Monthly Archives: March 2012
The bone-eating snot-flower worm
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But look how pretty it is! I recently discovered this little beauty in my occasional quest for fascinatingly odd creatures. It’s actually Osedax mucofloris, “osedax” meaning ‘bone-eating’, and “mucofloris” meaning – well, you can guess. It was discovered in 2005 on the remains of a dead whale in Kosterfjord on the Swedish coast. The whale had been dead for months, and had already been stripped to the bone by scavenging denizens of the deep. The worm looked like pretty pink flowers growing out of the bones.
Scientists, as is their nature, dug the flowers out and found that the other half of the animal (the ‘root’) was buried inside the bone, presumably obtaining nutrients from it. The picture over on the right there shows the whole animal. That woolly mass down at the bottom is its ‘root’ system.
The BESFW (as my can’t-be-arsed-typing-the-full-name fingers now call it) is a type of annelid worm, and related to creatures like ragworms, leeches and even the good old earthworm. So far, it has only been discovered on two whale skeletons, those of a minke and a pilot, and both in the same fjord.
Experts ‘guess’ that it’s actually pretty widespread in the Atlantic, although that’s going to be hard to prove given that whale skeletons are REALLY hard to find on the ocean floor.
The BESFW exhibits very strong sexual dimorphism – that is, the males do not develop into mature adults, and (rather like human males) remain as big kids all their lives. They are attached to the sides of the female, and fertilise her eggs as they are released into the water (see worm porn, left).
I have as yet no information on why they didn’t call it “The Pretty Pink Flowery Worm”, or for my Northern readers, how they taste when fried.
Cats in the Sun
On a gloriously Springy sunshiney day like today, what could be more relaxing than watching a cat enjoying the fine warmth? Here’s a few having fun around our house.
WALMWAYSP Tweetup
Hmm. I may have to think of a snappier name…..
I’ve been besotted by @little_mavis for decades now, and June 23rd will be our 33rd Wedding Anniversary. That day is a Saturday, and we’d like to celebrate by meeting Twitter chums for another YSP Tweetup.
Last August a big old gang of us had a rather wonderful Tweetup at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Remember this? Friends, kids, dogs, picnics, sculptures, parkland, lakes and best of all a bloody good laugh. (We’ll gloss over The Boy’s little adventure).
So this is just an advance warning, really – I’ll be posting far more details later. But do mark June 23rd down in your diaries to come HERE and have fun with us while also admiring some really impressive artworks, like the dubious one on the left there. It is, isn’t it? It’s a penis. Though admittedly rather a short one.
Mums
Once again, an impromptu #SUNDAYPICS sprang up during what was officially a weekend off. In honour of Mother’s Day, lots of you posted pics of Mums of whom you were rightly proud. It wouldn’t be polite to invoke my usual sarcasm when talking about your Mamas, so I’ll just fling the pictures up. Hover over each photo to see who it was from, and what they said. Click on it to see a larger version. Enjoy!
Poems: crowd-sourced poetry FTW
Crowd-sourced poetry, eh? Who’d have thought that it would be so much fun? The finished articles turned out to be rather special, as you’ll see and hear here. You complete stars, you. I reckon these deserve as wide an audience as possible, so feel free to pimp the shit out of this particular post. Oh, and thanks to @little_mavis for the original idea, and @matcochr for being a boffin. After the ‘official’ videos, you’ll find a collection of extra poems that various folks were inspired to post. I’m not sure I spotted them all, so if you posted a poem that I didn’t include, I do apologise.
Albert and the Lion, by Marriott Edgar
The Battle of Hastings, by Marriott Edgar
The Licorice Fields of Pontefract, by John Betjeman
Clive the Fearless Birdman by Pam Ayres
Here are the Extras that I spotted in the #SUNDAYPICS timeline. There’s such a variety of types of poem, though all well read; I advise you to give them all a listen. I’ll start with one that sounds so sexy it could be used as a seduction tape. Rather disappointingly, it’s about a lumberjack.
