Going bats

At dusk each night, I watch the flying foxes, the local fruit bats, making their way to wherever they go to feed. They roost somewhere to the west, and dine somewhere to the east, and as I live on a ridge, they fly past at about window level..

Some bats are so exceedingly ugly, that it can be little surprise that they are regarded with horror.

These are the small insect-eating flying mammals which make a specialty out of using echolocation to find their dinner, in the form of flying insects.

We cannot hear the noises these bats make to find their food, but some moths can hear them, and they have evolved to drop, very fast, when they hear a bat's call.

We speak of people being as blind as a bat, but in reality, bats see quite well — they just don't need vision, because they can 'see' with sound, but there is just one problem: how can a bat hear a faint echo at the same time that it is shouting?

The answer, it seems, is that they change their pitch, and those incredibly ugly faces of theirs are part of their hearing apparatus, channelling back the echoes, and distinguishing the pitch of the echo from that now being emitted.

There are quite a few other types of bat as well, though some of the terms seem to have evolved from other words. The animal called an evening bat is aften-bakka in Danish, while in Middle English, it was bakke, although 'flittermouse', a close parallel to the German fledermaus, is not unknown, reminding us that the bat looks very like a flying mouse.

Fruit bats are larger and zoologists call them the Megachiroptera. These bats do not use echo-location because fruit do not dodge out of the way, and according to some people, this group may have evolved separately from the small insect-eating bats, the Microchiroptera. Then again, maybe they all come from a common source, and evolved different habits. Last I heard, the evidence seemed to favour the idea that the bats evolved once, and then split into two groups.

There are real vampire bats in South America, small beasts with razor-sharp teeth which scrape at the skin of their victims, usually near a heel, and use an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing as they slowly drink their fill. These are specialised forms of the insect-eating bats, and so they retain the ugly faces their ancestors needed for echo-location of insects.

It seems that the legend of the vampire came from Europe, and the link with bats is possibly related to bats as a source of rabies infection, as we will see shortly. In this, the South American vampire bats are just a neat coincidence, it seems.

A brickbat is entirely different. While we use the term mainly in a figurative sense, a brickbat is a piece of brick, less than half of the brick, with one end complete, and commonly used as a missile to hurl at an enemy. Its derivation is unknown, so perhaps it came from a piece of thrown brick, turning and appearing to flitter like a bat.

More likely, though, it came from the other main sense of 'bat' which means to strike or hit, a meaning which we see in a cricket bat, a baseball bat, or in terms like battery and battering ram. In that sense, a brickbat would be just a piece of brick used for hitting or striking — or perhaps a piece of brick that was broken away to finish a course of bricks, for that matter.

The batter that we put on something to be fried is apparently related to the hitting sense of 'bat', because part of the preparation involves beating the batter to mix it. The word 'battle', however, is a bit of a puzzle, and may not have come from the same root, or if it did, it came first through vulgar Latin, where it was battalia, and French, where it was bataille — and our 'battalion' also comes from this source.

Even 'cotton batting' comes from the fact that raw cotton has to be beaten by hand while it is being cleaned. When people started putting cannon together to batter the enemy walls in a siege, these were called a battery, and it seems we have Benjamin Franklin to thank for applying this name to a set of crude capacitors called Leyden jars, to make the first battery of the electric kind. And as usual, the work of Ben Franklin would take some beating.

 

Capturing a spider's web

Before you start, ask yourself if you really need to destroy a spider's web. These photos do a pretty goof job of capture. though you will need to click on the photos to see larger versions.

As you can see, there is another way to capture a spider's web, and that is with a camera.

In another entry, I have shown a web, captured at night with a flash, but I am rather fond of getting shots of webs that are covered in dew or festooned with rain drops.

The one on the left, above, is a bit different: it was attached to a road sign and catching the late afternoon sun. I had to shoot into the sun, but by moving around a bit, I had the camera in the shadow of the sign, while the web showed up well against the trees behind.


You really want to catch a web?  OK, here's how.

First up, you need the right sort of web. Leaf-curling spiders like this won't leave the web for you, so this sort of web is No Good At All.



What you need:
A large sheet of stiff black paper or cardboard, an old cardboard box, a can of white spray paint, newspaper, an assistant and a pair of sharp scissors. You can also use black paint and white cardboard, if you prefer. You can even use paper, but you need to tape it to a piece of cardboard the same size (or larger). You also need a place well away from buildings, washing or anything else that will be spoiled by a coat of paint. Talk to an adult!

Your assistant will probably need goggles and a breathing mask: think about this!

What you do:

The best place to find large numbers of spiders is in heathy bushland, close to a swamp or a creek, as there will be more insects around in those places. On the other hand, you can probably find a suitable candidate in your garden.

The week I wrote this piece, I found a suitable candidate several days in a row, stretched over the path I had to walk along to collect the morning paper. In the end, I collected it on a straw broom and moved it to a garden tree where we would not keep breaking it down.

On a calm day, about two hours after sunrise, when the dew has dried from the webs, choose a large web. If she is still in her web, persuade the spider gently to take shelter while you spray and steal the centre of her web. The paint will not be at all healthy for the spider.

While your assistant holds a large piece of scrap cardboard behind the web to catch most of the paint which misses, spray the web with paint from about 50 cm away, being careful not to paint your assistant. Do both sides, then put away the cardboard and the paint.

You only have one go at collecting the web, so choose the part which you want carefully. Push the black cardboard flat against the web, which sticks to the paper because the paint is still wet. Hold the cardboard into the web, and get your helper to cut around the edges of the web with the scissors.

Carry the cardboard indoors to a safe place and leave the paint to dry for half an hour or so while you tear down all the left-over parts of the web with paint on them, as orb weavers eat and re-use their webs. When the paint is dry, you can spray it with artist's fixative, or cover it in cling-wrap.

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said a spider to a fly.
"'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy."
— Mary Howitt (1799-1888) The Spider and the Fly.

Scary spiders

I freely admit that some spiders are scary, and you have to know what you are doing.

On the left is a funnelweb spider (Atrax sp.) that I found in the Snowy Mountains about thirty years ago.  I was shooting with a Pentax SLR with close-up rings, and I didn't get all that close, and I was a bit nervous — which explains why the shot is a bit blurry.

The rest is probably down to nerves! The shot on the right is a close-up of the fangs of a dead relative, an unnamed mygalomorph spider.  One has every right to be scared of animals like the one above!

