s arm, which was bare, and fixing itself by its suckers endeavoured to attack him with its powerful beak. The sensation of horror caused by this unexpected assault may be readily imagined. Mr Beale states that the cold and slimy grasp of the ferocious animal induced a sensation extremely sickening, and he found it requisite to call to the captain, who was occupied in gathering shells at a little distance.”

I don’t know what Mr Beale had expected, but they proceeded to jump on the wretched creature and hack it with the boat knife: “It did not surrender, till the limbs by which it so tenaciously adhered were successively cut off.” The Victorians were notoriously wasteful of wildlife and we may be sure that Mr Beale and the captain did not cook and eat this octopus. We are told that cephalopods are unusually intelligent, which strikes us, prejudiced as we are against things with tiny heads and eight legs, as strange but caused me to feel some sympathy with Mr Beale’s antagonist. It must have experienced its own sensation of horror on being confronted with a heavily bewhiskered Victorian naturalist.

from Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry by Alice Thomas Ellis (2004)

Victorian ladies who, one gets the impression, spent most of their lives in what is now known as ‘socialising’, rarely set foot in the kitchen except to have words with Cook, but were frequently found in hysterics, or high strikes as the condition was vulgarly known. When visitors came to call, a young woman had to know when to stay in the room or when to make herself scarce and while the writers on etiquette tried to be reassuring – ‘A young girl with all the freshness of youth and the sweet dignity of woman-hood has a sure passport into society which assures her a warmth of welcome’ (the proviso, as long as her papa has pots of money, was considered at once too obvious and too coarse to be stated) – it is no surprise that so many of them were reduced to lying on the floor drumming their heels and screaming. Hysteria, which was, according to The Dictionary Of Daily Wants, ‘more common in females than men’, was characterised by ‘low spirits, a feeling of depression and anxiety, sudden involuntary grief and tears, palpitation, sickness, a sense of suffocation and the apparent presence of a ball in the throat; theses symptoms are or are not attended with sobs and sudden fits of laughter, convulsive twitches and contractions of the hands and arms, finally terminating, after more or less muscular contractions, in insensibility and coma’. If the patient was young and robust, she was bled, but in general it was thought sufficient to throw cold water on her.

from Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry (2004)

from The New Psalmanazar

“To begin from the top: I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head and three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away; one on my left cheek which fractured the jaw bone and has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound; one over the right temple and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly grazed the windpipe; a musket ball in the hip, which made its way through my back, slightly grazing the backbone; five sabre cuts on my right arm and hand, three of the fingers broken, the hand cut three-fourths across, and the wrist bones cut through; three cuts on the left arm, the bone of which has been broken but is again uniting; one slight wound on the right leg and two with one dreadful gash on the left, to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up.”

Almost as an afterthought he added that on arrival at Sidi el Muktar he had caught the plague – “a dreadful malady somewhat similar to yellow fever in its symptoms” – and had spent nine days “so ill with fever that it was presumed, expected and hoped that I should die”. While he was sick most of his possessions, including his gun, had been stolen and sent to be sold in the Timbuctoo market. “I am nevertheless doing well,” he concluded, writing with only the thumb and middle finger of his left hand, “and hope yet to return to England with much important geographical information.”

… “My father used often to accuse me of a want of common sense,” he once confided to his sister, “‘Tis true, I never possessed any, nor ever shall.”

Gordon Laing in Africa in 1825, from Barrow’s Boys by Fergus Fleming (1998)

It is almost a year ago that I (inadvertently) set out to learn to speak Danish. My beginner’s vocabulary list is here. I am now watching Borgen, and have progressed by leaps and bounds. Here are the latest additions to my phrasebook:

English : briefing. Danish : briefing.
English : spin doctor. Danish : spin doctor.
English : girl power. Danish : girl power.
English : wet tee-shirt competition. Danish : wet tee-shirt competition.
English : famous for fifteen minutes. Danish : famous for fifteen minutes.

Of all the miserable places on earth, a snow village recently deserted is the most gloomy.

George Francis Lyon, Private Journal During The Recent Voyage Of Discovery Under Captain Parry (1824)

On Commander John Ross’s 1818 voyage to search for the North-West Passage,

To justify the expedition’s scientific aims the Admiralty and the Royal Society donated chronometers and compasses – the Isabella carried seven different models of each – plus a number of other instruments, among them Henry Kater’s Pendulum for measuring the ellipticity of the globe, Mr Plentty’s Cork Life Boat, Englefield’s Mountain Barometer and Companion, Burt’s Buoy and Knipper, Trengrouse’s Apparatus for Saving Lives, and Troughton’s Whirling Horizon. John Ross would later contribute to the array with a dredging device of his own invention which he whimsically christened ‘the Deep Sea Clamm’.

Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (1998)