But Is It Art?

Just a footnote to the last post - I realise a number of people who read this live in America (you poor, poor, sorry people) and I don't know how familiar Ab Fab is to American audiences. So if there are any of you who haven't seen the segment I referred to, here's the part quoted courtesy of YouTube:



Of course, as YouTube has been blocked at uni to stop students from simply downloading stuff all day, and I live in one of the sections of Perth where we can only have a dial-up connection at home because the phone-lines can't carry broadband, this took half an hour of buffering to check I had the right one-minute segment. I hope you appreciate it.

My Name is LUCA

All workers on bacterial evolution dream that someday they may find LUCA. LUCA is the euphonious acronym for the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the theoretical organism or proto-organism from which all the living things we see around us today are descended. In a comment on an earlier post, though, I admitted to never being able to use the name LUCA without the tune to a certain 1987 Suzanne Vega hit running through my head*. Howard A. Landman agreed with me, and actually took it a little further. Without further ado, here are the lyrics he has penned for "My Name is LUCA":

My name is LUCA,
I lived on the ocean floor
near some hydrothermal vent
or maybe in a tidepool by the shore.
And everything that's now alive
is my descendant that survived.
All the others went away (x3)

I'm not the first life. No,
that was way before my time.
Things were so much simpler then,
the start of evolution's climb.
Born in a world of RNA,
or some say protein, some say clay.
No one knows just what it was (x3)

Now if you feel inclined
to explore your family tree,
you're gonna have a real hard time
tracing your way back down to me
'cause horizontal gene transfer
has left the path a tangled blur.
Still, it wouldn't hurt to try (x3)

(repeat first verse)

*The other option would be to channel the gnat from Alice Through the Looking-Glass and suggest a joke be made about "LUCA" and "lucre" - maybe "we all have one if not the other"?

How Irritable is This Bird?

Jackass penguin (Spheniscus demersus). Photo by Tuxette.

It's definitely intriguing how the meanings of words can change over the years. A Blog Around the Clock recently presented a quote that claimed that Charles II described the newly-built St Paul's Cathedral as "awful, pompous and artificial". This was entirely complimentary - "awful" indicates something that inspires awe, "pompous" roughly means "majestic", while "artificial" means that it indicated a great deal of artifice on the part of its builder - and "artifice" would have meant "technical or artistic skill", having not yet gained its current connotation of duplicity and deception. "Automaton" is another word that has changed significantly in meaning. It literally means "self-moving", and so when it was first coined would have indicated the independent, undirected movement and action of the subject - almost the complete opposite of its current usage.

I bring up those examples to segue into another change in meaning that I came across yesterday. I happen to have in front of me a copy of the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1866, in which (amongst other things) W. Lilljeborg presented a revised classification for birds. In explaining the principles on which he based his classification, Professor Lilljeborg notes:

Irritability seems to us to be the most distinguishing character for birds, and this should consequently be taken into consideration more than others with regard to their classification.

Canada goose (Branta canadensis). Photo by George K.

I'm sorry? You're classifying birds according to how irritable they are? Fortunately, Lilljeborg further explains, "We do not by irritability mean the muscular strength alone, but vivacity and activity generally". Lilljeborg was basing his classification on a principle that evolution had proceeded from less derived, more sluggish forms to more derived and accomplished forms. All horribly Scala Naturae-based, of course, and more than a little inaccurate in some regards:

The swimmers seem to us the lowest, from their showing a tendency to the lowest form of vertebrated animals - the fish-form. In the [penguins], where the wings resemble fins, and where they, as in all other diving birds, serve as such, we have this form most strongly designated. The heavy, clumsy structure, with small wings and short legs, also makes them generally less active than other birds, and shows a lower development of the type of bird.

Southern yellow-billed hornbill (Tockus leucomelas). Photo by Tuxette.