Or indeed, of the one on the left. Discretion being better than valour, I freely confess that this redback, photographed in one of the nursery houses, was most sincerely dead. I don't think anybody has died from a redback bite for a LONG time, but the bites are very painful, they say.

The redback is a close relative of the American Black Widow and the New Zealand katipo — and the Australian redback is good at stowing away. One made it to Tristan da Cunha some years ago, from memory it was in some NASA equipment that was shipped there from rural New South Wales.

The thing is: you don't need to get close to spiders to study them, you can engage in historical research. That aside, their eyes "glow in the dark" when you shine a bright light on them, because the eyes reflect some of the light back at you.

At night, you can spotlight spiders on open ground and examine them. Here is my ever-helpful wife posing with a strong light behind her ear: walk out in the garden, look for glowing eyes in the grass and then move in on them.

Just get as close as is comfortable to the glowing eyes, look at them, talk to them nicely, and move on.

And you can use this link to get some historical newspaper information.

This is part of a new series, all of which are tagged Nature Study.  Look for this tag at the end of this post and click on it to find the other related pieces. I have also gone back and retro-tagged previous articles that fit, so you will actually find quite a horde of them, so that you need to look at two sets of older posts as well.

Playing with dragons

There really ARE dragons, all over Australia.

Not the fire-breathing flying beasts in story books, these are lizards in the family Agamidae, and one of my reference books says Australia has 78 species, which means I still have quite a few to find.


The dragon you see here is a bearded dragon from the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. I was out in dry country near the dingo fence, and I went off the road looking for interesting stuff.

That's a good way to find interesting things, though as you can see from the top two shots, this beastie was well camouflaged in the red soil.

While I know how to handle these animals, I don't make a habit of it, unless they are on a road and need to be moved. In this case, I wanted to show the other people in the party what one of these looked like, but more importantly, I needed pictures of how to do it for a book, so I picked it up.

The dragon didn't like it: you can't see his tail, because he was lashing my leg with it, and his spiny skin was trying to puncture my hands. I am old and tough, so I put up with it for a while.

The trick is to hold the body firmly but gently between the front and hind legs, and if you can, wear gloves!  I tentatively identify it as a Central Bearded Dragon, Pogona vitticeps, based mainly on the location, and a couple of mug shots found on the web.

My local dragons are Eastern Water Dragons, Intellagama lesueurii, and they are settling in very well in suburban Sydney. They are good swimmers,and if you have a licence, they make good pets, but I prefer to see them in the wild. I have never seen any good reason to pick any if them up.



These animals rely strongly on vision, as you can see here. With all those spines, they are probably not too worried about predators, but I rather suspect that this animal knows us when we arrive at a particular beach.

You see, we know what they like to eat, and we usually go there for a meal, and when we do, there is always some fruit in the pack.

They will eat strawberries and blueberries, but grapes are a particular favourite!

Now you know what to do.

This is part of a new series, all of which are tagged Nature Study.  Look for the tag at the end of this post and click on it to find the related pieces. I have also gone back and retro-tagged previous articles that fit.

This one was mainly written for Eabha and Eamon.

Looking at spiders 2

Other tricks that are worth trying include catching webs with raindrops on them, or using flash in the dark. Note that (aside from a mild trauma from the flash {maybe}) for the spider, these do no harm to animals.

Now look at the webs below left: There is always something new to learn, and I have NO idea at all what sorts of spiders make these webs that lie flat on the ground, but they are quite common in grasslands and open heath.

I have seen these webs from Cape York to Victoria, but I have always  been with people who were in a rush, so they remain unknown.

I suspect that the spiders making these webs catch small hopping crustaceans and  things like that.

The joy of going out and looking is that there is always something that requires an answer.

The other way is to find dead spiders and pose them. Dead huntsmen occasionally show up in our garage, and if they are fairly fresh, they can be placed in a jar with a damp tissue, which softens them so they can be posed and support in place with pins as they dry again.

None of those pins goes through the spider: they just support it while it dries, letting me get the pose on the right.

This is part of a new series, all of which are tagged Nature Study.  Look for the tag at the end of this post and click on it to find the related pieces. I have also gone back and retro-tagged previous articles that fit.

Bear with me.  I'm going to stay with spiders for a bit.

Looking at spiders 1

I took up spiders in 1958 when I saw Keith McKeown's Australian Spiders. The frontispiece was of a jumping spider like the one on the left, but the photo showed it face-on, and I fancied a resemblance to my Latin teacher. Any life form that could mimic Latin teachers had to be OK.

Then, with my (very) distant Scots ancestry, the St Andrews Cross Spider (right) was interesting. They insist on putting a saltire in their web, and then put two legs along each line. Why?

The best guess I have seen is that they do it to make themselves look larger to potential predators. They are a nice easy target, and usually found in the nursery where I work as a volunteer

Over the years, I have come up with some wrinkles to make snapping easier. That jumping spider kept springing away, so I put in a glass salad bowl, with blue card in the bottom. Then I just had to wait until it got tired of leaping.

I used to wonder how orb-weavers (left) avoided getting caught in their vertical webs, but as the side-shot on the right shows, the webs are NOT vertical. The web is just a blur because most of it is out of the focal field, but you can see the angle.

Later, I decided to try capturing the web better, and started working with card sheets, and as you can see on the left, not all cards are equal. The blue background hides the web completely. Still, the plain background is less distracting that out-of-focus brickwork.


This is part of a new series, all of which are tagged Nature Study.  Look for the tag at the end of this post and click on it to find the related pieces. I have also gone back and retro-tagged previous articles that fit.

Take a dose of millipedes

An afternote: the book mentioned below is now available, both as a Kindle e-book, and also as an Amazon Print On Demand paperback. Use this link to learn more.

I am working on a new book which has the working title Not Your Usual Treatment, and it will include bizarre folk remedies, quack operations and bizarre devices, all used to "treat" in some way a real or fancied condition. The exact form will emerge from the research and the digging, and here is an example of a "find" and where it has led me, so far.

The hunt began when I was poring over Buchan's 1790 Domestic Medicine. I can't prove it yet, but I suspect that much early colonial medicine was influenced by this volume, or its competitors, and I was fascinated with the huge list of ailments that were amenable to treatment with "Peruvian bark", which is a sort of antique code for quinine.  It was the bark of the cinchona tree.

