Go forth

Watching late night Pet Rescue as an excuse to avoid going to sleep, I was struck by the beginning moments of one episode.

They started off by releasing a couple of wild animals that had been rescued and brought back to the peak of fitness. The first animal was a common toad (Bufo bufo, for all you binomial nomenclature fans) of the type that are sadly often found in a rather flattened form on our roads.

However, what had this particular Mr Toad been rescued from? It had been attacked by a grass snake. Would it be churlish for me to suggest that this is because grass snakes have evolved to eat toads? That’s how animals work - they all need to eat something, apart possibly from supermodels (homo anorexus) who seem able to subsist on nitrogen alone. It’s nature, innit. I hope the people who found the toad are now going to assiduously chase after it to rescue any slugs and snails it may try to eat - after all, we can’t be speciesist here.

Furthermore, in the Top Trumps of conservation, grass snakes score rather more highly than toads. The common toad is, as its name may just suggest, pretty common. Grass snakes, on the other hand, are a protected species so the toad-fanciers have managed to deprive an endangered animal of its dinner.

Next week, perhaps they could nurse back to health a mouse saved from the claws of a barn owl by a member of the public who daringly managed to effect the rescue by smacking the bird with a shovel.

The second animal release was even more odd. It was a duck that had been found, and I quote, “completely covered in cooking oil.” 

Basically, they’d rescued someone’s Sunday lunch.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I live opposite the family of a true animated hero: the Road Runner. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was absolutely right - cartoons are real, and Wile E Coyote’s eternal nemesis lives happily in Essex, a welcome respite from racing along the dusty roads of the American southwest.

How do I know this?

Because every time someone leaves the house in one of their many and varied cars, they merrily toot their horn twice. Meep meep.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Meep meep.

So it must be a family of Road Runners, keeping the old traditions alive by sounding the warcry and remembering the old days when life was a good straight road and an obsessive canine with an unlimited credit account at Acme Corporation.

Because the only alternative is that the house is populated by the sort of cretinous morons who, having said good-bye to their fellow simpletons, feel the need to announce to the entire street the electrifying fact that they are departing from their driveway in a motorised vehicle. Every time that meep meep sounds, crowds of my neighbours rush to their windows to stare at the amazing spectacle of a magical horseless wagon passing by. Truly we are filled with gratitude that we might be afforded a chance to see this miracle.

Middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep, five in the morning, doesn’t matter - the meep meep endures. I’m sure that even if we were afflicted by some natural disaster forcing us to evacuate our homes - flooding, perhaps, or a many-tentacled horror from under the earth - the last thing I’d hear as I rushed panic-stricken from my home would be the imbecilic double toot from opposite as the subnormal neanderthals saluted their shortly-to-be-eaten house.

It’s time to open an account at Acme.

Meep meep.

The topic of fainting goats came up at a party this weekend. I do find that the concept of swooning ungulates usually makes ideal small talk in an informal situation – it’s mentioned in all the top self-improvement books. Basically, they’re the Norman Wisdom of goats, a breed that stiffen up and topple over whenever they’re surprised. Not generally the best of predator defenses, particularly if you’re halfway up a mountain, as goats often tend to be.

Let me demonstrate (don’t worry, no involuntary sky-diving in this; it’s all in a lovely green pasture):

Look at the poor things - they’re like a novelty domino rally. If this occurred in the wild, lions wouldn’t roar; they’d shout ‘Boo!’, leaving a field full of finger food without any of that awkward chasing and jumping.

Breed it into humans and we’ll end wars forever. One gunshot and everyone falls over…

NEWSFLASH! Office cat is back!

I wrote about the disappearance of my furriest co-worker back in January, by which time I’d come to the conclusion that her owners must have moved away.

But now, heading on for five months later, the cat is back, materializing outside the door today as though nothing had happened and meowing to be let in. The resultant wander around the office and insolent roll on the floor have restored normality once more, in as much as an office with a resident feline can be called normal.

Quite honestly, it has made my week.

I recently stumbled across an astounding discovery: the first drafts of four of the great Shakespeare’s plays. It is evident that he went through many stages of revision before ending up with the classic texts we know and love today, and these early versions give a fascinating insight into the creative process. I bring to you some exclusive previews before this gets picked up by the literary press and becomes international news.

The Taming of the Poo Comedy about a drunkard suffering from constant acute diarrhea. Well, perhaps not that cute. Like so many of the great bard’s works, it coined (and answered) a famous phrase when the hero exits some woods, pursued by a bear who is afflicted by the same problem.

A Midsummer Night’s Bream The original inspiration for Finding Nemo.

Hamlet Tragic tale of a tiny baby pig who just wants to herd sheep in Denmark. Ends badly in a bacon factory. With minor changes to cater for a younger audience, was also adapted into a film.

As You Like It, Not A Lot, But You Like It A farce of identity when a small bewigged magician named Paul and a wide range of supporting characters exchange disguises until he finds the love of his life, Deborah. Ends with a twist into horror as Paul saws his new wife in half.

In the bright sunshine of incipient summer the garden bench has been commandeered by a queen wasp (not a WASP or, thankfully, the various members of W.A.S.P.). Every ten minutes she helicopters in to pick up strips of wood, chewing industriously away before carrying off her spoils to her secret base. The bench is quickly becoming stippled with the marks of her labour.

I like to think that she’s building a host of tiny wasp-sized benches, ready for her future handmaidens to populate as they train to become fully fledged yellowjackets – a kind of insectoid convent school with a particularly lively uniform.

It gave me a chance to try a few close-up photographs, and the hankering for a proper macro lens on my camera in order to do an even better job. Unfortunately macro lenses are majorly expensive so it might be a wee while…

The sort of special effects that you’d normally see only in Hollywood when a volcanic eruption and lightning intermingle here.

I’m an information junkie. I thrive on collecting utterly useless information, facts that have no purpose beyond being interesting; indeed, worthy of the splendid Quite Interesting. I’m terrible at remembering dates, but tell me that houseflies take off backwards; that J was the last letter added to the English alphabet; or that the British shrew and the duck-billed platypus share the rare trait among mammals of being venomous; and that nugget of info will stick in some corner of my brain forever, serving no purpose beyond boring the non-trivia-obsessed majority at parties.

This is a serious affliction – it goes to the extent that I will enthusiastically refute, with full evidence, some of the false facts and urban legends that tend to bounce around. Things like the ridiculous claim that we only use 10% of our brain – utter balderdash, except perhaps in the case of footballers and anyone whose car stereo can be heard more than thirty feet away from their car.

As a gift to those doomed infovores with the same kind of all-consuming factual addiction as me, I bring you Wikipedia’s Unusual Articles list. It’s the sort of page that keeps me engrossed for hours, learning about such things as the US town sitting on top of a burning coal seam that is expected to smoulder for 250 years, the Korean belief that using an electric fan in a closed room will kill you, or the shortest war in history (38 minutes). There’s much, much more there to enjoy.

As ever with anything on the internet, where facts can sometimes be created more from a consensual belief rather than hard reality, if you’re ever going to use any of this information in place of smalltalk at parties, make sure you double-check it first lest you come up against a fellow info-addict and descend into the sort of claim and counter-claim spiral that ends with someone being to beaten to death with an encyclopaedia over an assertion that daddy longlegs are the most poisonous animal but that they can’t bite humans*.

* They’re not, even taking into account that what the British and Americans call daddy longlegs are different things: one being an insect, the other a variety of arachnids. See how I’m unable to resist blurting out useless info?