A description obviously heavily biased by observations of penguins almost solely on land, not in the water where they are far more adept. I also had to snicker somewhat at Lilljeborg's complaint about the previous tradition of placing the birds of prey (rather than the passerines he favoured) at the "summit" of avian evolution:

A system that places the dirty vultures highest, does not seem to us to indicate a correct idea of the nature of birds.

Great blue heron (Ardea herodias). Photo by tofrg.

Lest I give you too negative impression of Lilljeborg's skills as a systematist, his final classification stands up fairly well by the standards of the time. The classification itself was generally based on good anatomy - the philosophical considerations mostly affected what order he listed things in. Still, I couldn't read that section on "irritability" without getting the mental image of Professor Lilljeborg, his fingers heavily bandaged, making his way down a row of birds sitting in cages, poking each one in turn with a chopstick and seeing how long it took to snap back. One suspects he probably left the eagle until last.

REFERENCES

Lilljeborg, W. 1866. Outlines of a systematic review of the class of birds. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1866: 5-20.

The Most Unread Books

It's been a while since I last bothered with any of the meme things, but I found this one via Stanger Fruit and Evolving Thoughts. Supposedly, this is a list of the 106 top books that people have lying around at home because they think they should read them sometime but have never got around to reading. Needless to say, it's a list that is heavy on the "classics" and other pretentious wank. As John Wilkins did, I've bolded the books that I've read, and italicised the ones that I've started reading but never finished. I don't know how universal the list is, though it's probably largely American - I can't help wondering if a New Zealand list would be much different. Would The Bone People get a look-in, for instance?

There once was a time when I was a very avid reader, and often went through a couple of books in a week. Unfortunately, I rarely find time to read fiction these days, but I may track down a couple of titles from this list I haven't re

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22 - I've lost count of how many times I've read this book. It's one book that I've found I can pick up any time, anywhere, and still enjoy fully.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights - started reading this one, but lost the book about a third of the way through and never picked up another copy.

The Silmarillion - I'll admit that it's harder to read, but I actually have a lot more regard for the Silmarillion that for either The Lord of the Rings or the confused mess that is The Hobbit. The Silmarillion (which was never really considered publishable during Tolkein's lifetime) was where Tolkein indulged his own personal enthusiasms for mythology and linguistics, while one can't help the feeling that The Lord of the Rings has been wrapped in a more commercially-acceptable blanket.

Life of Pi : a novel

The Name of the Rose - I remember running around university trying to find an acquaintance from high school who was studying Latin to confirm what the last sentence actually meant.

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses - this barely qualifies to be italicised. The British version of the telly programme Who's Line is it Anyway? used to occassionally have one segment where the competitors had to give an ordinary composition (such as, in the case I'm about to refer to, a chocolate cake recipe) in the style of a famous author. In the chocolate cake example, one of the 'competitors' indicated that he would be constructing his recipe in the style of James Joyce. The host, Clive Anderson, replied, "Well, I'm sure we've all read the first two pages of Joyce". That about sums up my effort. Funnily enough, that's also all I've ever managed of Brian Aldiss.

Madame Bovary - the main problem with Madame Bovary is that it is impossible to like a single character. Flaubert obviously didn't think much of people.

The Odyssey - The Illiad's better.

Pride and Prejudice - I'm rather a fan of Jane Austen, and this was the first of her books I read - I'd say Persuasion was probably my favourite, though I haven't yet read Northanger Abbey or Mansfield Park. If I may be allowed a lowbrow moment, though, I was actually glad to have seen the BBC version of this with Colin Firth before I read the book, because I have to admit that some of it would have gone over my head if I hadn't. In my defense, I was about fourteen at the time.

Jane Eyre

The Tale of Two Cities - I think I managed three pages for this one.