In the middle of that hunt, I found a gem, but to understand it you will need to know that chin-cough is a dialect word for whooping cough.

The millepedes, or wood-lice, are greatly recommended for the cure of a chin-cough. Those who chuse to make use of these infects, may infuse two ounces of them bruised in a pint of small white-wine for one night. Afterwards the liquor may be strained through a cloth, and a table-spoonful of it given to the patient three or four times a-day.

William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 287.

Buchan expressed his reservations about the cure, a few chapters later:

Many dirty things are recommended for the cure of the jaundice ; as lice, millepedes, &c. But these do more harm than good, as people trust to them, and neglect more valuable medicines; be sides they are seldom taken in sufficient quantity to produce any effects. People always expect that such things should act as charms, and consequently seldom persist in the use of them. Vomits, purges, fomentations, and exercise, will seldom fail to cure the jaundice when it is a simple disease; and when complicated with the dropsy, a scirrhous liver, or other chronic complaints, it is hardly to be cured by any means.

William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 373.

a woodlouse

a millipede

But there was a taxonomic problem here. The millepede (or millipede as we now write it) is a juliform diplopod, a beastie with many, many pairs of legs, two pairs to each segment. More importantly, I recalled reading in an old textbook (possibly Grassé's Traité de Zoologie) that the diplopods secrete hydrocyanic acid, which would make ingesting them a bit risky.

three views of dead slaters

On checking, I discovered that they actually secrete benzoquinones which are nasty, but not deadly. Still, I wouldn't swallow a diplopod, especially one which had been annoyed by being crushed!

Wood-lice on the other hand are terrestrial crustaceans, known also as pill-bugs, sow-bugs, slaters or grammar sows, among other names, and I guessed that this was what was meant. I confirmed this from a couple of old sources, but I wondered why the millipedes were having their good name delivered to a bunch of land crustaceans, with a different shape and may fewer legs.

Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, had the answer for me:

Millepedes or Woodlice, which roll themselves into Balls, are bred chiefly under Logs of Timber, but not in the Timber…

Francis Bacon, Philosophical Works, vol, 3, 115 (about 1625).

A pill bug!!

A juliform diplopod.

So there we have it: they are grouped because some of the slaters, the ones called pill-bugs, roll up to protect their bellies, and so do juliform diplopods.

Before Linnaeus, any sort of criterion could be applied, if it suited you, and so the millipede was a wood-louse or vice versa, if that suits you.

An addendum posted April 5: I have been doing some further checking and Theophilus Redwood, in his A Supplement to the Pharmacopoeia, London, 1857, at page 163, explains that the correct animal to use is the Oniscus armadillo, which is the beast above, to the right. He says:

Millepedes are prepared by exposing then to the vapour of hot  alcohol, which kills them, In this state they are always contracted into the globular form, and thus are distinguished from the wood-lice, which have sometimes been confounded with them.

Statue of Sir Hans Sloane,
Chelsea Physic Garden.

I wondered about how widespread the practice of medicinal use of wood-lice was, and I landed once again in a favourite place, the garden of Hans Sloane, which I visited in London, eight years ago. The garden is now better known as the Chelsea Physic Garden, and it is a delight to those who know a bit of medical botany.  Where does Sloane come in? Well, it was once his garden.

Portrait of Sir Hans Sloane,
Chelsea Physic Garden.

Sloane was Anglo-Irish and trained as a medical botanist in London and France, but went to Jamaica with the Duke of Albemarle in 1687. The result was his great Natural History of Jamaica and a dead ex-pirate, because he helped treat that wicked old retired pirate and ex-Governor of Jamaica Henry Morgan, whose main problem was too much grog. (As a side note, one of the themes I am playing with is the use of alcohol for medicinal purposes, but that's for later.)

Sloane and another medico called Fulke Rose treated the poor bloke with millipedes and oil of scorpions. Luckily, a number of his other patients thrived, because Sloane had taken a good supply of "Peruvian bark" with him, and that meant that he could treat malaria (and if Buchan is to be trusted (he couldn't be), Sloane could also treat pleurisy, TB, diphtheria, spotted fever, smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, sore eyes, and just about every other ailment in the book,

Sloane did one other useful thing: he tasted cocoa in water and found it bitter, but mixed it with milk and gave it as a medicine. Aside from that and his membership of the Royal Society, Sir Hans Sloane, as he became, leaves the picture now.

But how were "millepedes" prepared?  In the early 1600s, John French offered this recipe for aqua magnanimitatis: the water of magnanimity, which was good for deafness:

"Take of ants or pismires a handful, of their eggs two hundred, of millepedes or woodlice one hundred, and of bees one hundred and fifty. Digest all these in two pints of spirit of wine, being very well impregnated with the brightest soot. Digest them together the space of a month, then pour off the clear spirit and keep it safe."

Thomas Willis (1621-1675) thought the stuff would do for headaches: as a rule, when one preparation is accorded multiple powers, that indicates something dodgy—but then aspirin eases headaches and thins the blood, so it's not a perfect rule. Here's Willis:

We ought not to omit, or postpone the use of Millepedes or Woodlice, for that the juicew of them, wrung forth, with the distilled Water, also a Powder of them prepared, often-times brings notable help, for the Curing of notable and pertinacious Headaches.

Thomas Willis, Pathologiae cerebri.

The idea of medical millipedes was still around in the 19th century, going on Knapp's 1829 Journal of a Naturalist:

We may even now, perhaps, swallow a few matters, the arcane of the needy or the daring, in the various compositions of powders, draughts, and pills, which are not quite agreeable to our palates or out stomachs; but our forefathers had more to encounters, as they had more faith to support them, when they were subjected, for the cure of their maladies, to such medicines as album græcum, or the white bony excrement of dogs, bleached on the bank, for their heartburns and acidities; the powder produced from burnt mice, as a dentifrice; millepedes or woodlice, for nephritic and other complaints; and the ashes of earthworms, administered in nervous and epileptic cases.

John Leonard Knapp, Journal of a Naturalist, 1829, 337.

And I dug up a 1906 reference in Nature which took me back to William George Black's Folk-Medicine, published in 1883:

A relation of mine was in the cottage of a wise woman at Penzance about two years ago, and found that she was still in the habit of prescribing in scrofulous cases grammar sows, sow-pigs, millepedes or woodlice, to be swallowed as a pill. According to the Penzance woman, the sufferer must himself secure his medicine, but she had a corner in her little garden where nothing was grown but mint and thyme, and there the sow-pigs were reared. As a concession to modern feelings, patients are now allowed to wear this disagreeable medicine in a little bag round the neck, if they shrink from the heroic remedy of swallowing it.

