Fed by Birds

Go to Bluebell FM now to hear the brand new story of Bluebell's grudges. It's been a bit of a long gap, I'm afraid, but you know how it is: you can't hurry a robot.

Posted by at 6:20 PM | Permalink

There will be a short hiatus from the end of this week as I go off to Berlin and then a mystery island in the Baltic for a few days. I think the mystery island will take care of itself but any suggestions about interesting/strange/underrated places to visit in Berlin would be very gratefully received...

Posted by at 2:10 PM | Permalink

There's something a bit familiar about the mix of items in Lewis Carroll's scrapbook, put online in its entirety by the Library of Congress. It includes advertisements he found funny, cartoons, pictures of seahorses and weird fish, cuttings of stories about mysterious animal footprints. Yes, this is essentially Lewis Carroll's blog and completely fascinating:

He seems to have been intrigued by a story about threatening letters:

And kept a clipping recording his own 'outing':

There are cuttings of his own journalism, such as an article about Feeding the Mind and - my favourite - a little story about how a family acquired its Speedle ("There is one drawback. It is blue and there are no straps.")

Posted by at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last weekend I paid a visit to Eltham Palace, an Art Deco mansion built by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld in 1936, on to the remains of a medieval royal palace. Stephen Courtauld was a member of the wealthy textile clan, but sensibly dodged going into the family business for a more agreeable existence of philanthropy, yachting and jetting around in little shiny planes. The interiors are pretty spectacular - Virginia Courtauld had the most enviable bedroom and bathroom I've seen:

The Courtaulds were so fashionable that even their pet lemur, Mah-Jongg, slept in style, in centrally heated quarters decorated with a mural of bamboo forest scenes. Mah-Jongg was bought in Harrods, apparently, and was very keen on nipping guests on the ankles.

Sadly they don't let you take pictures inside the house so I can't show any more, but it's definitely worth a visit - even though you have to wear blue plastic bags over your shoes and dodge crowds of people listening to audio guides narrated by Hercule Poirot, which is not quite so glamorous.

Posted by at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I didn't make it to Sunderland for If There Ever Was, an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells, for which curator Robert Blackson commissioned 14 strange scents from a team of perfume designers and botanists. Luckily this book released to accompany it brings the smells to me, in the form of paper inserts. The perfumes include a lovely recreated Edwardian scent from the Titanic, a meteorite hitting Peruvian mud, the smell of communism - some kind of institutional soap, I'd guess, with a hint of bleach - and the Mir space station, which it turns out was plagued by "the pungent odour of pickling gym socks", created by the sweat of vodka-drinking Russian cosmonauts. The rub'n'sniff technology works reasonably well, although one of the smells is so strong it seems to drown out the first few: think it's the sun's rays - "hydrogen and helium with a molten cocktail of copper, terbium, strontium, antimony and europium". Had no idea the sun smelt so terrible.

Posted by at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thomas Weynant's Early Visual Media site has these beautiful examples of scenes from 18th century peepshow boxes. The luminous effect was achieved with cutout areas backed with tissue paper, and candles or daylight shining behind them.

Posted by at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've just finished reading Corvus: A Life with Birds, a sort of modern equivalent of Len Howard's Birds as Individuals, in which Esther Woolfson describes her adoption of various corvids, particularly a rook and a magpie. Woolfson's book is twice as long as it should be and could do with some photographs, but I did learn some interesting bird facts from it:

1. Doves are very aggressive.
2. Crows can recognise the scientists who work with them on a campus of 40,000 people, and will follow them, shouting.
3. Birds can see twice as many colours as humans.
4. If you keep a magpie in the house, be prepared to come home and hear them imitating the voice you use on the phone.

She also has a good account of a martial arts fight between a teenage girl and a magpie, which is not something you read every day.

See also:
Ravens Are Watching

Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)