The Brothers Karamazov - I rather liked this one. It does drag on in places, but the ironic gems hidden within it rather make up for it. My favourite example: "You see, I once knew a certain young unmarried woman, back in the last 'romantic' generation, who after several years of mysterious love for a certain gentleman, whom, incidentally, she could have taken to the altar at the time of her choosing with a modicum of fuss, ended by inventing insuperable obstacles, and on a stormy night throwing herself from a lofty bank, resembling a cliff, into a rather deep and fast-flowing river and perished in it really for no other reason than her own caprice, solely in order to emulate Shakespeare's Ophelia; and one might even say that had this cliff, so long ago selected and favoured by her, been not so picturesque, and had there been on its site merely a flat, prosaic bank, then her suicide might possibly have never taken place at all."

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife - never heard of it

The Iliad - I've actually read two or three versions of this - it's quite incredible what a difference the translation style makes.

Emma - apparently, Jane Austen commented in a letter when writing Emma that she had invented a heroine whom no-one was going to like but Austen herself. I must admit that I found the character of Emma more than a little annoying.

The Blind Assassin - don't know this one, either.

The Kite Runner - nor this.

Mrs. Dalloway - watching that absolutely drear piece of cinema, The Hours, rather put me off the idea of reading this.

Great Expectations - If I ever read this one, I'll have to see if I can find the original version. The movie was based on the version with a 'happy' ending, and the happy ending just pissed me off.

American Gods - I'm a great fan of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic series, but I must admit that his novels don't enthrall me so much. Ditto his movie efforts.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - haven't of this one either. The title rather sets the bar, doesn't it?

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books

Memoirs of a Geisha - the movie was a little tame, but anything that manages to get Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li into the same film has a lot going for it.

Middlesex

Quicksilver - the only Quicksilver I know is the X-Men character

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury tales - I missed this part of high school English

The Historian : a novel

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera - wash your hands first.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley was brother to Julian Huxley, one of the authors of the modern evolutionary synthesis, and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the self-styled "Darwin's bulldog".

The Fountainhead - I read this when I was in high school. Even then, Ayn Rand pissed me off. The 1949 movie version's not bad, though.

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein - The Modern Prometheus was not what I expected. It's actually something of a tear-jerker.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula - I read this in high school. It was a lot more boring than I expected. I read it in an omnibus edition that also included The Lair of the White Worm, the 1988 movie version of which (featuring the unbelievably aptly-named Amanda Donohoe - put the stress on the last syllable) is a must-see for lovers of glorious B-grade trash.

A Clockwork Orange - I think it was actually a Nature piece I once saw that referred to a clockwork orange - "to use the phrase coined by Stanley Kubrick". No.

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King - very nearly. I never quite read about the last twenty pages.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible : a novel

1984 - I found this book a lot more disturbing when I re-read it a couple of years ago than when I had first read at about age 13.

Angels & Demons

The Inferno - I've read the entire Divine Comedy, though I must admit I somewhat skimmed Il Paradiso.

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility - seriously, all you people with unread Austen on your shelves should get around to it. If Sense and Sensibility has a significant failings, it's that the ending seems a little contrived. Sense and Sensibility is centered a lot less on a specific romance than the other novels, being rather about the relationship between the two sisters who are the main characters, so when Austen marries them off at the end of the book (as she always does), there doesn't seem much reason for it beyond expediency.

The Picture of Dorian Gray - in places, it has to be admitted, something of a vehicle for Wilde's one-line witticisms. If you read a lot of Oscar Wilde, you can't help noticing that he also used the same lines in a number of different works. One story holds that after someone (I forget who, unfortunately) once made a clever comment in Wilde's presence, Wilde commented, "I wish I'd said that". The original speaker replied, "You will, Oscar".

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels - a very good book, but the obscenely funny Modest Proposal is probably the best of Swift's works.

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Dune - this book impressed me a lot when I was a teenager, but to be honest it's rather palled somewhat as I grown older.

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes : a memoir

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present - I don't think there's much reason to expect me to have read this, is there?

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere - I actually prefer the telly series.

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything - I'm still not quite sure what to make of this one. At least half of the 'information' in here is utter bollocks, but then the value of Bill Bryson's work for making science more popular probably allows for a lot of forgiveness.