William George Black, Folk-Medicine 1883, 198.

There was also a footnote which gives us a few more names and shows that the practice was widespread in Britain:

Miss M. L. B. 17 October, 1878. "In the Eastern Counties they are called old-sims and sow-bugs, and in other parts St. Anthony's hogs. Their Latin name is porcellio scaber. The Welsh have several names for this insect, — gwrach-y-coed, i.e. the withered old woman of the wood; gwrach-y-lludw.

But how safe were  you, swallowing these things?  Not very, I suspect, given a tale that Edward Wright passed on to the Royal Society in 1755. Wright was in Paris and keen to observe the small animals that Buffon and Needham had been reporting as developing in sealed bottles, which appeared to be cases of spontaneous generation of life. In the way of Fellows of the Royal Society, he experimented and recorded. Details are from Edward Wright, Microscopical Observations, Phil. Trans., 1755, 698.

On May 1, 1752, at 11 in the morning, Wright "…made an infusion of dried millepedes, or wood-lice, such as are commonly kept in the apothecaries' shops. These he put unbruised into a small phial, so as to make it half full; then poured on them as filled it neck and all, stopped it with a well masticated cork, and put it in a pocket, where it was kept in a mild degree of warmth." On examining it that night, he found it "…swarming with oblong, slender, flattish animalcules…"

You can see them on the right. Those are bacteria, I would say, and they can only have come from the dried wood-lice, I think.  Take a dose of wood lice, and you might be in trouble!


Mind you, others who were taxonomically challenged might have been in trouble as well. Imagine what would happen if somebody managed to confuse millipedes with one of these chaps. Centipedes would not be nice to swallow.

So, you see where the idle eye can lead you down some curious by-ways!

PS: I am indebted to my good friend, Marian Drabkin, who found me a Huffington Post article which adds a bit more detail on wood-lice and indicates that they were also good for tooth-ache. I don't think I am finished with this topic just yet...in fact I know I'm not, because I keep coming upon more recipes for "millepedes".


* * * * * * *
This blog covers quite a few different things, so I tag each post. I also blog about history, and I am currently writing a series of books called Not your usual... and the first two have been accepted by Five Mile Press, The offcuts appear here with the tag Not Your Usual... . For a taste of Australian tall tales, try the tags Speewah or Crooked Mick.   For a miscellany of oddities, try the tag temporary obsessions. And language us covered under the tags Descants and Curiosities, while stuff about small life is under Wee beasties.

Steering a course through cyberspace

Cyberspace, that ill-defined area controlled by computer technology, first appeared in William Gibson's Neuromancer, but that was just one point in a long trail that began with the ancient Greeks.

The old Greeks called the art of steering a boat something that sounded like 'kubernan', but for complicated reasons to do with the ways we transliterate Greek into our alphabet, we write this as cybernan. The Romans were more accurate when they adopted this word into Latin as gubernare, calling the steersman a gubernator, a word that lives on in American English in 'gubernatorial race', a competition to elect a governor.

In the engineering sense, a governor is once again involved with a sort of steering. In simple terms, it is a control device which stops something from running out of control, and cybernetics is intended to carry that same sense of control, of maintenance of the status quo.

Watt's governor

James Watt did not invent the first steam engine, but he invented a governor, the first automatic speed control for a steam engine. This neat gadget featured two brass balls and a series of levers called a pantograph (another Watt invention that he later adapted to reproduce drawings, among other things). Watt's 'governor', from the Latin word, reduces the steam supply when it spins faster, and increases the steam supply when it runs slow, and thus by feedback (another Watt invention), it controls the engine's speed.

With careful design, the steam engine and the governor ease into a compromise where the engines spins at constant speed, and the governor holds the balls at a constant angle, so the steam supply is held constant.

Norbert Wiener went to the Greek word to name his method of aiming guns to shoot down German 'buzz bombs' (which used feedback controls as well), he dubbed his control systems and their study "cybernetics". And that, in turn, gave us cyborgs, cyberspace, cybercrime and cybersex, so now 'cyber' means anything done by computer communication. But the language progresses: if people who know each other in cyberspace meet in the real world, they are in meatspace.

In nautical space, the item used by the steersman to control the ship was a stéorbord in Old English, a rudder or paddle placed over the side of a ship, traditionally on the steerboard side, which became the starboard side. The other side of the ship used to be called the larboard side, and this is often explained as a corruption of lee-board, but this is unlikely for a number of reasons.

It is rather more likely that larboard comes from the Middle English laddeborde or latheborde. This indicated the side of the ship from which loading took place, now called the port side, also meaning the side from which loading took place, but preferred by sailors because it was less likely to be confused with 'starboard' when shouted in an order given in a howling gale.

Sadly, one bit of folk etymology attaching to port and starboard, the alleged origin of 'posh' is completely untrue. The yarn has it that 'posh' stands for 'port outward, starboard home', indicating those who, in travelling from England to India, were to be allocated the cabins on the shadier port side while sailing to India, and the shadier starboard cabins sailing back to England. It is a pretty tale, but one entirely unsupported by any evidence. In reality, 'posh' probably was a slang term for money.

Some things change slowly: young people going to see are still taught that "If two lights you see ahead, port your helm and show your red", which means swinging the tiller over to the port side, which turns the bows to starboard, showing the port light, which is red, yet the tiller was replaced by the ship's wheel soon after 1700.  Small boats still have a tiller, but few of them have navigation lights.

This tiller, nothing to do with farming, was the grooved stock of a crossbow, and hence a beam of similar size used to control a rudder, a word which comes from the same root as 'row', reminding us that originally the helmsman steered with an oar-like paddle.

But why was he called the helmsman? Did he have a special hat, a turn-helm? Apparently not: the steering sort of helm was a hjalm in Old Norse, and that was just another name for the tiller. When Mao Zedong was acclaimed as the Great Helmsman, he may have governed many people, but he did not need a Chairman Mao hat to qualify for the title.

Finding a lost mountain

The problem with searching for lost mountains is that they have probably been lost for a very good reason. In Australia, the early traditions was to slap the name of some wealthy and powerful patron or potential patron on each feature as it was added to the map.

