Scribal Terror

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Rajah and Sakari

From the Metro Richmond Zoo

The mating habits of the Argentine lake duck

Never mind. Let Alex tell you about it. He has a mating extravaganza going on at Neatorama.

For the record, I like the French

But this is a little weird:

According to an opinion poll published Friday, the French dislike themselves even more than Americans dislike them, Reuters reported.

The survey of six nations, carried out for the International Herald Tribune daily and France 24 TV station, said 44 percent of French people thought badly of themselves against 38 percent of U.S. respondents who had a negative view of the French.

More sartorial nonsense from Iran

CNN reports:

Iranian police have warned barbers against offering Western-style hair cuts or plucking the eyebrows of their male customers, Iranian media said Sunday.

Dignity, always dignity

From JustElite. For extra credit, where did my post title come from?

Improvement in Anbar

The New York Times reports:

Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.

“Many people are challenging the insurgents,” said the governor of Anbar, Maamoon S. Rahid, though he quickly added, “We know we haven’t eliminated the threat 100 percent.”

Many Sunni tribal leaders, once openly hostile to the American presence, have formed a united front with American and Iraqi government forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. With the tribal leaders’ encouragement, thousands of local residents have joined the police force. About 10,000 police officers are now in Anbar, up from several thousand a year ago. During the same period, the police force here in Ramadi, the provincial capital, has grown from fewer than 200 to about 4,500, American military officials say.

The remaining paragraphs are full of caveats, but it's still a basically positive story.

Global warming on Mars

The Times reports:

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

The door is open . . .

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, dirty syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share.

A red chalk drawing of a fetus at nine months gestation by Jan van Rymsdyk -- and the story behind it

This drawing by medical illustrator Jan van Rymsdyk is dated 1764. It was published in 1774 in William Hunter's The Anatomy of the human gravid uterus. It is in the collection of the University of Glasgow Library.

I've been reading Wendy Moore's The Knife Man, a biography of John Hunter, younger brother and assistant to William Hunter, the author of the book in which this picture appeared.  In fact, the picture itself figures in one of the chapters.

As Moore explains, pregnant women on whom to perform anatomical dissections were hard to come by in the mid-eighteenth century, so William Hunter, who owned and operated an anatomical school in London with the assistance of his younger brother John, was more than ready to seize the moment when the body of a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy was deposited at his doorstep. William delegated John to perform a detailed dissection and Jan van Rymsdyk to illustrate. One of the results was the red chalk drawing above. (I was intrigued enough by Moore's description of van Rymsdyk's work to track down one of the drawings.)

It is very likely that the cadaver was obtained by grave robbers under the direction of John Hunter, who, according to Moore, turned the rather rare crime of body snatching into a thriving industry that emptied coffins throughout London in the second half of that century and the beginning of the next when the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832 made the study of the human body possible without the need for "Resurrectionists." On the brighter side, John's dissections gave him the practice he needed to become a great surgeon -- great enough to be considered the father of modern surgery.