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five - I still think this is a great book. I'm a fan of Vonnegut in general, though Galapagos is probably my favourite (perhaps unsurprisingly).

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves - yeah, I'm a grammar nazi too.

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion - as I said, probably my favourite of Austen's works (and is it just my imagination, or has every single one of them except Northanger Abbey appeared on this list?)

Northanger Abbey - oh, there it is. We have the complete Austen set!

The Catcher in the Rye - does anything actually happen in this book? At all?

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - though there are reasons why I should probably read this one in the not-too-distant future.

Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

The Aeneid - despite having read a lot of classics, I've never got around to this one.

Watership Down - I loved this one as a kid.

Gravity’s Rainbow - I actually intend to read this one again. Maybe I'll actually work out what the heck's going on the second time around. Maybe not, though.

The Hobbit - I referred to The Hobbit above as a confused mess, and I stand by that statement. Problem is, Tolkein started on The Hobbit as a story for his kids before he realised the possibility of linking it into his "Elven lore" compositions. As a result, The Hobbit doesn't know whether it's supposed to be a light children's story or a serious piece of pseudo-mythology, and there's definite signs of strain.

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences

White Teeth

Treasure Island - one of the possible names I suggested when we got our dog as a small puppy was Flint, because he kept on climbing up onto our shoulders.

David Copperfield - Reader's Digest versions do not count.

The Three Musketeers

When Insects Turn Ugly

Kevin Z has asked me to contribute my favourite choice of schlocky Z-grade horror movie, an idea that started with Rick Macpherson. I did have some objections to replying - the concept of "Halloween" is something of a bugbear of mine. Traditionally we don't celebrate it here in the Antipodes, and I've tried to dissuade its encroachment into the Great Southern Consciousness. What can I do at this point other than quote the great David Bowie:



In the end, though, I couldn't resist the opportunity to pull out a few wonderfully terrible monster films. I don't do actual horror films in the modern sense - I have a surprisingly low tolerance of gore on screen, or of things jumping out at me - but I adore a papier-mache monster.

The Wasp Woman



Janice Starlin has a problem. For many years, she's been the director and public face of America's leading cosmetic company, but time is collecting its inevitable toll. Despite her best efforts to hold back aging, anything less than perfection is unacceptable in the cut-throat business of beauty. Her search for a solution brings her into contact with Eric Zinthrop, a slightly eccentric researcher. Zinthrop, well aware of the anti-aging properties of royal jelly produced by bees, has begun research into the royal jelly of wasps. He discovers that wasp jelly can not merely slow aging, but actually reverse it!* Starlin wastes no time in installing Zinthrop in a primate laboratory, and insists on becoming his first human test subject. Unfortunately, Zinthrop is unaware that the impatient Starlin is sneaking into his laboratory and injecting herself with far more of the solution than he has judged to be safe...

*All the same, they should have known something was up when the guinea pigs he injects his solution into not only get younger, but actually change species into rats...

When I saw this movie last year, I was actually stunned by how good it was. It's not a great movie, but you can see a great movie somewhere struggling to get out - trapped by the dollar-a-day budget. The inescapable ridiculousness of the monster costume is, at least, ameliorated by its having very little actual screen time, with more mileage drawn from Starlin's attempts to conceal what is happening. In contrast to the usual run of mad scientists (see later), the mayhem is not caused by a researcher acting with disregard for humanity, but by the subject's refusal to accept the researcher's cautious approach. Like the classic King Kong, despite the monster's seemingly horrific nature, the intention is ultimately not to bring fear but pity. In King Kong, 'twas beauty killed the beast. In The Wasp Woman, it's the pursuit of beauty.

As an aside, the life of Susan Cabot, the actress who played Starlin, seems also worthy of film (and indeed, apparently a biopic is in production). Cabot met her own end when her son, a sufferer of both dwarfism and mental illness, bludgeoned her to death.

