In 1872, as he prepared to retire in Edinburgh, English menagerie owner Alexander Fairgrieve auctioned off his remaining attractions in the Waverley Market. The largest lot was Maharajah, an Indian elephant 7 feet tall with 20-inch tusks. The winning bid, £680, came from James Jennison, proprietor of the Belle Vue Gardens near Manchester, who was expanding his zoological collection. The elephant rebelled at entering a horse box on the Northern British Railway, so his keeper, Lorenzo “Lion Tamer” Lawrence, simply walked his charge to Manchester.

The unlikely pair covered 200 miles in 10 days, arriving on April 20, and the celebrated animal, “having travelled by road from Scotland, via Carlisle, Kendal, Lancaster, Preston and Bolton,” was installed in a temporary glass-roofed elephant house. In the ensuing years he would walk among the visitors, ridden by thousands of children and starring in spectacles such as “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” in the city’s May Day and Whit parades. He died of pneumonia in 1882 at the age of 18.

Heywood Hardy’s 1875 painting A Disputed Toll, above, records an event that probably never happened — it’s said that during their journey, while Lawrence was arguing with a parsimonious gatekeeper, Maharajah simply lifted the gate from its hinges. Accurate or not, the memorable painting now hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery.

In 1808, as a monument to his victories, Napoleon planned to erect a colossal bronze elephant on the site of the Bastille. Standing 24 meters tall, the creature would be cast from the guns captured at the Battle of Friedland, and a stairway inside one leg would lead visitors up to an observation platform on its back.

The project fell apart after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, but they got as far as building a full-sized plaster model of the finished statue, protected by a guard who lived in one of the legs. The plaster elephant stood for some 30 years, overrun with rats and gradually falling into ruin. Finally removed in 1846, it was commemorated by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables: “It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.”

You’d look forlorn too if you were the first zebra in England. The bewildered creature, known as “Queen Charlotte’s she-ass,” departed the Cape of Good Hope “Noah’s-ark fashion” with another zebra in 1762, but her companion died on the voyage. Installed at Buckingham Palace, she “was pestered with visits, and had all her hours employed from morning to night in satisfying the curiosity of the public.” And, inevitably, there were jokes:

A sight such as this surely was never seen:
Who the deuce would not gaze at the A___ of a Q____?
What prospect so charming! — What scene can surpass?
The delicate sight of her M____’s A____?

Though squeamish old Prudes with Invective and Spleen,
May turn up their Noses, and censure the Q____n;
Crying out, “‘Tis a Shame, that her Q____nship, alas
Should take such a Pride — in exposing her A____.”

She was eventually sold to a clockmaker named Pinchbeck, who led her through Yorkshire in a traveling menagerie. She died in April 1773, eleven years after she’d arrived. “Pray do you not think the fate of this animal truly pitiable?” wrote the Rev. William Mason to Horace Walpole. “I should think this anecdote might furnish the author of Heroic Epistles with a series of moral reflections which might end with the following pathetic couplet: ‘Ah beauteous beast! Thy cruel fate evinces / How vain the ass that puts its trust in Princes!'”

(Christopher Plumb, “The Queen’s Ass,” in Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, ed., The Afterlives of Animals, 2011.)

French artist François Abélanet creates anamorphic landscape illusions. “With my creations, I transform fiction into reality,” he writes. “Where there’s a garden, a plaza, a courtyard, or a confined space, I see a playing field where everyone is invited to participate, to play with nature. Indeed, I like the idea that nature lives its own life and becomes its own creation.”

More at his website.

Order a beer at Kayabukiya Tavern, in Japan’s Tochigi prefecture, and it will be brought to you by one of five monkeys. Owner Kaoru Otsuka started his business nearly 30 years ago, but business really took off when he brought his pet macaque to the premises and got it to hand a wet oshibori towel to a customer. Now the monkeys hand out oshibori and beer and perform on a makeshift stage.

Under animal welfare laws the monkeys work only two hours a day, and customers give them boiled soya beans as tips for their service. Now they’ve begun donning human masks and wigs — perhaps they’ll soon be opening a restaurant of their own:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Oew8O9le0

Between the 1950s and the 2000s, the Sicilian town of Giarre started a series of ambitious building projects as its politicians competed to create jobs and secure funds from the regional government. Unfortunately, there was no need for the buildings — Giarre’s population is only 27,000 — and today the seaside town hosts 25 half-built and abandoned constructions, including an amphitheater, a sports stadium, a polo ground, and a swimming pool.

“Giarre offers the extreme form of a condition found in most cities, making it a parable of urban planning,” writes social geographer Alastair Bonnett in Off the Map. “It is the epicentre not of merely an Italian but a global phenomenon of accreted unfinished visions.”

“Several companies started the projects without the intention of finishing them,” architect Salvo Patane told the BBC. “These were projects started so as not to lose funds that were available from the regional government. More than waste, this was bad politics.”

Community activist Claudia D’Aita wants to reconceive the abandoned constructions as a park — “a kind of open-air museum” — exhibiting a cautionary new architectural subgenre. They would call it the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion.

An optical illusion. The black dots disappear unless you focus on them.

The English village of Uley had a remarkable citizen in 1917: a lowland gorilla, captured in Gabon by the French soldiers who had shot his parents. Uley resident Rupert Penny spotted him for sale in a London department store, paid £300, and named him John Daniel, and his sister Alyce raised him like a human boy.

“Until recently, we had people that remembered him walking around the village with the children,” said Margaret Groom, an archivist at the Uley Society, who unearthed a collection of old photographs. “He used to go into gardens and eat the roses. The children used to push him around in a wheelbarrow. He knew which house was good for cider, and would often go to that house to draw a mug of cider. He was also fascinated by the village cobbler, and would watch him repairing shoes. He had his own bedroom, he could use the light switch and toilet, he made his own bed and helped with the washing up.”

She had to sell him when he reached full size, and he passed into the hands of a circus. Eventually Alyce received an urgent message reading “John Daniel pining and grieving for you. Can you not come at once? Needless to say we will deem it a privilege to pay all your expense. Answer at once.”

She set out immediately, but he died of pneumonia before she arrived. His body was given to the American Museum of Natural History for preservation and remains on display there today.

(Thanks, Steve.)

Belgian novelty restaurant Dinner in the Sky is aptly named: A crane hoists the guests, their table, and the wait staff 180 feet into the air for a 90-minute meal aloft. Founded in 2007 by a marketer and a bungee-jumping impresario, the company has expanded into 47 countries. Most of the food is prepared on the ground, where up to 44 guests sign liability waivers before being strapped into seats around two tables for the duration of the meal; guests are encouraged to use the restroom first, and the foods are chosen to avoid choking hazards.

Ithaa (below) is the world’s first undersea restaurant, an acrylic bubble located 5 meters under the Arabian Sea in the Maldives. Guests enter via a spiral staircase; the 5-by-9-meter main dining room seats 14 and offers a 270-degree view of the surrounding sea (including some of the same seafood that’s on the menu). Lunch for two costs around $120; that’s cheaper than dinner, and the view is best when the sun is shining.