bond villain or master linguist?

the duck face may have replaced the sneer as the ultimate facial expression in formal portraiture, but this still doesn’t really clue us into whether or not this disgusted genius and his evil lap cat are planning to hold the world hostage for one hundred billion dollars or thinking about how to make sense of the odd little glyphs found inscribed in mayan stonework. so i will just tell you.

yuri knorozov is the russian ethnographer and linguist who first deciphered maya script. here’s how it all began »

At the closing stages of the war in May 1945, Knorozov and his unit supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin. It was here…[that] Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze. Somehow Knorozov managed to retrieve from the burning library a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which were then known…Knorozov is said to have taken this book back with him to Moscow at the end of the war, where its examination would form the basis for his later pioneering research into the Maya script.

there are many bamfs in linguistics but for my one hundred billion dollars, knorozov is the bamfiest bamf of them all.

for bestiary: a dingorilla

apart from a 1938 advertisement for shell gasoline, i can’t find any references to this marvelous hybrid animal. but just because some madison avenue ad guy dreamt up the dingorilla doesn’t mean that you and i can’t try to make one for ourselves in my subterranean insemination facilities à la that movie with val kilmer and marlon wayans.

for both wunderkammer & bestiary: a khao manee, a rare breed of cat from thailand noted for its 700-year royal pedigree and pure white fur. also, due to a freaky genetic defect, they have different coloured eyes. it is whispered that if one of these rare cats meets your gaze, you will temporarily understand all things.

know your cow butts

it used to be that one could select a good dairy cow based upon the shape of the hairs on its thighs. nowadays: growth hormones.

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source: how to select cows by william pope hazard (1889).

dancing with the vermin

i was reading a questionable novel on the nordic track last night that made reference to a species of animal known as the “japanese waltzing mouse.” i was so captivated with the idea of a mouse that knows not just how to dance, but how to dance in 3/4 time that i abandoned the nordic track machine without fully wiping it down and bum rushed my local library to find out more.

it turns out, the only references to this magical dancing species of mouse occur between 1900 - 1915. in the hysterically-titled science gossip (1900) we learn that professor gotch (professor gotch?!?!) believes that waltzing mice are probably not a separate species and their capacity to dance is most likely a genetic defect of the brain. so that settles that, but what i really want to know is: what styles of waltz do these mice know? viennese? cross-step? venezuelan? is their dance card limited to waltzes or could they possibly polka or—and this is a big or—could they lambada the night away like i did in rio back in 1994?

to find out, i dug up an old pet manual from 1914 and discovered the following:

These brown and white, piebald dancers are a source of amusement to all who watch them. Anatomists and physiologists have written long treatises upon why this mouse dances like a spinning top. But it does not matter much to us whether the dancing is caused by imperfect equilibrium through some defect of the ear or brain, or from some other cause, so long as our pets keep active and entertaining. 

Mrs. Cyrus R. Crosby has given to me the notes which she made upon the habits and care of her pair of pet waltzers. Although they are nocturnal in their habits, and begin their regular dancing after four o’clock in the afternoon, yet she found that sometimes they came out in the morning or at noon and danced for a time. Once she tried to count how many times one of them whirled without stopping; the approximate number was two-hundred and seventy-four.

there is also a really awful poem written about the japanese waltzing mice. i shall include it only so that it can help you appreciate what a good poem about a japanese waltzing mouse could be:

Little four-foot dervishes are they
As they whirl and twirl— 
It is not work and it is not play— 
‘Tis as if they just were built that way 
To twirl and whirl.

They go so fast they make a blur
As they whirl and twirl, 
Their very long tails and spotted fur 
Look like a wheel on a pivot awhirr 
As they twirl and whirl.

yak skiing

i was reading through the kindle version of my favourite extreme sports magazine looking for an exciting new pastime to take up (because honestly, naked dodge ball, tejo, and ninja star golf are getting a little boring) when i came across a listing for the little-understood sport of yak skiing. 

In the Indian hill resort of Manali, Tibetan Peter Dorje runs an operation dedicated to the most implausible extreme sport in the world: yak skiing…

Pete heads to a high slope with the yaks, trailing out a rope behind him. You wait below, wearing your skis and holding a bucket of pony nuts. When Pete reaches the top, he ties a large pulley to a tree, loops the rope through it and onto a stamping, snorting yak.