Horrors of Spider Island



Even in black and white, movie directors were well aware of the virtues of making a "horror" movie for the essential purpose of getting a whole bunch of large-breasted women to run about in very little clothing. A troupe of exotic dancers and their super-masculine manager crash-land on their way from America to Singapore and are washed up on a deserted tropical island. Nightie-ripping catfights over who gets to bed the only available MAN are dulled slightly when he is bitten by a giant radioactive spider, causing him to mutate into a supposed half-man, half-spider creature that looks more like a shaven Wookie in need of a good orthodontist.

I recommend that male readers of this blog watch this movie only when in the exclusive presence of their own sex. The levels of chauvinism demonstrated at some points are such that female viewers will probably have an uncontrolable urge to thrash the nearest male simply for being there.

And last but certainly not least...

Mesa of Lost Women



Oh. My. God. Sometimes words just fail me. I don't know where to begin...

I came across an IMDB comment that described this piece of bizarritude as "the greatest Ed Wood movie not made by Ed Wood", and I couldn't agree more. It has the complete absence of acting ability, the total disregard for lighting and perspective, even the overbearing Griswold style voiceover. Ed Wood, the... ahem... multi-talented director of Plan Nine from Outer Space and the quite unforgettable Glen or Glenda, or I Changed My Sex was actually not connected to this particular piece of drek, though he apparently did use the same flamenco guitar riff in his later Jailbait. Believe me, after sitting through Mesa of Lost Women, you'll remember the flamenco guitar. The same three bars cycle in an infinite loop throughout the entire - freaking - film! Not even the B-52's doing "Rock Lobster" can compete with that.



Back to the movie. On an isolated mesa in the middle of a New Mexican desert, a mad scientist is experimenting with injecting human growth hormone into spiders, producing an army of beautiful spider-women (as well as stunted little dwarf men, because male spiders are a poor comparison to the females). The mad scientist (named, ha ha, Dr Araña) tries to talk another scientist into joining his researches, depriving him of his reason when he refuses. Through a rather convoluted set of coincidences, the stupefied victim ends up escaping from the mental hospital he's been confined to, taking a bunch of people hostage and escaping in a light plane that happens to crashland on the very mesa housing Araña's spider people!

Seriously, I simply cannot explain this masterpiece of ineptitude. "In the continuing war for survival between man and the hexapod, only another fool would bet against the insect". Except, of course, that spiders aren't insects*.

*Funnily enough, I found this last point slightly less annoying than a similar problem in the recent movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a film I mostly liked except for an overwhelming urge to scream at the television: "Listen to me! Chocolate. Is. Not. Candy!"

Looking Out for No. 1

The newest thing meme-wise is to try and find if there are any search queries on Google for which your site comes up as the first entry. So I've just hopped onto Google Webmasters, which gives me a list of Google searches that have returned my site and the rank it got in the search. I also tried running the search through Google myself to see exactly what it was bringing up (it was a little obscure in some places). Apparently yours truly is a world leader on the web when it comes to:

- another word for trachea

- giant bird lice

- legs of bristletails

- parasitic red algae snail

- Morris Buddenbrockia (with another page as result no. 2)

- crane fly's toxicity

- insect diversity and distribution

- ugly eels, or fish ugly eel

- marine tube worms leaving thier shells (Google as spell-check), or little tubes

- "blog action day" bird Australia

- doing job properly

- Cetferungulata

And most importantly:

- green frog sex (In fact, "frog sex" is apparently by far the most commonly used search term that returns the Catalogue. I have often wondered what on earth is so fascinating to people about frog sex, but I'm too scared of what I might discover to find out). The same page is entry No. 1 for catalogue sex lack, which is a little sad.

The Gay Bomb

The Ig Nobels came out last week. For those who haven't heard of them, the Ig Nobels are intended as a spoof on the Nobel Prizes for academic achievement, and according to the official website are awarded for research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think". I have to admit that I could probably name more Ig Nobel winners than Nobel winners - not to mention that unlike the proper Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobels do directly recognise achievements in fields like biology and mathematics*.