Later, it became more common to actually ask the locals what the name of a place was, and to record that, but in the early days, the names given by savages were of less interest. So the largest river near Sydney is named the Hawkesbury after a worthless trimmer in the British government, and the main geological element seen around the city is now called the Hawkesbury sandstone, though Wiananatta shales and Narrabeen shales lie on either side of it.

If you are naming things after people, there are a few rules: you cannot name anything after yourself, though two colleagues can each claim a discovery and name their find after the other. The only problem is that sometimes the thing they see as a significant feature can be less so when you aren't trying to carry out a trigonometrical survey.

From page 157 of one of the books that
came from the search described here, my
Australian Backyard Explorer.

Triangles were very important in convict days. As every convict-oriented tourist attraction likes to remind us, just before a re-enactment that involves splatting somebody's back with tomato-soup-covered thongs, convicts were tied to an iron triangle before their lashing. Out in the bush, though, as people set out to map a new continent, triangles were central to the whole mapping thing, which commonly went by the name of triangulation.

The Greeks understood triangles, Mason and Dixon used them when they surveyed the Mason-Dixon line in the US, European surveyors understood it when they used triangulation to accurately plot lines up and down meridians at different latitudes so they could plot the shape of our globe, which is not quite the perfect sphere that the Greeks had assumed.

It works like this: if you have a carefully measured base line, you can get compass bearings on a prominent landmark from each end. Then if you draw a scale version of the baseline on your chart, you can locate that landmark in relation to the base line by completing the triangle. You just need to know the length of one side of the triangle, and the angles, which you get from the bearings, and that landmark is located. Repeat this with landmark after landmark, and you can begin to fill the map in, adding names as you go.

Now comes the beautiful part: if you are in a new place, like the junction of two streams, and if you can get bearings on any two known landmarks (though three will always be better), you can locate that point on the chart as well, and so accurately locate the river at that point. Then, as you work your way into new territory, new landmarks may be added to the map and given names.

Triangle by triangle, the chart builds up, each point being pinned down: and you don't just have the angles to play with, because you can also make an accurate measure of the distances between two mountains that are separated by a chasm, a burning desert, shark-infested seas or crocodile-ridden swamp. If you have one side measure, and the angles, you know the lengths of the other sides, and putting everything on the map is just simple trigonometry.

In short order, what began as a base line measured along a beach or across a plain, anywhere that is reasonably flat and open, is quickly parlayed into a chain of triangles linking named features that may extend over many degrees of latitude or longitude, or both.

And in time, the mountains and other features that were used at first as reference points, fade into the mists. Instead, surveyors will rely on a small number of accurately placed "trigonometrical survey stations", trig stations to the unwashed like me, poles with what appears from a distance to be a ball.

Far beneath the Hawkesbury sandstone, the Narrabeen shales and other rocks, the whole Sydney sedimentary basin sits on a bed of coal, the Permian coal measures, coal that comes above sea level in Sydney's south and north, and also approaches the surface of the ground in the west at Lithgow, past the mountains that hemmed in the colony.

The coal outcrops to the north were found in 1797, when Lieutenant Shortland entered the mouth of what was briefly known as "the coal river" in 1797, but he had the sense to dub it "Hunter's River", close to the modern name of Hunter River, celebrating the name of the then governor of the young colony of New South Wales, Captain John Hunter.

Newcastle is still a coal port.

It seems that even before official exploration, fishermen had found their way along the coast to the coal river and brought back lumps of coal to sell in Sydney, and there is evidence to suggest that boats were visiting the Hunter to cut timber (one branch of the river was already known as "the cedar arm").

Whatever the earlier history, it all became official in 1801 when a party that included Lt Colonel George Paterson, Ensign Francis Barallier, Surgeon John Harris and Lt James Grant, RN, arrived in His Majesty's Armed Surveying Vessell (sic) Lady Nelson, to survey the entrance to the river, and to assess the land for agricultural potential, as a source of timber, and as a source of coal.

The colony, based at Sydney, continued to grow, but the colonists were hemmed in until 1813 by a range of mountains to Sydney's west, which seemed to offer no way through. These mountains are made of the tough Hawkesbury sandstone, which also makes the insipid and sandy soil of Sydney, stuff unfit for a decent vegetable garden, incapable of supporting flocks and herds, deficient in trees suited for building work or minerals to be dug from the ground.

Even shell banks, suitable for making lime, were in short supply, so the group were expected to look into many things. (In fact, the first commercial export from the colony was a small cargo of 45 tons if coal, sent to the Cape of Good Hope in 1801.)

Before they left, all of them, except Barallier, who surveyed the area and made the chart, knew where their names would appear on the map, along with the name of the colony's governor King and King's wife, Ann, Paterson's wife Elizabeth, Harris' brother surgeon, William Balmain, and even a Mr. Edgerton, who was a friend of a friend of Grant. Today, all of those names have disappeared from the maps, even if they were once key features in the charting of the lower Hunter Valley.

I knew from Grant's journal that it was he who named "Mount Edgerton", shown on Barrallier's map as the "Egerton Hills", and Paterson had named Mount King and Mount Grant, while Barallier's map revealed Mount Harris and Mt Balmain, and a river branch called Paterson's River, which is now the upper reaches of the Hunter. Paterson's River has gone, and no modern map, shows any of them. A visit was needed, but the wilderness of 1801 is now a sprawling city of 400,000, and I rather feared that my mountains would be underneath suburbs.

I selected a finite set of targets: Mts Ann, Elizabeth, Grant and Harris, and called in at the Newcastle City Library. I had emailed them to say that I was coming, what I had read so far, and what I hoped to find, so I was met with several helpful books, but far more importantly, a copy of Barrallier's chart, an older-than-me Ordnance Survey map, and more modern maps were also on hand. It soon became clear that my lost mountains were beyond the city limits.

I expected the maps to be a little disappointing, because I thought they were Grant's work. Governor King, later in 1801, when Grant asked to be allowed to leave the colony, was rather dismissive of his skills: " . . . I should [have] been glad if your ability as a surveyor, or being able to determine the longitude of different places you might visit, was in any ways equal to your ability as an officer and a seaman."

Instead, the chart was the work of that supposed paragon of cartographic virtue, Ensign Barallier, and I began to understand why Barallier's chart of his wanderings in the Blue Mountains has been impossible to reconcile with today's landscape. In short, I soon realised that Barallier's chart of Coal Harbour was not a close match for either present-day charts or reality. Barallier wasn't as good as people had thought.

