I’ve just returned home after a period of wandering over the last few weeks that has taken me to Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Houston, Las Vegas, San Francisco — and to the elephant seals on the beach outside Hearst Castle.
Oxford seems unchanged, and I’m pleased to learn from the telly that Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden with the slogan, “The film that is so funny, it was banned in Norway”.
Here’s Andromache, wrestling with a blue thing on a stick:
Oh, I’m very pleased to see this again:
Readers with long memories will recall that Enkidu became interested in cricket almost immediately, after coming to live with us in the Summer of 2005. Here and here, for example. And now that the Ashes are being contested again, Enkidu’s interest has reawakened.
I’ve been leaving the radio on at night, very quietly, so that I can fall asleep while Justin Langer is scoring runs, wake up while Ricky Ponting is scoring runs, lucky me, and if I drift into consciousness in the middle of the night I can easily register the latest score before drifting back into sleep. And after finding alternative places to sleep for a month or more, Enkidu chose Wednesday night, the first day of the Test Match, to come and settle down at the foot of my bed again: he was there at the start of play and still there at the close, and I don’t think he went anywhere else in between. So that’s a lot of Test Match Special that he got to hear.
He slept on my bed last night, too, though he had pushed off by the time the England batsmen were starting their innings. And here he is, later this morning, watching the highlights being streamed through the BBC website:
Richard Williams, in tehgraun:
If they go on to lose this series, that first ball will inevitably come to be seen as a bellwether - a term deriving, incidentally, from the ancient rural practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated goat chosen to lead a flock of sheep.
MORE: I liked this comment on one of tehgraun blogs from
Bottle of red wine then listened to the first hour not a good idea. Have to say Aggers description of the first ball was great. Although when he said “its gone straight to 2nd slip” I almost fell off the sofa - didn’t realise the guy hadn’t actually hit it.
There’s a story in today’s Observer about the children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on the true story of the love of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo. We bought a copy in San Francisco’s A Different Light last year for one of our nephews, and it’s a pretty good book, with lots of pictures of penguins in it.
The Observer article, however, does rather overdraw the contrast between “liberal Manhattanites” and “small towns in the American heartland”. Tango is basically a conservative text, which strongly implies that the gay penguins’ relationship is legitimated through the baby-penguin-rearing activity that transforms them into a family unit deserving of respect. So it’s basically an Andrew-Sullivan-inflected gay penguin children’s book.
What America needs is a book to celebrate the lives of queer and sluttish non-baby-penguin-rearing male penguins. This is a group that is strikingly underrepresented in America’s lucrative and high-profile children’s book market.
In addition to its pair-bonded lesbian geese (Alice and Gertrude, I think), San Francisco Zoo used to have a nymphomaniac lady penguin. I wonder what happened to her.
It’s getting colder and wetter and darker outside, which means that muddy pawprints are becoming a bit more common around the house.
Enkidu stills seems to spend most of the day outside, doing whatever cat things he does out there, and checks in with me twice a day, at breakfast time, and whenever he gets in late at night, when he usually comes to wake me up to say hello.
Andromache, by contrast, tends to stay indoors and purr, happy now that I’ve restored a steady supply of tuna-flavoured catfood, rather than the chicken-themed muck I was trying to get her to enjoy.
Anyway: here’s Andromache washing Enkidu’s head a few minutes ago. Notice the rather complicated cat-toy-glove-thingummy.
More of the same:
A brief pause:
Headwashing resumes:
Enkidu shows off his clean head:
Following up on the Earl of Shaftesbury’s remarks about the elephant, below, we’re told today that elephants can pass the mirror test.
It seems to me to be only a short step from there to the necessary “Genius for Architecture and Mechanicks”, and then, I’m afraid, we will be finding it “hard to dispute with him the Dominion of the Continent”.
I don’t plan to get involved in this particular dispute. I intend to live in peace with the elephant, and as far as I’m concerned he (and she) can have the D of the C (though I’d still like to be able to visit France and Italy from time to time).
Seeing the title this post over at HM’s (it refers to the second clip) reminded me that I came across another passage the other day which can usefully join the set of beaver-blogging posts from this time last year which are assembled over here. It’s Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, reflecting on the animal kingdom, with a valuable reflection on the elephant as well as on the beaver:
Well it is perhaps for Mankind, that tho there are so many Animals who naturally herd for Company’s sake, and mutual Affection, there are so few who for Conveniency, and by Necessity are oblig’d to a strict Union, and kind of confederate State. The Creatures who, according to the OEconomy of their Kind, are oblig’d to make themselves Habitations of Defense against the Seasons and other Incidents; they who in some parts of the Year are depriv’d of all Subsistence, and are therefore necessitated to accumulate in another, and to provide withal for the Safety of their collected Stores, are by their Nature indeed as strictly join’d, and with as proper Affections towards their Publick and Community, as the looser Kind, of a more easy Subsistence and Support, are united in what relates merely to their Offspring, and the Propagation of their Species. Of these thorowly associating and confederate-Animals, there are none I have ever heard of, who in Bulk or Strength exceed the BEAVER. The major part of these political Animals, and Creatures of a joint Stock, are as inconsiderable as the Race of ANTS or BEES. But had Nature assign’d such an OEconomy as this to so puissant an Animal, for instance, as the ELEPHANT, and made him withal as prolifick as those smaller Creatures commonly are; it might have gone hard perhaps with Mankind: And a single Animal, who by his proper Might and Prowess has often decided the Fate of the greatest Battels which have been fought by Human Race, shou’d he have grown up into a Society, with a Genius for Architecture and Mechanicks proportionable to what we observe in those smaller Creatures; we shou’d, with all our invented Machines, have found it hard to dispute with him the Dominion of the Continent.