*There is a widespread urban myth that there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics because Nobel's mistress left him for a mathematician. Sadly, there seems to be little direct evidence for this story.

Among this year's winners, one prize really stands out. The Peace prize was awarded to "The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other". Personally, I would like to wish the researchers of the Wright Laboratory every success in their endeavour, and please could they tell me where I might purchase one (or two or three) on completion? This could be a perfect example of a military development with wide-ranging civilian uses.

I was about to suggest that, as well as expanding my own personal options, the judicious release of a few well-placed gay bombs around fundamentalist hang-outs would solve a lot of problems currently besetting society. But then I realised that probably it wouldn't.

Flying Spaghetti Monster vs. the Invisible Pink Unicorn

Needless to say, not anything to do with any organism known to mankind, but a very cheesy video with a surprisingly catchy tune. I guess all I can do is ding-a-ding-dang my dang-a-long-ling-long.

Request for a Citation

Recently I obtained a pile of duplicate reprints from the museum library, and I've since been entering them into my Endnote. Unfortunately, one of the reprints doesn't have the journal volume number and pagination, and I haven't been able to find them online. Does anyone out there have the details for:

Ride, W. D. L., & A. J. Cain. 1961. On the transfer of the name Anas punctata Burchell from the Hottentot teal to the Maccoa duck by the S.A.O.S. List Committee. Ostrich.

In the meantime, enjoy this sweet little video courtesy of The Other 95%:



Update (13/12/2007): A massive thank you to Darren Naish who finally supplied me with the answer:

Ride, W. D. L., & A. J. Cain. 1961. On the transfer of the name Anas punctata Burchell from the Hottentot teal to the Maccoa duck by the S.A.O.S. list committee. The Ostrich 32: 91-92.

He even gave me the reference for a follow-up paper:

Winterbottom, J. M. 1961. Transfer of the name Anas punctata Burchell from the Hottentot teal to the Maccoa duck. The Ostrich 32: 134-135.

Now I am content.

Interesting Animals Viral Chain Letter... I mean, Meme

I've had this one passed on to me by Julia.

An interesting animal I've had

My misfortune with cats has become something of a running black joke in the family - I've had two hit by cars and two disappear (one of them only a few months after I'd spent $1400 getting her brought back to life after being hit by a car). My most recent cat did technically outlive me - when I left New Zealand, I sent him to live at my parent's. Unfortunately, that rather elderly cat (I had inherited him from someone else who had gone overseas) took to peeing around the house, and after my mother injured her back slipping on one of the puddles, my father took the cat outside and shot him. At the moment my partner and I are catless, but we do have a year old retriever/bull terrier cross dog by the name of Sammy, also known as Master of Destruction, He of the Inescapable Tongue, and Digger-up and Devourer of Unspeakable Things. Sammy has been known to eat wood.

An Interesting Animal I Ate

There is very little that I won't try at least once, but outside of crustaceans and molluscs, there are surprisingly few tasty invertebrates. The only thing that I've found almost completely inedible were silkworms (they taste exactly like mushrooms picked after they've become too old and gone to spore), which were sold in copious amounts from street-stands in Korea. I have tried witchetty grubs, which have a very rich taste something like butter and something like snot. Jack says they used to catch locusts in the season in Thailand and eat them fried, but I've not yet had the pleasure.

One thing I haven't yet tried - a number of years ago the Department of Conservation tent at the local Field Days was selling pies made from possum, but they were all gone by the time my sister and I got there.