Whatever the man's deficiencies as a cartographer, the layout was more or less right, and as I looked at the windings of the river on the different maps, I began to link up some common features, and to spot some possibilities. Working with maps on different scales, and with Barallier's eccentric rotation of the map to put west at the top, it helped to have some clues left by one of the librarians, in the form of an indication that "Mount Grant is below Clarencetown".

That gave me Mount Grant as a small prominence, 3 km SE of the town, far from any roads, on the thoroughly modern Clarencetown CMA sheet. Working systematically, triangulating from one map to another, one prominence to another, I pinned the assorted hills down, more or less, in a hypothetical way, perhaps. One high point stood out as worthy of attention: it was near a road, just after it crossed a railway line, and it had a name.

There was a trig station shown on it, so I knew it would be prominent, even if it now bore the dismissive name Comerford's Hill. Better still, there was another marked trig station near the hamlet of Largs that appeared to match another of my mountains, so I headed for the area outside the rural city of Maitland.

Then, my potential Largs mountain (Mt Edgerton) proving elusive, I headed for the second target, and by asking around for the Rosebrook road, found myself crossing a bridge where a side road was labelled "Mount Harris Drive".

Did I mention that my note-taking methods are a bit chaotic? I write everything down as I spot it, so I can always go back and reconstruct the processes, so I wasn't sure which mountain this was supposed to be. There is another Mount Harris in New South Wales, named in 1817, but that is also rare on maps, and a it was scheduled as a target for a later search, so I was delighted to find this one.

The Hunter River, seen from what is now Comerford's Hill.

The sign said Mount Harris, so Mount Harris it was. I should, perhaps, have mentioned that the mountains in this area are vertically challenged to a marked degree. This may help to explain why this Mount had been downgraded to a mere Hill, but at least it was small enough to drive around.

Comerford's Hill must once have been a farm, now it is several swanky hobby farms behind an unwelcoming gate across a muddy track, so I went up the gravelled Mount Harris Drive instead. This took me past a water reservoir with a trig station on top, but there was a higher rise, a little further on, so I drove further, and got out.

Being unchallenged (I was rather hoping somebody would come out to question me, so I could question them in turn), I walked to the crest, and found that I was looking down on the Hunter, Paterson's River to Barallier. I cannot reconcile this with the map, but Grant's description of it as having "extensive and picturesque" views tallies with what I saw (except that the locals have created a rubbish dump at the highest point).

Of course, it was only later, when I realised that Mount Harris is quite a long way from there, and that this hummock was in fact Mount Ann, that I realised I had another serial geographical victim on my hands, besides Dr Harris (and Barallier, whose name appears on no map that I know of). You see, in an effort to curry favour with Governor King, Lieutenant Grant had, five months earlier, named "Ann's Island" in Jervis Bay, unaware that it had already been dubbed "Bowen's Island", the name it bears today on the charts.

The other Mt Harris on the Macquarie River is also unimpressive.

So in sum, I have found just one of the lost mountains. lurking where it always was, but under two false names. I need more maps, more research time, and another 500 km of driving, in order to sort the question.

When I set off to pursue John Oxley's travels, when he named the 1817 Mount Harris, I pursued it. This one is 46 metres above sea level (I wasn't joking about vertically challenged!), but it is still findable.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, but plain travelling isn't all that bad, either.

Looking at Atlases

WRONG!

Do you recognise this fellow on the right? If you think you do, then you have probably fallen for the same wrong belief that I have accepted for most of my life. Here's the low-down, but don't worry: it turns out that we are in good company!

The first Atlas was a particularly strong person, the brother of Prometheus, and like Prometheus, he was a giant. Atlas was given the task of holding up the sky, after the gods of Olympus defeated the Titans in battle. Set to this task in some undefined place to the west of the Mediterranean Sea, Atlas even lent his name to the ocean he stood in, which we still call the Atlantic Ocean.

The ancients assumed that part of the sky rested on some very high mountains in Morocco, still called the Atlas Mountains, while Mount Atlas was the tallest of that range. One legend says that Atlas was turned into the mountain after he refused accommodation to Perseus after Perseus had killed and beheaded the Gorgon Medusa.

The head was a useful trophy, as anybody who saw the Gorgon's face was turned to stone, and the incommoded and unaccommodated Perseus flashed the severed head at Atlas, who promptly became a mountain.

There was just one small problem: even the ancient Greeks knew that the world was no flat slab, but an orb, a globe, and around 150 BC, they even had a good estimate of the size of our planet, so there was very little need for Atlas in the thinking of scholars, but to the common folk, the world was flat, and remained so until sailors started sailing around it , around 500 years ago, which kept Atlas gainfully employed, so far as the common folks were concerned.

Once the sailors started going off and filling in bits of the map where once there were only dragons, there was a need for new maps, showing the true relationships of the parts of the world, and globes became popular. When Mercator published a book of flat maps, his son illustrated the cover with a picture of the world globe, held aloft on the shoulders of a strong man. From supporting just the sky, Atlas now had the task of supporting the whole world. It is perhaps from this mapping context that we get the drawing paper size called Atlas, which is 26 inches by 34 inches, or the same as eight sheets of foolscap.

Back to our man-mountain, though, the Perseus-Medusa-Mount Atlas tale has another problem. A second Greek legend says that later, when Heracles was given the task of obtaining the golden apples of the Hesperides, he approached a distinctly non-mountainous Atlas for help. Atlas asked Heracles to take over the load-bearing task while he, Atlas, fetched the apples. Then on his return, Atlas told Heracles that he was fed-up with carrying the load, and that he, Heracles, could carry on holding up the heavens.

He may have been physically strong, but Atlas was not very bright. Well, to be honest, he was seriously thick in the noggin department, so when Heracles said in his most affable tone that he agreed, but would Atlas take over for a moment while he, Heracles arranged a pad for his head, Atlas took the load for a bit, and as you may have guessed, Heracles made off, taking the apples of the Hesperides with him.

That eminent playwright of the appropriately named Globe theatre, Shakespeare, has Cleopatra speaking of Mark Antony as "the demi-Atlas of this earth", while in the third part of Henry VI, Warwick the king-maker tells Edward "Thou art no Atlas for so great a weight" — in this case, the weight of the kingdom, which Warwick plans to take away from Edward.