That’s from Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol.3 pp.134-5 of the Liberty ed.
Apologies for the long absence of cat-pics from these pages. I mislaid the camera for a bit, and when I found it again under a pile of books the weather was improving, and the cats were spending much of their time outside. Anyway: here’s Enkidu, contemplating the most recent addition to the historiography of the Enlightenment.
My goodness. Over here.
Don’t worry. I don’t think this is going to become a daily feature. Anyway, here’s Enkidu, Mac User, a few moments ago:
Andromache, earlier this morning:
This is what you miss if you don’t subscribe to the BBC Oxfordshire News RSS Feed!
I read through Martin Amis’s long piece in yesterday’s Observer, and was struck by one thing in particular: he writes in the third part that
The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.
It’s a while since I flipped through a book called The Camel and the Wheel by Richard Bulliet that deals with the fascinating story of the disappearance of wheeled transport from the post-Roman Middle East, but I don’t remember the story there having much to do with the “intellectual autarky” of the Islamic world, and a glance at this article, in which Bulliet summarises his argument, suggests that my memory’s working along the right lines.
So is anyone seriously making the case against Bulliet that Muslim “intellectual autarky” (rather than the good old-fashioned historical materialist reasons of geography, political economy and camels) was a major cause of the collapse in the use of the wheel (whose decline, in any case, predated the rise of Islam), or is this just becoming something people like Bernard Lewis and Martin Amis can say in order to make the Islamic world sound more unreasonable than it in fact was?
Enkidu, at full stretch:
Don’t miss the photo of Ann Widdecombe plus goat over at the WiddyWeb.
Andromache doesn’t always make it easy to type at the computer, seeing that wrists can also be employed as feline chin-rests.
Enkidu, to his shame, is bored by my books:
Actually, Enkidu is very bored by my books:
We used to think that Andromache was a lesbian submissive, but more recently we found out that the enormous neighbour’s cat with whom she used to wrestle playfully in the bushes was a boy. (That’s the cat that’s enormous, by the way, not the neighbour.) Our neighbour has been told by a vet, however, that her cat must lose weight soon OR HE WILL DIE, as his heart’s not in a terribly good way right now, and this has spurred us to put collars on our cats and magnets on the collars, so that they, and only they, can get into the house through our catflap and eat whatever crunchy tuna-flavoured food that they might find there.
Andromache was in a bit of a sulk about wearing her elegant green collar for a few days, but she seems to have adjusted to it, and is back to her usual friendly, perpetually purring self.
Enkidu, on the other hand, has managed to get his collar off three times in three days. On the first couple of occasions he did it in the living room, so I could scoop it back up and put it back on him. Now he’s removed it outside somewhere (and woke me up just before 7 this morning banging at the flap - which he can’t get through any more).
So now I have to get some spare magnets, to replace the one that he’s lost somewhere in the great wide world, but I’m also keen to pick up tips from the Friends of the Cat who read the Virtual Stoa - and I know there are some of you out there - about how to choose and fit a collar onto a cat who has managed to remove a pretty securely-fitted collar three times in quick succession. Any ideas?
Here’s what my final-year undergraduates gave me at the end of term, with a very sleepy Enkidu on one side…
… and a very small, sleepy Andromache on the other…
Here’s Enkidu, a few moments ago:
There haven’t been many cat pictures recently. Andromache’s still pretty hard to photograph indoors, and as the weather’s been getting better, Enkidu in particular has been spending longer and longer outside, away from my camera lens. (Although I think if it stays as warm as this, they’ll be spending more time back indoors, as I doubt it’s that much fun being a furry animal in bright sunshine.) Anyway: here’s Enkidu:
And here’s Andromache:
Enkidu and Andromache have just had their first birthday, over the week-end, so I’m now going officially to consider them cats rather than kittens, even though they are still quite small, at least compared to the enormous beasts that roam the streets of North Oxford.
By way of celebration, here’s the earliest picture I have of them, taken on 15 May last year when they were all of two days old. It’s pretty obvious which one Enkidu is; a little harder in the case of Andromache.