An Interesting Animal in a Museum

I already mentioned the Auckland Museum moa earlier this week, which despite its vast inaccuracies is an old familiar. For a great many years, visitors coming into the foyer of Auckland Museum were greeted by "Rajah". Rajah had been resident in Auckland Zoo in the 1930s, but increasingly erratic behaviour (in a time when zoo elephants were expected to be available to be ridden by visitors) lead to his being regarded as a danger to public safety and put down, after which he was mounted and put on display at the museum. By the time the museum was refurbished about ten years ago, long years of display had taken their toll on Rajah, who was beginning to look decidedly tattered and moth-eaten, and the decision was made to take him off display (it may have also been a factor that Rajah had a decidedly colonial air, and was associated with an outdated mindset that the museum was trying to escape the taint of). He was moved into storage, but the size of the mount was such that the movers ended up sawing of his legs in order to fit him onto the truck (seven months to prepare the mount, a matter of minutes to destroy it). I was an occassional volunteer in the museum at the time, and there was a story circulating that the sight of an elephant travelling down the road on the back of a truck had severely disconcerted a passing drunk in Newmarket.

Rajah has since been somewhat restored, and has been returned to the Auckland Museum as part of a display on the history of children's icons in the country. If you look closely at the photo on the museum's website, you can still see the scars of past indignities in the seams were his legs had to be sewn back on.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

I have been thrown by a bull once in my life. When my parents first moved from dairy to beef, the first time I helped in taking the bulls into the stockyards I was not yet used to working with these animals that were so much bigger than the cows I was used to. When one of them turned and tried to head back in the direction he'd come from, my nervousness rather compromised my attempts to shoo him in the direction he was supposed to go. The bull made a dash for it with me standing in the gateway, picked me up with the dish of his head and tossed me onto the fence. I rolled off the fence and came away completely unharmed. For the record, I am now more aware that it is spectacularly easy you get a bull to do what you want - you just need to shout louder than they do.

An Interesting Animal in its Natural Habitat

Pretty much all of them, I'd say. I have rather fond memories of the first time I found a scorpion, though.

I suppose I should pass this on. Okay, Kevin, Aydin, Bug Girl, she's all yours.

(insert title here)

It seems I've fooled at least one person into thinking I have some sort of intellect - Kevin Z at The Other 95% has passed on the "Thinking Blogger" award to me. Apparently I'm supposed to pass it on to five more people, but this being something that has been going around for a little while, there's a shortage of people to pass it on to. There's no mention of dire things happening to my relatives if I don't pass it on like there normally is with chain letters, but I will highlight five other writers out there that have caught my attention lately (in no particular order). I'd also recommend heading to Kevin's site - it's well worth the trip, even if he is currently sobbing over his lophophorates.

Brian Switek of Laelaps has doubtless already received one of these, but he has a fantastic site for anyone with an interest in study of vertebrate palaeontology, and the study of the study of vertebrate palaeontology.

Also in the palaeontology field is Julia of The Ethical Palaeontologist. I'm not sure why she has tagged herself "ethical" (though as far as I can tell her ethics are impeccable), but she certainly writes some excellent posts.

Rick MacPherson of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets writes his posts on the world of tropical marine biodiversity and conservation. Plenty of sea lice and sunsets - not so much malaria and bedbugs. Which is all good, because I know which two I would choose.

Cameron McCormick of The Lord Geekington is yet another fan of vertebrates, particularly cryptozoological specimens, who writes some very worthwhile, detailed posts.

Finally, Susannah of Wanderin' Weeta (with Waterfowl and Weeds) has a delightful site built mostly around her nature photography. Her recent sequence of spider baby posts have been wonderful.

Other things have happened here, too. I now have a face - I've finally gotten up to putting up a picture of myself. Pay no attention to it.

And my department has finally seen fit to change from Macs to PCs. At last, no more phaffing about with a *^&^%$# Mac! I'm free! Free! (I'm so happy.)

I'm really not doing my job properly

Apparently, I'm far too inoffensive for my own good:



This is actually a bit of a worry considering my supposed topic. Taxonomy, especially of invertebrates, is supposed to be all about filth. I once attempted to send my taxonomic paper on Pantopsalis to a colleague, only to hear from him later that he had had a fair degree of difficulty extracting it from his work e-mail - an overzealous filtering programme had noticed its repeated use of the word penis and marked it as spam.

