Fed by Birds

This Slate interview explores the work of the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, where researchers for many years have been trying to teach chimpanzees and bonobos to use language. Results are still hotly contested: in this film, their answer to most questions seems to be "hot dog" or "banana", which suggests sophisticated language structures aren't quite there yet. But the researchers themselves have learnt to take their charges' abilities seriously; one man whispers his replies to the interviewer, explaining that he's learnt never to make critical remarks about the apes within their hearing: "Yeah! They eavesdrop! It's disgusting!" As one of his colleagues points out, what we need to do isn't to teach apes to be more human, but to find out what's really going on with them. We might be surprised.

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Could this be the world's best animal? It's got huge eyes and it moves in slow motion. But don't think about keeping one as a pet. Not least because it's venomous.

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With all the fuss about Phoenix Mars, the Cassini-Huygens mission, still twirling around Saturn four years on, seems to get forgotten - but I still find the pictures of Saturn's rings it's sending back mind-blowing. It's like they got to the moon and found there really was a big smiley face on it.

Saturn's seasons last seven years, and now it's going into spring, so the colours of the north and the south are gradually changing.

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In need of a little colour in your life? Go and look at the Smithsonian collection of seed catalogues:

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There's something very appealing about a window display that someone once worked hard on, now preserved in an old photograph, often along with the hungry faces pressed against the window. These pictures are from all over the place, I'm afraid, but primarily the English Heritage Viewfinder site and the Library of Congress. Although the first - and best - was created by my grandfather for a grocer's shop in Gloucestershire: I've already written about it at my other place.

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A surprising number of fungi are bioluminescent: that is, glow in the dark - contributing to a phenomenon known as foxfire, from Japanese legends about fox spirits in the woods. You can see why these might seriously freak you out on a lonely journey home - I wonder how many ghosts/fairies/aliens were actually mushrooms? Spooklights seem to be a popular sighting in America: reminds me of the legends of will-o-the-wisp in England, which I think were actually due to marsh gases, and who lured travellers either into a quagmire or to buried treasure, depending on how lucky they were.

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Among the online collections of Indiana University I found the Jane Johnson Manuscript Nursery Library, a set of cards made by Jane Johnson in Lincolnshire for the instruction of her son, George William Johnson. Since he went on to be High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1784, all the careful work she put in to teaching him obviously paid off. Some of the cards demonstrate the alphabet:

Some teach sets of words:

Some tell strange little tales:

and some give very useful advice:

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Delia Derbyshire has received quite a lot of attention in recent years as a pioneer of electronic music, but Daphne Oram has been unfairly neglected. She was the one who persuaded the BBC to set up the Radiophonic Workshop in the first place - although the direction it took wasn't cutting edge enough for her, and she eventually resigned to work on her own music in a Kent oasthouse. This included inventing the Oramics machine, a system for converting pictures into sounds. "To me she was a kindly, rather eccentric aunt. But she had a very clear vision of how the computer would revolutionise electronic music," said her nephew in the BBC's obituary in 2003.

You can listen to some mp3s of her music or buy the CD here, and if you're in London, the Southbank Centre is paying a long overdue tribute to her next Friday. See you there.

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I've written earlier about the strange notes about hurricane-watching being left in South London phoneboxes. Commenter James Morton points out that there are quite a few of these on Flickr, and a discussion here. No one seems to have worked it out yet, but I'm inclined to agree with the comment 'Bloody art students' - especially since one of the notes shown here has a phone number on it - to be rung only between Sat and Mon. Well, it's Thursday, so I'm not ringing it - especially since I'd be disappointed to hear tour dates for the Hurricanes or something. But if anyone does, please let me know...

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A land where everyone is made of balloons gets a visit from - the pincushion man! This 1935 cartoon from East Frisian animator Ub Iwerks is actually pretty scary, so watch out...

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Head Trip by Jeff Warren is a fascinating journey into different stages on the daily "wheel" of consciousness. I didn't even know some of these stages were there: I had a vague awareness that the hallucinogenic state you go into just before falling asleep is called hypnagogic, but not about the hypnopompic stage on the way out, where dreams overlap with reality.

Anyone who suffers from insomnia may find consolation in the section on sleep: Warren suggests lying awake in the middle of the night might be natural or even beneficial. In the days when people went to bed with the daylight, they had a first sleep, then all got up for the 'stirring hour' or what Warren calls 'the Watch', chatted, had sex, wandered around or just mulled over their dreams, and went back for a second, different sort of sleep in the early hours. When Warren goes off to a remote hut to try the old pattern, he finds his ideas about sleep transformed: "It was a little like finding out that the home you live in is really the exposed bell tower of a vast underground cathedral."

Of course it's mainly Western industrial societies who've become slaves to the idea of eight hour sleeps - if you're a member of the Gebusi tribe in Papua New Guinea you never fall asleep at all, for fear of becoming the victim of a prank: "A favourite joke on someone who succumbs consists of dressing up in warfare gear, taking up weapons and screaming at the sleeper. If he starts out of sleep in horrified alarm, convinced he's about to be killed in a raid, the joke is viewed as an unqualified success."

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I'm always interested in the Guardian's series on Writers' Rooms - although what it mainly reveals is what depressing places most writers work in. Far too many books, piles of dusty papers and ugly office furniture. The best ones belong to people like AL Kennedy and Mark Haddon, who've noticed that they don't work in an office and are pretty pleased about it: "My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!" And those like JG Ballard who realise that if you're writing what you want is not a lot of other people's stupid books to look at, but pictures. Unless you're Rudyard Kipling, whose room is dominated by a portrait of his slave-driving wife looking disapproving, which made this grand study "a bit of a prison".

Room 26 has a great series of photos of writers actually working in their rooms - above, Edith Wharton, who is much more elegant about the whole thing and what's more is wearing a fantastic print.

Fed by Birds' workspace is of course quite different, as you see below:

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The important thing on a Monday morning is to keep an open mind. So when you've set off to do some work, and a voice in your head says, "But the sun's shining. Why not go to Brighton instead?", maybe you should listen. After all, you can write on a beach just as well as in a library, can't you? (No.)

What I like about Brighton pier is that it has its brash sections:

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and it has gentler sections, where people sit each side of the glass partition and gaze out to sea:

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At the very end you have the rides:

This is the sound of the rollercoaster above. The squeaks you hear are a group of teenage boys, trying to maintain their cool and not quite succeeding:

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Sadly Ivor wasn't in evidence, but he has an impressive list of corporate clients.

But of course the best sounds are these:

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A visit to Beasts of London leads me to the mysterious tale of the sighting by four terrified boys of a bear on Hackney Marshes in the 1980s. Don't remember hearing about this growing up in Hackney - not even the gory detail that two decapitated bear corpses had been found earlier, floating in a nearby river. These bodies are talked about in various forums as the corpse of a giant, or as skinned bears, the result of feuding local circuses. This writer seems to know the real explanation: one of those 'pointless traditions' which judging by the number of urban wild beast sightings on the internet is still going strong. Weirdly, it looks like the Hackney bear was immortalised in an episode of Jasper Carrott's The Detectives.

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Audrey Corregan's photographs of birds from behind give me the uncomfortable feeling that I've offended an owl or a magpie. Via Dear Ada.

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