Milton mentions Atlas as a high mountain in Book 4 of Paradise Lost, to give the idea of a giant Satan. And Charles Atlas, of course, made his fame as a strong man. All in all, it seems that time has taken away the load-bearing role that Atlas once had, leaving just the strong-man aspect — except in one case.

That venerable guide to all things in the human body, Gray's Anatomy, tells us that "The first cervical vertebra is named the atlas because it supports the globe of the head." In other words, even though the load-bearing function is recalled, it is in terms of the picture on the cover of Mercator's atlas book, rather than in terms of what a rather thick-witted Titan really had to do in older days.

Picking a good book

This story began with a headline that read Scientists find secret to writing a best-selling novel. You can read the whole of the story here and you can read the actual paper here. It was in the Proceedings of the 2013 Conference in Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

I will just quote one paragraph from that paper: it says a great deal if you read it aloud, so you can savour the clumsiness in the construction.

For our experiments, we procure novels from project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg houses over 40,000 books available for free download in electronic format and provides a catalog containing brief descriptions (title, author, genre, language, download count, etc.) of these books. We experiment with genres in Table 1, which have sufficient number of books allowing us to construct reasonably sized datasets.

I think it makes me wonder: do these people know how to write coherent English? To put it another way, I would not be asking them to review or revise one of my manuscripts.  They are junior academics, and I am sure they are trying hard, but they needed more sage advice before they rushed into print.


True, they had some quantitative measures such as counting the connectives (good) and mention of body parts (ludicrous). They also concluded that prepositions were good and verbs were bad, though apparently not as bad as foreign words, symbols and interjections!

Basically, Vikas Ganjigunte Ashok, Song Feng and Yejin Choi, a trio of computer scientists at Stony Brook University in New York, had grabbed a whole bunch of classic books from the Project Gutenberg collection.  Then they analysed the  texts and compared their measures with historical information on the success of the work.

They ran their study over a number of books in different genres measuring things like “interestingness”, novelty, the style of writing, and how engaging the storyline was. Yeah, right, no chance of any halo effect there, eh?  No chance of somebody saying "This is a book about Harry Potter, so it mustn't be very interesting, right?


Wrong. That's the first flaw: the analysis is far from objective.

What followed reminded me of a dodgy attempt by the Control Data Corporation in 1980 or 1981 to foist an outdated and kludgey system called PLATO on four government instrumentalities in New South Wales: they wanted to sell the BSLS (Basic Skills Learning System) to Correctional Services, the Apprenticeship Directorate, the Education Department and TAFE.

I am fairly certain in retrospect that somebody had been bribed, because it was getting an and uncritical easy run, with a total of $200,000 to be shelled out--a lot of money back then, when a deputy principal got less than $20,000 a year. Subtext: it was a lot of money!

My boss thought that there was a rodent-like odour to the proposal, and asked me to have a play with the evaluation reports they had given us, some 400 words of raw (and cooked) data.  He and I had done the same Master's course in evaluation and he knew my weird penchant for dissecting out buried dross and detecting things that do not compute. It didn't take long before my antennae began to twitch.

No wonder: there was dross everywhere.  From memory (the original papers are two floors down, in an unmarked box), they showed us an evaluation where the control group size was zero (but the control group still had scores). There were other cases where the control group was scoring at the ceiling level of a test, but the experimental group had the grade levels of their equivalent scores extrapolated.

In plain language, the control groups were fitted with hobbles and a ball and chain, the experimental group (the ones using PLATO) were issued with JATO packs, and then the groups were sent out to run a race.

The perceptive reader may be wondering why I don't mention the Hawthorne effect here.  Yes, that was alive and running as well, but that was minor compared with the procedural fudging that was going on.

These people weren't even good cheats. In the batch of research papers they sent (apparently hoping we would weigh them rather than read them), they accidentally included a memo where a distraught underling told the shiny gung-ho boss at Control Data that the whole thing was a fiasco, and I was able to look at the dates on which the shiny boss had published his latest glowing reports. I could show that they came after the date received that he had stamped on the deadly memo.

I had this bloke chapter and verse, because like him, I used to submit stuff to the ERIC clearing-house. I knew when one of my submissions was received at ERIC, and I had a lower accession number than one of his glowing reports, but the date stamp on the memo was even earlier than my submission.  It followed that after he got the heads-up, he kept on flogging the dead horse.

In short, these people were frauds, but they were hopelessly incompetent frauds because they gave me the evidence on a plate, but the funniest part was one study where they had used regression analysis to present an equation which claimed that the students using BSLS would gain one whole grade BEFORE they started the course. That's what happens when you apply any sort of statistical analysis without knowing what you are doing.

That was what reminded me of the book-quality study complained of above.  You see, figures don't lie, but liars can figure.  Proof is here.

I was told to bury my report, which made me wonder if somebody higher-up either suspected or knew that bribes had gone out.  I know from the attitudes of the people I spoke to that they weren't on the take — either that, or they were better actors than I would expect.

The purchase was blocked, so I did as instructed, leaving my report in a drawer for several years. Then I learned that a known muppet and dodgy character (he back-stabbed me once) was spruiking PLATO at AARE (the Australian Association for Research in Education).

So, being full of charity and having itchy shoulder blades, I gave a paper the following year, outlining the damning faults and showing what a rort the whole PLATO thing had been.  I guess it had the desired effect, as the muppet left the country.

I kept all of the evidence, just in case one of those I foiled ever reads this and decides to try a lawsuit.  It won't fly, my friend. It's past history, but if you want to be silly, I eat people like you.

Note in September 2014: I have now told the whole PLATO fraud story, in complete and technical detail. Note the comment about detail: the new piece isn't for the faint-hearted.


Coming up to modern dodginess, the funny thing was: before I even got through the abstract of the book-quality paper, the same antennae were twitching.

All I can say of this paper is that I hope no publisher ever hears about this idea, because this appears to be a great example of what we old computerists call GIGO.  They tried...

Or was this one of the 120 papers of computer-generated gibberish that Cyril Labbe of Joseph Fourier University detected recently?

That's about the only logical explanation.

How I won the war

Well, one of them, and it certainly wasn't the war you were thinking of. As you will see, if you read on, it was a war that was vitally important to the preservation of sanity and due decorum. Please note: I am not anti-military.  I write military history from time to time, but my heart is with the troops with their laconic humour and their sense of the ridiculous. Put me among the officers, and my Puckish side will come to the fore.

