Those of you who read The Public Domain Review will have recognised the picture above. If not just click on it to read the sad and instructive story.
I'm back in NuL and work, but this is a short week and I'm going to Liverpool for the weekend and seeing Kit. On Monday we're gong to the Royal Northern College of Music in Lancaster to see Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies doing the music for the silent classic Dr. Caligari. It's a Birthday treat for Kit.
I included the story of the rabbits because I was struck by the discrepancy between the illustrations and the story itself. I felt it related to the Mughal Crocodile I had been searching for and some of the cryptozoological websites I looked at.
I like cryptozoology; it is often hopelessly amateur and shambolic in its approach but it has a hopeless enthusiasm that one can't help but admire.
Descriptions of bizarre events and Big Fierce Animals are almost always exaggerated. Nobody wants to be attacked by a below average size tiger with small rounded teeth. If you are going to be attacked let it be by some enormous slavering and befanged brute that will be worth describing in great detail at every dinner party you attend from then on.
In Mughal art it seems to me that often the dullest and most boring creatures may be the most accurately drawn; the squirrels, sheep and mice. The mundane truth of hidden detail becomes the most beautiful part of the picture.
But I would have liked the pictures of Mary Toft's brood of bunny children to have been the reality. The truth made me cringe.
And I shall return to cringing another time.
In the last blog I said all tortoise shell cats are female. That is not entirely true.
There are rare male mutations with an extra X chromosome but they are always sterile.
I'm back in NuL and work, but this is a short week and I'm going to Liverpool for the weekend and seeing Kit. On Monday we're gong to the Royal Northern College of Music in Lancaster to see Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies doing the music for the silent classic Dr. Caligari. It's a Birthday treat for Kit.
I included the story of the rabbits because I was struck by the discrepancy between the illustrations and the story itself. I felt it related to the Mughal Crocodile I had been searching for and some of the cryptozoological websites I looked at.
I like cryptozoology; it is often hopelessly amateur and shambolic in its approach but it has a hopeless enthusiasm that one can't help but admire.
Descriptions of bizarre events and Big Fierce Animals are almost always exaggerated. Nobody wants to be attacked by a below average size tiger with small rounded teeth. If you are going to be attacked let it be by some enormous slavering and befanged brute that will be worth describing in great detail at every dinner party you attend from then on.
In Mughal art it seems to me that often the dullest and most boring creatures may be the most accurately drawn; the squirrels, sheep and mice. The mundane truth of hidden detail becomes the most beautiful part of the picture.
But I would have liked the pictures of Mary Toft's brood of bunny children to have been the reality. The truth made me cringe.
And I shall return to cringing another time.
In the last blog I said all tortoise shell cats are female. That is not entirely true.
There are rare male mutations with an extra X chromosome but they are always sterile.