Cabinet of Curiosities

pumpkin

It’s a fruit, not a vegetable. The botanists are clear on this, and so should you be. A fruit is a product of the seed-bearing structure of a flowering plant. A vegetable, on the other hand, is the edible portion of a plant, you know, like leaves, stems, roots, bulbs, and tubers. Pumpkins are flowering plants…you don’t eat the flowers, you eat the seed-bearing bit. That’s the fruit. A pumpkin is a fruit. For that matter, strictly speaking, by definition, a squash is also a fruit. A cucumber is a fruit. Beans, peppers, and tomatoes are fruits. If this makes you unhappy, don’t write to me about it…go find a botanist to bully. (Sidebar: If you do indeed bully a botanist, do write to me about THAT. It sounds amusing.)

Pacific Railway Acts

If you were to decide to build a railroad across a continent, would it have occurred to you to build TWO — one from the west heading back eastward, and one from the east, heading westward — and hope that when they met…they actually met?, and didn’t, you know, miss each other by several miles, or even meters. And yet, that was the plan. It involved granting many loans and subsidies and right-of-ways under the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, and, because there was a war on (the Civil one, for those of you keeping score), a second round of subsidies was required (sound familiar?), which they issued under the greatly imaginative title of the Pacific Railway Act of 1864. There followed much death, corruption, flagrant disregard of ethnic workers, rail companies’ selling of their own bonds…thanks heavens America has learned her lesson from that experience, and hasn’t ever re-exhibited any of that behavior. (Hint: read a chronicle about the PRA, if you’ve the stomach for self-improvement.)

Hop

Hop, as in beer, yes; essentially a boiled pine-cone-looking flower. The beer is hoppy if you can taste its hops. [Pellinore restrains himself making dreadfully unsatisfying puns about the Ephemeral Hoppiness derived from drinking beer. He contemplates a more sophisticated series of jokes about bandwagons or scotch, but decides such would be lost amongst the inebriates, and instead leans on the corporal with a sigh.] The hops brewed for beer come from the female version of the plant, about which you must not make nor have judgment. It’s the resin inside the female’s cones which give your beer that bitter/mellow taste and aroma you crave. The poor male version of the hop grows flowers as well, but they never turn into cones, but remain as droopy panicles. PELLINORE: Ah, droopy panicles. I wish I could take credit for having written that phrase (which means essentially a cluster-looking tuft, such as you see in oats or grasses), but credit given where credit is due. “Droopy panicles” comes directly from the Oxford English Dictionary. I should like one day to write a character in a British pantomime and name it Droopy Panicles. Or perhaps describe some ill-fitting gown of an overly-gussied-up politician: Look at Madame Senior Senator and her droopy panicles! Freshly picked hops must be dried in kilns before they can be brewed, but after drying, they are cured and baled and are then ready for marketing. Much like senators.

Zhao Gao

Zhao Gao was a Chinese eunuch. Wait, stop — how many Chinese eunuchs can you name? I’ll wait while you think. [sound of Pellinore humming….] Time’s up, thought so.

And yet, there were many many Chinese eunuchs. They were very powerful political players in ancient Chinese government. Wily, too, as you’d expect, using their position as trusted slaves to gain political power, and, depending upon the emperor, often able to acquire noble titles themselves. There were plenty of instances in which eunuchs banded together to form their own powerful cabal and even remove emperors.

Zhao Gao, the focus of this entry, was one of the more ambitious of his kind, and conspired to seize power upon the death of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, Shihuangdi. The emperor actually died in 209 B.C., a fact which Zhao Gao kept hidden from the emperor’s son and heir apparent, even going so far as to forge a letter from the father, ordering the son to commit suicide. The father’s letter was convincing enough to get the job done, and therein followed a rather ghastly sequence of events involving the emperor’s decomposing body, an infant son being crowned emperor, a back-stabbing prime minister, revolutions, infanticide (you saw that coming), a puppet sovereign, and an eventual assassination which ended the whole dramatic thing. And that’s just one of the Chinese eunuchs.

