Don't Pandas Manage To Do Cute ... VERY VERY Well!

This is the post where I'm obviously feeling ever so slightly less hairy-chested than usual ...








... though I suspect the feeling will have dissipated by the next post!

A Day at the Aquarium - Manatees and Things

Nice how sitting round can turn into a walk can turn into a day at the aquarium ... depending of course on the direction the wandering takes.


Inside, we looked around a bit - and then realized the blog post potential of the outing. Though these images and the footage do not pretend to be anything other than dead dead ordinary!

I made a beeline for the manatees - a kind of ocean-going version of my favorite land-dwelling mammals, the orangutans ('Traveling Round The Philippines - Zambles, Vigan, and 100 Islands').


I think also I love them cos of their common name - 'sea cows'.

And cos their closest relos are elephants and hyraxes - somehow this adds to the warm fuzzy feeling.

These herbivores always seem so friendly and gentle and empathetic and cuddly - no mean feat for an aquatic creature! Obviously lots and lots of anthropomorphizing going on here!


From the excessive amount of footage I took, I've put this together ...

... with what I think is just so right as the audio track - the Gregorian Chant 'Kyrie Eleison'!

Then on to the more ordinary denizens of an aquarium ...

... which in fact included the less-than-ordinary weedy sea dragon ...

(Not my photo - Included to give a better idea of how beautiful dragons are)

... and some of its more flora-imitating relatives ...


We then fortuitously meandered into the anemones and sponges department ...




... before we plunged into reef fish ...






The big finale was the bovver boys of the seas - the sharks.


I thought I'd been over-exposed to these guys but up close and personal they still managed to send a chill ... just about everywhere.


This last image has a curious resemblance to mid-nineteenth century naturalistic animal painting ...


... don't you think?

Okay, now for the scary stuff ...

... which I felt needed a counterpoint music track - and so George Michael's 'A Different Corner'. It works so perfectly - just listen to the words with images ... and chuckle! And it wards off the chills - very nicely!

The Last Tasmanian Tigers (Thylacinus Cynocephalus)

The very last Thylacine or marsupial Tasmanian Tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.

Hobart Zoo in the 1930s

And what makes this even more galling is the fact that there's the fair amount of film footage of this now extinct large mammal - taken between 1912 and 1932. Mainly at Beaumaris Zoo (later Hobart Zoo) and at London Zoo.

Animals caught in the wild were usually sold to zoos, like this mother and her three pups who were trapped by Walter Jack Mullins at Tyenna in the Florentine Valley in southern Tasmania in February 1924 ...

Mother and her three pups, trapped by Walter Jack Mullins at Tyenna in the Florentine Valley in southern Tasmania in February 1924

... and then sold to Hobart Zoo. It's very probable that the very last thylacine was one of the pups in this litter.

The earliest tiger footage is from 1912 and shows a thylacine being fed through a wire fence, while the owner of the Beaumaris Zoo, Mary Grant Roberts, stands by. Her long black dress is just visible to the right of the keeper at the beginning.

The next clip was taken in early 1928 and firstly shows a man teasing two tigers with his hat, and then the animals going into their wooden enclosure shed where perhaps they sleep.

This footage below was taken in late 1928 and shows a tiger interacting with a man through a wire fence. What's revealing here is the way the animal moves : rising up easily and steadily on its hind legs a bit like a kangaroo.

This last clip is from 1933 and shows the last thylacine prowling its cage ... and also demonstrating its enormous jaw extension.

There have been countless searches over the decades in more and more remote places for any last surviving tigers - to assuage our collective guilt in this extinction. But of course, nada!

In a further and latter day guilt-reduction exercise, there's a pretty big effort on at the moment to extract DNA from a female infant preserved in alcohol in 1866 ...

Infant female thylacine preserved in alcohol in 1866, Australian Museum, Sydney

... to implant it in the egg of (perhaps) a Tasmanian Devil host and ... well, you know the rest.

Hopefully people have learned the lesson ... what do you reckon?

Scrotums as Pets? No, Just Naked East African Mole Rats

No this is not the product of some rather creative Hollywood workshop - though it's probably been the inspiration for more than a few film fantasy monsters:

And I haven't been doing funny things with my scrotum just to amuse everyone, though ... I won't go there!

Or browsing installations at more avant garde art galleries ...


Just watching a David Attenborough documentary on mole rats, a kind of hairless East African burrowing rat that lives mainly underground and tunnels huge and complex networks in search of the tubers on which it subsists.


They live up to 28 years of age which, apart from being a good advertisement for tubers, has lead to investigation of its genome.

Their social structure is a bit like that of ants and bees, where there's a single breeding female and two or three consorts in each borrow complex - with the rest of the colony being tuber hunter-gatherer workers.



Only a mother could ... you know the rest!

Now if you wanna see a living example, up close and personal ... best thing to do is drop your jocks and take a good long look between your legs - LOL!!!

Joseph Pujol (1857-1945) - 'Le Petomane' of Le Moulin Rouge

I guess a lot of people think of Le Moulin Rouge in terms related (though perhaps somewhat removed) to things artistic - probably due to the lithographs of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.

While not aesthetically in the same league as the great can can dancer La Goulue (Louise Weber), Joseph Pujol was also pretty damn popular at the night club in the 1890's.

Joseph Pujol

His work and popularity more there than located that establishment at the grittier and Rabelaisian end of music hall spectrum!

Okay, I'll give you a hint as to his special 'talent':




Yep, you got it in one! The bending over pic is unmistakable. A fartist! A dying breed, if ever they were anything else but.

Born in Marseilles, Pujol discovered his amazing facility swimming in the sea as a child. He could - at will - take in large quantities of water and - equally at will - expel it.

Of course water turned to air and after his debut in Paris in 1887 and some touring of the provinces, he went very big time at Le Moulin Rouge in 1892 - becoming an instant sensation.

Each emission of the performance would be properly introduced:

This is a little girl

This is a bride on her wedding night (small noise)

This is a bride the morning after (much larger rasping noise)

This is a cannon (very large noise)

And so on, with the audience apoplectic with laughter. No high art going on here!

And of course Pujol had his pièce de résistance - blowing out candles:


Curiously, a descendant of Philipe Gallant, Pujol's assistant, claims to have the first 'explosion' of the De Sousa march 'Stars and Stripes' - captured at Le Moulin Rouge 5 February 1906:


I know you will expect this next bit!

Rare disque ODEON 19 cm N°6219 Monsieur LEFIRES Le célèbre Pétomane PARIS 1903

You'd imagine that Pujol would've faded into total obscurity after his death in 1945, but his life is the subject of a short film by Leonard Rossiter - 'Le Petomane' (1979) ...

Extract from 'Le Petomane' (1979)

... and of this French song ...

French Song

Now I always thought the appreciation of flatulence was mainly an English thing. Along with other kinds of toilet humour. But a quick YouTubing shows it as global phenomenon!

So a few clips to make the point:

Not sure bout the veracity of the the last one - but do we care!

If you claim not to have laughed during any of these - you are DEFINITELY LYING!!!!