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A saint depicted in art carrying his own head. Perhaps the most famous is St Denis, who appears among the statues on the front of Notre Dame, above, and who walked two miles and continued preaching a sermon after his head was chopped off. But there are many others, including St Valerie of Limoges, who gave her head to the bishop who converted her.
And St Alban, who seems to get to have his head and carry it:
Anyone interested in perfume ought to check out A Natural History of the Senses by the poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. It was a bestseller in its day, but looks as if it might have gone out of print. Ackerman is particularly good on the neglected sense of smell, especially the scents of people from history: crusaders came back perfumed with rosewater, Napoleon was drenched in violet cologne, Walter Raleigh smelled of strawberries.
She hurtles through time and space, throwing out strange facts left and right: if you put an Indonesian flying fox in your hair (as she does, experimentally), it starts to cough because of your soapy smells. Elizabethan women would put peeled apples in their armpits till they were soaked with sweat and give them to their lovers. One of Nero's guests was smothered to death in a shower of rose petals. She's defeated in her attempt to describe the smell of a penguin, but she has got a useful way to trick deer and rabbits by disguising your human scent with mushrooms, and a 16th century recipe for a perfume that makes women beautiful forever - it involves distilled raven, talcum powder and myrtle leaves, if you'd like to give it a go.
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Pictures from LIFE.
Hooray, Wolfram Alpha is now operational. Obviously the first thing you do with something like that is to put your own name in it.
And it tells me that I'm a minor planet, and even gives me my equatorial radius and solar system configuration. Google never did that.
My nomination is American dancer Ruth St Denis, whose fantastic costumes feature in page after page of pictures at NYPL.
Whether minimalist:
Or maximalist:
On stage:
Or as herself:
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The swimming bionic penguins created by German automation company Festo are amazing enough ("Unlike real penguins, they can also go backwards"), but keep watching til you get to the beautifully serene floating penguins - like shiny helium balloons, except with the power of autonomous flight. I feel I'd quite like to have one following me wherever I go.