An illustration for this purpose can be found in a sixteenth-century edition of De Arte Coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking).
A 1905 article in the Strand magazine provides more info about this work:
amongst the dishes herein enumerated we may find hot-pots of cow-heel, pickled broom buds, and Tetrapharmacon, of which latter delicacy we are told that it was made of pheasant, peacock, a wild sow's hock and udder, with a bread pudding over it.
The work is divided into ten books, beginning with soups, pickles, and sauces, and proceeding through the whole art of cookery, with hundreds of recipes, the very reading of which makes one's mouth water. For instance, who could resist "virgin sow drest with broth made of pepper, wine, honey, oyl, and stew'd damsons"? Or dormouse sausages? ...
There are many recipes in the book to dress "cramp-fish, that numb the hands of those that touch them; the cuttlefish, whose blood is like ink; the pourcontrel, or many feet, the sea-urchin or hedgehog." ...
Then, again, we are given minute instructions for the carving of beasts whose flesh was esteemed by the ancients. "In partes of Asia and Africa," we are told, "the oliphant is eaten, not as the Romans and Egyptians were wont to do, sparingly and only as pertain'd to his feete, trunk, and tayle all of which were great delicacies, but his entire carcase is carved and consumed." For the benefit of those who might happen to possess an elephant and be tempted to eat him a chart of carving instructions accompanies the text.
I just don't know... That lion looks pretty forbidding to me, for a suitable company mascot, as if he's saying, "Yeah, pal, just try to take my caffeine fix away from me!"
And won't the creatures of Narnia complain that we're using Aslan as a shill?
Armstrong Baillie may be unemployed but he is still working to make the world a better place, one giraffe appearance at a time. The 32 year old Scotland resident carries out random acts of kindness like giving gifts to needy children.
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He calls himself "The Good Giraffe" and has set up a blog for people to make suggestions about what he should do as his next good deed.
Rats use whiskers to feel around in the dark. They navigate by "whisking" — moving their whiskers rapidly back and forth. Humans, however, don't have whiskers. But could people learn to navigate in the dark using artificial whiskers? That was the question posed by a recent experiment published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The researchers attached plastic whiskers to the fingers (not the cheeks, unfortunately) of blindfolded volunteers. These volunteers were then asked to try to identify the relative position of several poles on either side of them. The researchers discovered that the volunteers skill at this task improved significantly over time. So they were learning to use whiskers just as a rat would. The practical value of all this is that the researchers hope to develop finger whiskers for blind people.
Incidentally, if you read the abstract of the experiment, you would never know it had anything to do with rats and whiskers. The researchers describe their experiment as a study of "motor-sensory interactions in humans using a novel object localization task that enabled monitoring the relevant overt motor and sensory variables."
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.