Now it’s your turn—and this is the important part. First tie yourself onto the other end of the rope, then shake the bucket of nuts and quickly put it down. The yak charges down the mountain after the nuts, pulling you up it at rocket speed. If you forget yourself in the excitement and shake the bucket too soon, you’ll be flattened by two hairy tons of behemoth. Or as Pete says, “Never shake the bucket of nuts before you’re tied to the yak rope.”

we don’t really have yaks (or mountains for that matter) in massachusetts so i may have to substitute in a skittish goat.  i will let you know how i fare and how many up-slope daffies that i wind up doing. my goat’s name is alphonse. i caught him eating a used kleenex™ once and since then we no longer eat spaghetti lady-and-the-tramp-style the way we once did.

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source: time asia magazine (2005)

for bestiary: a squonk

for the first time in my young life, i DID NOT spend my new year’s eve blasting power ballads from my fender stratocaster on the stone head of the sphinx. eschewing tradition, i instead decided that on 12:59:59 i would try parachute bungee jumping, a new extreme sport that i am pioneering whereupon i jump out of my gulfstream 250 executive jet, yank my parachute cord in a haho manner and just when the chute deploys, i bungee off of it, yo-yo-ing to the earth at terminal velocity while listening to primus on my microsoft zune.

anyway parachute bungee jumping was ok, but—in typical the-grass-is-always-greener mindset—i longed for my stratocaster and the legendary sphinx. and by way of powerful segue: do you know another legendary creature whose name starts with an ess, has 1 syllable and is useful for scrabble battles? the answer is the squonk—a pennsylvanian forest creature so ugly that it spends most of its time weeping and can evade capture by dissolving entirely into a puddle of its own tears » 

The legend holds that the creature’s skin is ill-fitting, and covered with warts and other blemishes, and so it hides from plain sight and spends much of its time weeping. Hunters who have attempted to catch squonks have found that the creature is capable of evading capture by dissolving completely into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered.

i pledge to ring in 2012 while standing on the head of one of these crybabies, maybe at terminal velocity or maybe—and this is a big maybe—while standing in an inflatable hamster ball 30,000 leagues down, at the bottom of the mariana trench.

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art credit: richard svensson

as long as i am posting pictures of turtles…

here is this one from something called the turtle derby of 1939. it is not immediately clear which of the two primary subjects of this photo is being exploited harder.

for bestiary: a fatu-livu (or gillygaloo), a mythical bird that lays square eggs. early twentieth century humorist george shepard chappell claimed that the eggs themselves resembled dice and could be employed in that capacity in a pinch.

luckily for you and i, learning how to lay square eggs is not the only method of producing them—we can always use this intriguing contraption. 

for bestiary: a globster, an unrecognisable mass of bones, tentacles, flippers, eyes or muscle that washes ashore. a globster isn’t a legendary creature so much as the hint of one. because they lack identifying features, their appearance oftentimes would give rise to myths of sea monsters and other mighty ocean beasts that liam neeson threatens to release. here are some famous globstsers. i have no recipes for cooking them »

• St. Augustine Monster (1896)
• Dunk Island Carcass (1948)
• Tasmanian Globster (1960)
• Mann Hill Beach Globster (1970)
• Godthaab Globster (1989)
• Bermuda Blob 3 (1997)
• Four Mile Globster (1997)

x-animals

i seem to have raised some stink with my moral aversion to animals that are spelled with the letter x. but fear not, there really aren’t that many of them besides the fox. here are a few more:

• addax (spiral-horned antelope)
• axolotl (a mexican salamander that looks like a homunculus; pictured above)
• box jellyfish
• culex (a mosquito)
• hyrax (these idiots)
• ibex (a mountain goat)
• lynx
• manx (a breed of cat from the isle of man)
• muskox
• ox
• xenopus (this ugly frog)
• xiphias (a sword fish)
• xolo dogs a.k.a mexican hairless dogs (either name has an x)

noteworthy: only a single one of these animals neither starts nor ends with x.