You see what you’re missing by not studying your second-century-before-year-one Chinese history! Note: The attractive fellow in this picture is not Zhao Gao himself, whose agent was rigidly stubborn about rights and images and demanded such a royalty payment that I declined, and used a generic profile instead so there take THAT greedy agent.

phrenology

True story: doctors once insisted that personality traits can be read by the bumps on your head. You read that correctly. “Phrenology” emerged some two hundred years ago and lasted an astonishing hundred years or so before someone said, “Really? Bumps on the head?” I can imagine some upstart bashing his mentor on the head with a hammer in the effort to make him more docile. The science behind bumpology was that personality traits, associated as they are with differing regions of the brain, vary in size from individual to individual, causing undulations on the skull. The originators of skullology were utterly convincing in their description of organs associated with murder, and theft, and so forth. Thank heavens we’ve moved on from believing that bumps on your head, or lines on your palm, have any meaning. Because, really, lines on your palm?

stonefish

Quick: what’s the most poisonous fish in the sea? “Stonefish!” you venture, you Clever Observer, you! For why else would there be an accompanying picture of a stonefish to the question? I applaud your astuteness; perhaps you have a hidden propensity for piscine classificationism. And yes, confirmed, the stonefish is indeed the most poisonous fish in the sea, unless you are a marine specialist, and know of some runners-up which on some lists surpass the stonefish for venomousness, but for our purposes, we shall grant you the correct answer of genus Synanceja, and you shall crow with rare eruditious pride.

The stonefish is a sluggish thing, and left to its own hum-hummery, will simply sit or drift near the bottom of the shallow waters of the Indo-Pacific; it is hardly an aggressive leviathan. You needs must step upon it, or squeeze it, to activate its venom, and even then, a light squeeze usually results in only a smallish squirt; it’s only when you really put pressure on the poor thing that it becomes lethal — rather metaphoric, that.

An interesting fact about the stonefish: it is quite edible in, say, the form of sashimi, for the chef simply excludes the venomous quilly-bits, leaving the tasty rest. A second even more interesting sidenote: the stonefish can survive for nearly 24 hours out of the water, so, you must watch for it along the shore lest it sting you.

Hint: it looks like a stone. I don’t suppose that helps much, does it? Well, if you step on a stone such as resembles this picture, and it injects you with a lethal toxin, yes, perhaps you may perish, but at least you will have the satisfaction of having properly identified a member of the Synancejidae family, which ought add to the value of your final moments, at least according to the classificationists who, in some capacities at least, have the final word.

The Hope Theatre

A troupe of performers, just after Shakespeare’s time in 1614 London, built a new arena, called the Hope Theatre, to house their plays. Eager to get onto the boards, they conceded to the Crown’s insistence that they build their arena as a dual-purpose venue, also suitable for the fighting of bears. Yes, bears. Bear-baiting was quite the sport back then and proved ever-so-much-more profitable than their witty erudition and theatricalities, and although the performers’ contract specifically limited the frequence of bear-baiting events to once every two weeks…well, you see where this is headed, and so should have they. If you had to guess, which do you think the London theatre-goers of 1614 would rather see: A new verse drama by, say, Ben Jonson — or two ravenous bears fight each other? Not a fair question. Not a fair fight. The poet always loses to the bear.

phratry

An anthropological term referring to different sects of people, oftentimes unrelated by blood, cohabiting and copopulating the same society. That is to say, clans banding together and actually getting along. Say it isn’t so, Pellinore. Oh, but it is. Or was. Phratry implies more than two distinct clans grouping together for common cause, or common food more likely. Say it aloud — can you hear “fraterie” — yes, shares the same root as fraternity (from the Greek φρατρί, the word for “clansman”). Huzzah for etymology and the OED.

Diego Garcia

A coral atoll, part of the Chagos Archipelago. Do you have the vaguest idea where that is? If I say “The Indian Ocean” — does that narrow it down? Near Mauritius? Ring a bell? Anyone? Oh, dear. It’s, you know, over there, on the other side of the world from you, south of the Equator. Ah, the Equator — that you’ve heard of. (Pellinore mumbles to himself. “Small victories, Pellinore, small victories…one apostrophe at a time….”)

This particular atoll encompasses only about ten square miles. It separated from Mauritius in the 1960’s, and became part of what is known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, and then everyone was moved off of it, so that the Americans could build some military establishment of some kind. This, for some unforeseen reason, agitated the inhabitants of the region, and there was turmoil and table-banging in the 1970’s, and again in the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s, the upshot of which is…(say it with me)…it remained a U.S. military base.

In 2019, the United Nations General Assembly demanded that the UK withdraw its colonial administration from the Islands, and return the land to Mauritius, to which the U.S. government replied that neither they nor the British have any plans to discontinue use of the military base on Diego Garcia. To which, in 2020, there was more table-banging.

Moral: There is no justice atoll.

The dabbling duck

Also called the dipping duck. Part of the tribe Anatini. They don’t often dive, as many a duck does, but rather…dip instead, tipping rather bottomside up. Undignified, I suppose, but it gets the job done. And oh, their flapping sound…quite noisy.

Also noteworthy is the dabbling hen’s propensity for laying her eggs in the nest of other birds, either fellow dabblers or other species entirely. Smart, or lazy, you decide.

KING PELLINORE'S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES