KING PELLINORE'S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
A little erudition won't hurt you. Ignoring it will.
Lorenzo DaPonte
You know this fellow by his more famous collaborator, Mozart, but it is DaPonte who wrote the words to the operas, without which, of course, the singers would have naught to sing but rather random sol, fa, la, and ti. In the 1820’s, he undignified the zenith of his career by a move to New York, where he railed against fate and social enemies in four (count ‘em) four volumes of memories…in Italian.
Nike
“Nike?” I hear you ask. “Pellinore, are you sure? Doesn’t look like a shoe.” (Pause for several minutes as Pellinore recovers his academic courage….) Nike, my friends, is the Greek goddess of victory. “Oh, victory! I see, because of her fast running shoes!” No, it has nothing to do with her shoes. She was the daughter of a giant, and of a river. (Second pause, as you contemplate how a giant copulates with a river.) Next time you a picture of Zeus or Athena, take a look at their hands…oftentimes, one or the other is holding a little figurine of Nike. Because (do I HAVE to spell this out for you?), because she represents victory. Not shoes. Not…shoes.
The particular statue in this picture was probably erected some eighteen hundred years ago, as a commemoration for a battle at sea; excavationists found it in 1863 on the Greco island of Samothrace, and have determined it probably….
But you’re still thinking about shoes, aren’t you?
I give up.
bioluminescence
True or false: you can see in the dark if you hold up a dead fish. A trick question, of course, because the answer is that it depends upon the fish. Some fish glow in the dark; others don’t. Some earthworms glow in the dark; others don’t. Amoeba, fungi, insects, some invertebrates…but apparently, not humans. We simply don’t glow in the dark. Nor do other mammals, or birds for that matter, or reptiles or amphibians, so you needn’t feel inadequate; at least, not on that account. The glowing happens in these luminiferous organisms when oxygen is combined with luciferin (look up that etymologically — fun!), releasing energy which then radiates. There are many theories as to the evolutionary advantage to glowing: attempt to startle; to hide; to attract other larger predators to feed upon your stalkers; to ward off homesteaders; to light up your dinner before eating it; to show off to the opposite or same sex, depending upon your chemistry; well, and et cetera, et cetera, including “I just want to look pretty.” The glow in the picture is from a gaggle of dinoflagellates, single-celled organisms in the plankton family which — oh, I can’t go into all that right now, but I urge you to look up “bioluminescence” in — no, no, no, don’t just Google it. Don’t be so lazy! Well, very well, if you must…but please at least click on a link to a scientific site, not one of those — Oh, and shrimps!, I forgot…there are glowing shrimps and squids, but apparently no glowing crabs. (Silence. Pellinore realizes with a sinking feeling he is, once again, alone.) Have I lost you? You’re gone, looking at pictures of glowing worms, and soon you’ll be distracted by cats frightened by cucumbers….
charabanc
This is a wagon with benches. The French name, Char à banc, means (wait for it) “wagon with benches.” Rather literal, oui, but accurate, and since the French invented it, they’ve a right to name it however they wish, so wagon with benches let it be. The first of them appeared in the early 19th century…it took some six horses to pull, sometimes fewer or greater, depending upon the size of the meal consumed by passengers. You can imagine it took more horses to get rid of a hosts’ guests than it took to fetch them, and take that as a metaphor if you like. Leave it to the English next to steal the idea from the French, and petite it a bit, so that it required but two horses, though one wonders whether that was due to the streamlining of the design, or the paucity of the English guests who, bless them, consumed as much of their hosts’ food as they could possibly keep down, but, well, you know the English cuisine…and can draw your own conclusion about why the weight of the English guests was not as great as that of the French. But then, of course, came the advent of the motor, and the British charabanc grew and grew to enormous proportions. Also a metaphor. Don’t get me started about the Americans’ megabus.
Pachycephalosaurus
Well, it’s a dinosaur, of course. But which? There aren’t very many of their fossils found, most of them being in North America where, you know, everything is paved over. But!, of those which have been found, we conclude the pachycephalosaurus was over fifteen feet long, with large strong back legs and rather underdeveloped front arms. Poor thing. Imagine it trying to compete in the competitions on All Fours Day during Cretaceous Day celebrations with the family. On the other hand, good heavens, those knobby knobs at the side of its face…theories abound that this species is behind the origin of the word “bone-headed”, and who are we to argue?
Daddy Longlegs
Not quite a true spider, poor ambitious thing, mainly due to the monolithic construction of its oval body (as opposed to the bifurcation of spiders). I don’t know whether you’ve had occasion to smell a Daddy Longlegs…it’s most rancid indeed when it wants to be, by secreting fluid from a pair of glands; I don’t recommend sniffing it, if you can avoid it. A sidenote: If you have several moments of curiosity more to invest in this topic, I highly recommend looking into the mating and egg-laying habits of the Daddy Longlegs…suffice it to say that protrubances are involved, from both sexes. Well that, and both parents die shortly after breeding, so there’s a lesson to be learned in that as well.
Contact Pellinore
PELLINORE: “Provide me an email address, and I’ll inform you when there’s new content; approximately weekly; certainly monthly. Nothing to purchase; no magazine subscriptions (because, really, who WOULD?). Merely a gentle nudge to visit me from time to time.”