Expect absurdist acts of political theater throughout the new year, from all sides.
[Mrs. Guilford Dudley of Nashville with ear trumpet, talking into ear of Democratic donkey, played by Mrs. Mary Semple Scott in skit at 1920 National American Woman Suffrage Association in Chicago]
Percy was a prize-winning racing pigeon with an odd habit:
At the drop of a hat — and even without that signal — he rolls on his back, tucks in his wings, curls up his legs and claws and to all intents and purposes is dead. Only his bright red eyes and an occasional craning of the neck show that Percy is playing possum.
No matter where he is or where you put him, Percy keeps up the pose. On the top of the television, on the rim of the cup he won at the Royal Welsh Show, or tossed in the air, he holds it.
Even putting him on the floor next to Suzie the cat doesn’t cause a twitch.
If the power goes out and you don't have any candles, no problem. At least, if you happen to be in the Shetland Islands. Just stick a wick down the throat of a dead stormy petrel, and it can be used as a candle. The McGill University Office for Science and Society confirms this strange factoid. In fact, it notes that in Denmark Great Auks used to be used for the same purpose.
Or, if you're in Alaska, a candlefish can be lit on fire and used for illumination. A National Geographic video (below) shows candlefish (aka eulachon) being caught, processed, and used as candles.
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Dec 22, 1929
Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 16, 2019 -
Comments (4)
Category: Animals
The website for Indlovu Gin describes it, somewhat euphemistically, as "The only gin designed by the African elephant from foraged botanicals." Put in plainer language, it's gin made with elephant dung. As the AP reports:
The creators of Indlovu Gin, Les and Paula Ansley, stumbled across the idea a year ago after learning that elephants eat a variety of fruits and flowers and yet digest less than a third of it. “As a consequence, in the elephant dung, you get the most amazing variety of these botanicals,” Les Ansley said during a recent visit to their operations. “Why don’t we let the elephants do the hard work of collecting all these botanicals and we will make gin from it?” he recalled his wife suggesting.
Weirdo was a giant among chickens. He weighed a colossal twenty-three pounds — about four times the size of an average rooster. Throughout much of the 1970s and 80s, he was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the heaviest chicken in the world. He was said to have the strength and stamina of an ostrich.
"Grant Sullens holds his prize 23-lb. White Sully rooster. Note the gloves he is wearing for protection. Note also that the photographer stayed on the safe side of the fence." Source: Farm Journal - Nov 1971.
However, Weirdo had a temper and ferocity that matched his size. His violent exploits were legendary. He killed two cats and pecked out the eye of a dog. He routinely tore bits of metal off his feed bucket, demolishing feeders at a rate of one per month. When an ungloved visitor made the mistake of trying to touch him, he removed their fingertip. He shattered the lens of a camera. And, in his crowning achievement, he managed to rip through a wire fence and attacked and killed one of his own sons, an eighteen-pound rooster.
Just as unusual as Weirdo himself was the story of how he came to exist. He was the result of a seven-year chicken-breeding program conducted by a teenage boy, Grant Sullens, of West Point, California. Sullens had decided that he wanted to create a breed of "superchickens," and he actually achieved his goal, succeeding where highly paid poultry researchers had failed.
Desmond Slattery (1914-1977) claimed to be a naturalist. But I'm not sure how much scientific training he actually had. I suspect that's just how he rebranded himself after his career in Hollywood fizzled.
His 'Songbird Saver,' which he debuted in 1968, was designed to stop cats from attacking birds by conditioning them to think that, if they did so, the birds would explode. As explained in the LA Times (Jan 23, 1969):
Basically, the Songbird Saver consists of a small dummy bird which, when nudged by a cat for any reason, explodes.
Slattery's own news release describes its effectiveness perhaps more vividly:
"Slipping out of the house, the trainee-cat will make its stealthily stalking approach... Seeing it (the Songbird Saver), apparently frozen with terror, the trainee-cat will pounce upon it, and with the resulting explosion, that cat will go about 9 feet in the air and take off for the high timber before its feet touch the ground."
It is with this simple device that Slattery hopes to save civilization "as we know it."
"Songbirds are vital to our ecology of life," he explained. "Our society could not exist without them. Frankly, in six years we'd be up to our neck in insects."
Slattery emphasized his device is harmless to cats and uses merely the same sort of exploding caps used in cap pistols. It is based on common theories of preconditioning and some stuff he read by Mark Twain on a cat's ability to learn.
"It's based, actually, on a combination of Pavlov and Mark Twain. If both those guys are wrong, I'm wrong."
The dapper 54-year-old promoter denied he was "anti-cat" and said that in fact his invention would allow cats and birds to live together in harmony.
In the Golden Age of comics, there was no internet to provide reference fotos for odd creatures or other objects/places/people which an artist might need to draw.
What creature is this artist attempting to depict?
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.