@shrewuntamed, Le Boucheron Eustache
@andromedababe, Shush by Irv Graham
@ladylittleton, When We Two Parted by Lord Byron
@och23, Time by Valerie Bloom
@mizzlizwizz, Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
@jackpot73, Rain by Raymond Carver
@wombat37, Swearin’ Jim by Leonard Henry
@ladylittleton, Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt
@alexbrightsmith, A Blade of Grass by Brian Patten
@shrewuntamed, My Granny by Beryl Cook
@greythorne, Hunter Trials by John Betjeman
@andromedababe, Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman
@ladylittleton, Antigone’s speech by Seamus Heaney
Poems: crowd-sourced poetry FTW
Crowd-sourced poetry, eh? Who’d have thought that it would be so much fun? The finished articles turned out to be rather special, as you’ll see and hear here. You complete stars, you. I reckon these deserve as wide an audience as possible, so feel free to pimp the shit out of this particular post. Oh, and thanks to @little_mavis for the original idea, and @matcochr for being a boffin. After the ‘official’ videos, you’ll find a collection of extra poems that various folks were inspired to post. I’m not sure I spotted them all, so if you posted a poem that I didn’t include, I do apologise.
Albert and the Lion, by Marriott Edgar
The Battle of Hastings, by Marriott Edgar
The Licorice Fields of Pontefract, by John Betjeman
Clive the Fearless Birdman by Pam Ayres
Here are the Extras that I spotted in the #SUNDAYPICS timeline. There’s such a variety of types of poem, though all well read; I advise you to give them all a listen. I’ll start with one that sounds so sexy it could be used as a seduction tape. Rather disappointingly, it’s about a lumberjack.
@shrewuntamed, Le Boucheron Eustache
@andromedababe, Shush by Irv Graham
@ladylittleton, When We Two Parted by Lord Byron
@och23, Time by Valerie Bloom
@mizzlizwizz, Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
@jackpot73, Rain by Raymond Carver
@wombat37, Swearin’ Jim by Leonard Henry
@ladylittleton, Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt
@alexbrightsmith, A Blade of Grass by Brian Patten
@shrewuntamed, My Granny by Beryl Cook
@greythorne, Hunter Trials by John Betjeman
@andromedababe, Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman
@ladylittleton, Antigone’s speech by Seamus Heaney
The Ghost Chicken of Highgate
A conversation with my daughter prompted me to remember something a once girlfriend had told me when I lived in London – that there was a place in Highgate haunted by a Ghost Chicken. No, really, it turns out it’s A Thing.
A quick Duckduckgo* led me to mentions of Sir Francis Bacon, so I took down my copy of Aubrey’s Brief Lives and found this story of events in April 1626 –
“As he (Sir Francis Bacon) was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborne (a physician) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a fowl, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodging … but went to the Earle of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation.”
Many doubt that Bacon did experiment in frozen foods, but people began to report strange happenings, and there were several reported sightings of a particularly eerie apparition around Pond Square from the 17th Century onwards. Yes, the Ghost Chicken was on the loose.
In the second World War the unnerving apparition of a ghost chicken was seen many times. In 1943, Aircraftsman Terence Long was in Pond Square one night when he heard horses’ hooves, wheels, and a screeching noise. Instead of a horse and cart though, what he saw when he turned was a half-plucked chicken, flapping its wings and legging it wildly around in a circle before vanishing.
Later, ARP Wardens saw the ghost several times around Pond Square. One tried to bag the incorporeal bird, but failed when it “vanished through a brick wall”
A resident of Pond Square, a Mrs. Greenhill, said after the war that she had seen the ghost, and described it as “a big, whitish bird”.
In January 1969, a “large white half-plucked bird” was seen by a driver whose car had broken down. He moved towards it, but it disappeared.
In February 1970 a courting couple were surprised when a ghostly chicken landed beside them, ran round twice, then vanished into thin air. Coitus henterruptus (sorry).
I couldn’t find anything after that, so perhaps the pecky phantom has found peace at last.
* if you want to search the net without Google tracking you, or bubbling the search results as it sees fit, then try Duckduckgo.
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