Because I was bullied as a child (probably no more than any other physically small but articulate boy got and still gets, but it was still no fun at all!), I learned guerrilla tactics early.

Those who bullied may not have known where it came from, but things often went wrong for them. I was never caught or accused, and my lips are sealed as to what I did, though one or two of the hoaxes I pulled off at school would be well-enough known, at least to those who assisted me. People who shouted at me always paid a penalty of sorts. The more they shouted, the more they suffered.  That was my rule.

I assumed that nobody had ever penetrated my masking activities, my guise of mild-mannered geniality, but at university, one of my friends was an elderly Czech who was always "Dr Racek", and in his papers, "A. A. Racek", though as his name was pronounced "Rahtsek", his students often called him "Dr. Ratsak" after a commercial warfarin product. He was a delightful, courteous, middle-European scholar.

I think he took me on as a friend because I was the outdoorsy type and could be persuaded to bring back mud from the edges of salt lakes and stuff, from which he could hatch and study obscure crustacea.  Or maybe he saw something of him in me. I think that was probably it.

I don't know his back story, but he would have been of military age in World War II.  For some reason best known to himself, he lent me a copy of a translation of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Švejk, although, as he pointed out, it was Germanised as The Good Soldier Schweik.

I had, a few years earlier, read Catch 22, and I had been for three years a public service clerk in lowly orders who observed his fellow underlings with the eye of an anthropologist. I had learned to swim like a fish in the sea of the clerk-people.  I had an unerring eye for opportunities to make the self-important look ludicrous.

So I had mastered the art of the anarchist (without the bleak bad humour of old-style anarchists — I was, and am, a conservative anarchist who doesn't like blowing things up).  Now, I learned that there were other ways to manage the authoritarian mind, the military mind, the bullying mind. Švejk became my guiding light.

Jump forward a few years.  I had graduated, I was teaching, I was married, and we were not all that well paid.  Anything and everything that offered money was worth doing, even quiz shows — but that's another story.

I was inveigled into becoming an officer of cadets. The NSW Cadet Corps in those days was a sort of military operation. One wore proper army uniforms and insignia, one got pompous, one saluted, one marched, one stood at attention.  Well, one was supposed to try.  This one faked it.

In short, this one became Švejk. I dreamed of subverting the route marches into nature rambles and other tricks. They didn't come off.  I will pass over most of the details, and refer only to two army camps at Singleton. There, the cadets were under canvas, but we officers were in barracks, except when we went into the field.

That was when the cunning Good Soldier came into his own.  The cadets did something called lantern stalks, which involved two platoons setting out from two lanterns on two ridges. Somewhere in the gully between the lanterns, they would meet and try to "kill" each other by taking a strand of wool that was around each cadet's arm.

Each encounter brought mighty swearing, and in the silence immediately after, they would see me standing there as I said quietly "When you make noise like that, you are drawing in the rest of the enemy — learn to move and fight in silence."

Recalling the swear words they had spoken, one would always ask me how long I had been there.  "I just came over when I heard the noise," I would lie. They never twigged that I had been there in a shadow, masked by a blanket to change my outline, waiting for them to arrive.  I got a reputation that I had polished hard, but did not merit, as some sort of Ghost Who Walks, but I truly enjoyed the game.

It also helped that I was (and probably still am — I haven't fired a rifle in more than 50 years), a crack shot.  On the rifle range, when two Cadet Under Officers, knowing my unmilitary outlook, decided to give "Mac" a helping hand. They took up their positions either side of me, and opened up on my target instead of their own. As a consequence, the result of my ten shots was 28 bulls and two inners.

On hearing this result, I called them over and told them that they had both probably missed on their first shot, but whatever the case, they agreed that their assistance had been unnecessary.  The CUOs were senior cadets and clever boys, so they had me better sussed than most, unlike the "real" officers, but at least I kept the lads guessing.

I certainly failed to mention my personal firearms policy: I would and will never shoot anything that bleeds, screams or shoots back.

Now about the "real" officers: the second camp I attended was all in barracks, and that entailed going to the officers' mess at night. Back then, a number of the officers were World War II types who were crashing bores, full of how they single-handedly Won The War.

I considered spiking their drinks, but there wasn't anything to use, and that was what led me to the Regimental Aid Post — or as We Military Chaps called it, the RAP.

They had no powerful laxatives that might fit the bill, but I got chatting with the third-year medical students who staffed the RAP, and told them how boring the officers' mess was. These people in the mess, I opined, must have made military history by Winning The War from the kitchens of the Catering Corps.  We explored Napoleon's maxim that an army marches on its stomach, but discounted that as an explanation.  We found common mind sets.

Now here was the situation: I had a car, and a uniform with a First Lieutenant's pips on it, so I had Authority. I also had a good command of the language of authority, and an excellent set of skills in hoaxing, but no refrigerator, and I could hardly walk into a pub in uniform to buy a case of beer.  The RAP students were in civvies, they had no car, but they had a refrigerator, ostensibly for storing medicines.

Together as a team, we were invincible. There was no security on the camp.  I could drive one of the students into town, he could go into the pub and buy some beer, I could drive it back in, and in the unlikely event that a sentry had been posted in our absence, none would question me.  I even had a cover story about urgent medical supplies ready for having one of the medical students with me in the car, but it was never needed. I was, after all, An Officer.

And that, children, is how we won the Bore War.  I would arrive back at the Officers' Mess, late in the evening, and the Colonel, and old stager, would see me, still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and murmur "There are very few of us left..."

The funny thing: I knew him well from my time, almost a decade earlier, in Papua, but he didn't know me. I kept it that way for good reasons, but that's another story

Note: certain parts of this tale may (or may not) have been adjusted and/or embellished to make a better story. Other parts may (or may not) be entirely false and misleading. That caveat applies equally to everything in this paragraph, including this sentence.


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This blog covers quite a few different things, so I tag each post. I also blog about history, and I am currently writing a series of books called Not your usual... and the first two have been accepted by Five Mile Press, The offcuts appear here with the tag Not Your Usual... . For a taste of Australian tall tales, try the tags Speewah or Crooked Mick.   For a miscellany of oddities, try the tag temporary obsessions. And language us covered under the tags Descants and Curiosities, while stuff about small life is under Wee beasties.

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