Five Things for Brian Switek

Brian Switek from his blog Laelaps* has sent me five questions to answer as part of a circulating blog-connecting thingy. If you want to be connected to it, I'll explain in a moment, but first the questions.

*Brian has named his blog Laelaps in reference to the dinosaur genus by that name, now known as Dryptosaurus due to the name being preoccupied by a mite. He has not named it after the actual genus Laelaps, which are bloodsucking parasites of rodents (and occassionally humans). Pictures of the dinosaur "Laelaps" are pretty abundant online, so for a change of pace I've shown a picture of the mite Laelaps (picture comes from CSIRO).

1) What got you interested in evolution/biology?

It's a little hard to recall exactly - I've had at least a vague interest in animals for as long as I remember - my mother informs me my first word as a baby was "duck" (and I've never even considered the possibility that, growing up as I did on a farm in New Zealand, she may have misheard me). The main reason for my interest, I think, was probably the names. I've always had a fascination for how words fit together, and it was probably the names in my dinosaur books that first grabbed my attention. Who can fail to be impressed by the sound of Parasaurolophus? And by the time I discovered Opisthocoelicaudia, there was no saving me.

2) Now that you’ve told me about your oldest book, what’s your favorite book?

Hmmm... not sure. One book that I've found that there seems to be no limit to how many times I can read it is Catch-22. I, too, would like to know how to buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Crete and sell them at a profit for five cents in Malta. Other books I own that I value quite highly are The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, Galapagos and Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut, and Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.

3) Given your studies, do you have a favorite arachnid?

It almost goes without saying that I have a soft spot for the harvestman Pantopsalis phocator, the first species I ever named myself (Taylor, 2004) [spot the blatant self-promotion]. The only dampener to my enthusiasm is that, to be perfectly honest, I have never yet laid eyes on a live specimen of that or any other Pantopsalis, only corpses in vials. I have found other members of the same family, but in my enthusiasm at finally recovering specimens I gave them no time to escape and chucked them straight into ethanol. One of the large harvestmen would still be on top of my list of things I would like to encouter in the wild. There are few arachnids that I wouldn't like to at least give the time of day to (well, I might be convinced to steer clear of scabies mites).

4) If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do there?

Everywhere and everything? There is no shortage of places I would like to go. I spent a year of my life in Japan in high school, and I would quite like to go back there with Jack so I can show him around. We're hoping to go to Thailand next year, which I've always wanted to do. I suppose I've always wanted to go to the Siberian taiga - there's something about the idea of standing in a forest and thinking that that particular patch of forest stretches halfway around the freakin' planet.... If that doesn't make you feel absolutely minuscule, I don't know what would.

On the other hand, my enthusiasm for travelling to the Great Pyramids has been dampened slightly since I tracked them down on Google Earth and discovered that the city goes right up to them. The photos may look like they're sitting in the middle of open desert, but if the person taking the photo had turned two degrees further to his left, he would have gotten a face full of someone's laundry.

5) Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to having chosen science as a profession (i.e. non-science folk not understanding why you would want to study what you do, hoops you have to jump through for research, anything at all) ?

I suppose the thought that really causes me worry at nights is the whole uncertainty of it all career-wise. I honestly have little idea what's going to happen once I've finished my PhD. Australia's currently having a bit of a boom in science, and I'm just praying that continues (or that somewhere else is having a boom).

In terms of peeves, some of the security and safety restrictions in recent years have reached the point of ridiculousness. I recently found that I probably wouldn't be able to borrow vital type specimens from Germany because the restrictions on shipping alcohol have become such that the museum is afraid that they don't have enough of a guarantee that the specimens will arrive and be returned safely. Postal services have decided they do not want to shoulder the explosive risk posed by two mL of 70% ethanol.

Now that I've answered Brian's questions, here are the rules if you want to join in, copied verbatim from Brian's page:

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like [the food you hate most in all the world]. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your [blog] with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

Have fun.