A hybrid image by Pablo Carlos Budassi. View it from a distance.
Love and War
Oddities
Reconnaissance
In 2021, Istanbul’s public rail service spotted a curious passenger: “We noticed a dog using our metros and trains and he knows where to go,” spokesman Aylin Erol told India Today. “He knows where to get out. It’s like he has a purpose.”
The dog, known as Boji, is a stray Anatolian shepherd who’s been observed using the city’s buses, metro trains, trams, and ferries. Since city officials fitted him with a microchip, he’s been tracked through as many as 29 metro stations in one day, traveling up to 30 kilometers and ranging as far afield as the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara.
“You take the train and, suddenly, you see Boji,” Erol said. “And look at him. He lies, just like this. You just smile and catch the moment, really. This is what Boji evokes for Istanbulites. He also reminds us that we can still enjoy Istanbul as we rush about.”
Sweet Dreams
In an 1894 feature on peculiar furniture, the Strand describes a “suffocating bedstead” used to dispatch unwitting inn guests in the days of coach travel:
Nothing whatever of a suspicious character revealed itself to the eye of the wayfarer, yet when the scoundrel who meditated crime had satisfied himself that the man slept, he would quickly lower an interior portion of the canopy of the bedstead, firmly imprisoning him in an air-tight cavity until suffocation ensued. Struggling and shouting would be useless under such circumstances, as the weight of the box would be tremendous.
This recalls Wilkie Collins’ 1852 story “A Terribly Strange Bed,” in which a visitor at a Paris gambling house realizes the canopy over his bed is moving:
It descended — the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down — down — close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between the bed-top and the bed. I felt at the sides, and discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe. I looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare. In the middle of the bed-top was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected for compression.
In his preface to the collection in which that story appears, Collins claims that it’s “entirely of my own imagining, constructing, and writing” but credits painter W.S. Herrick for “the curious and interesting facts” on which it’s based. The Strand article, published 40 years later, doesn’t mention Collins, but perhaps the idea had entered English folklore by that point. Or maybe it’s true!
Point of Interest
The Clachan Sound, in western Scotland, connects at both ends to the Atlantic Ocean.
So the Clachan Bridge, which crosses it, is known as the Bridge Over the Atlantic.
For What It’s Worth
In an unsigned feature in 1893, the Strand noted that Mozart and John Stuart Mill had identical ears.
Incontrovertibly, “It is equally true that the latter composed, to the fraction of a note, exactly as much music as the other formulated imperishable logic.”
Which Witch?
Hob and Nob live in Gotham, a village stricken with “witch mania.” Rita visits both of them. Hob tells her, “The witch has blighted Bob’s mare,” and Nob tells her, “Maybe the witch killed Cob’s sow.” Hob and Nob themselves don’t suspect any particular person of being a witch, and there’s no definite description (such as “the Gotham witch”) that they both think applies uniquely to some alleged witch. Hob isn’t aware of Cob’s sow, and Nob isn’t aware of Bob’s mare. Rita herself doesn’t believe in witches. She reports the following:
“Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow.”
How do we make sense of this? The two assertions seem to refer to the same person, but how is this possible if no such person exists? What can it mean to say that one nonexistent object is the same as another?
(P.T. Geach, “Intentional Identity,” Journal of Philosophy 64:20 [1967], 627–32.)
Swan Upping
Speaking of swans: By royal prerogative, all mute swans in open water in Britain are the property of the British Crown. Historically the Crown shares ownership with two livery companies, the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers, and so, accordingly, each year in the third week of July three skiffs make their way up the Thames from Sunbury to Abingdon, catching, tagging, and releasing the swans they encounter. Nominally they’re apportioning the birds among themselves; in practice they’re counting them and checking their health.
Magnificently, the Crown’s swans are recorded by the Marker of the Swans, a recognized official in the Royal Household since this tradition began in the 12th century. Queen Elizabeth II attended the Swan Upping ceremony in 2009, as “Seigneur of the Swans,” the first time a reigning monarch had done so. The entire operation was shut down for the first time in 2020, due to COVID-19, but it commenced again the following year.
While we’re at it: All whales and sturgeons caught in Britain become the personal property of the monarch — they are “royal fish.” Plan accordingly.
(Thanks, Nick.)
In a Word
daymark
n. a mark to help navigators to find their way
nimbiferous
adj. bringing storms or showers
kenspeckle
adj. easily recognizable, conspicuous
onymous
adj. having a name
During World War II, pilots in northern Australia noted that an enormous thunderstorm formed daily between September and March on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory. Regularly reaching heights of 20 kilometers, “Hector the Convector” is one of the world’s largest thunderstorms, an object of concentrated study by meteorologists, and a relative oddity — a cloud with a name.
A Literary Voyage
A striking detail from the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1860: On a wager, poet John Taylor (1578–1653) once engaged to row from London to Queenborough in a paper boat with two stockfish tied to canes for oars. He partnered with a vintner named Roger Bird, and the two
Took ship vpon the vigill of Saint Iames
And boldly ventur’d down the Riuer Thames,
Lauing and cutting through each raging billow,
(In such a Boat which neuer had a fellow)
Hauing no kinde of mettall or no wood
To helpe vs eyther in our Ebbe or Flood:
For as our boat was paper, so our Oares
Where Stock-fish, caught neere to the Island shores.
The boat began to leak and founder, and Taylor contrived to hold it up by attaching eight inflatable bullocks’ bladders to its sides. After two miserable days, he and Bird reached their goal and were feted by the mayor of Queenborough while the people tore the boat to scraps, “Wearing the reliques in their hats and caps.” They rode home on horseback.
Endorsement
The cover of Wolfgang Haug’s 1986 book Critique of Commodity Aesthetics bears a striking photo — when corn was strategically spread in in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, hundreds of feasting pigeons produced an impromptu advertisement for Coca-Cola.
Evidently Coke had borrowed the idea from Assicurazioni Generali, a Venetian insurance company with headquarters in the piazza. The insurers would coax the pigeons to form the letters A G.
I’m not sure when the Coke ad was made. In The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader (1995), Nigel Wheale says the ad could be seen on the walls of Italian bars and restaurants in the late 1960s, but possibly the photo had been taken earlier.