And goes back to Friday, when Sarah, my colleague sitting alongside me, was saying that if she had 20 Questions That Must Be Answered, one of them would be about the Loch Ness Monster, at which point Conrad, arch skeptic, leapt into the conversation, which went along the lines of -
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| Conrad: not a believer |
SARAH: I'd like to know about the Loch Ness Monster and if there's really anything there -
CONRAD (Loudly and firmly: No!
SARAH: But -
CONRAD: NO!
SARAH: How can -
CONRAD: Still no!
At which point she wondered aloud that, if there wasn't anything actually in the Loch, how the story kept on going? Well, there are a few pointers. One ingenious theory is that decorative giant catfish were released into the loch in the nineteenth century when estate owners got bored of them, and these caused sightings that gradually died off as the catfish did. Art?
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| No, he is not a very small man! |
One count against Nessie being a species of dinosaur is that Loch Ness is of comparatively recent geological origin, only 150,000 years old thanks to glaciation. Another tick in the "Nonsense" box is that no DNA analysis of the loch's waters has ever found evidence of unidentified DNA. Oh, and "The Surgeon's Photo"? Proven to be a fake. I think we've covered this before; all the same, do we have a picture, Art?
| Doctor What |
Okay, Sarah, one of the reasons why the tall tales continue is that people continue to make money out of them, because They Want To Believe ("They" being the general public). Were Your Humble Scribe to write a book that conclusively proves Nessie does not exist, titled <thinks> "The Monster Vanquished: Why There Is No Nessie" with a list of sources and a biography, it would sell a couple of hundred copies. On the other hand, were I to adopt the pseudonym Odious Bodger and write a whole load of tripe on the matter in a work titled "NESSIE IS A SPACE ALIEN FROM THE SEX GALAXY!!!" with lots of grainy photos and screaming blocks of upper case text instead of evidence, it would sell ten thousand copies and The History Channel would bid for the rights to make a television series about it, AND it would get major coverage from The Daily Star and The Sun*.
Besides, if Nessie were real, her agent would be up there angling for a percentage of the royalties.
Motley! Bring me a flensing knife, for I feel like cutting up some blubber in the back yard**.
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| The knife in question |
A Question Of Intellect
As you may already be aware, Conrad has been speculating on the concept of the speaking animals of Narnia, and how they all appear to have intelligence equal to that of that environ's humans, and I have also queried how far down the food chain this talking/intelligence combination goes. Are there talking fish in the lakes and ponds? What about insects? Okay, a talking woodlouse musing on "The Consolations of Philosophy" is a bit of a stretch, but what about hive insects such as bees or ants?
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| Of course, one can take it a bit too far. |
Anyway, that's not what I wanted to mention here, and I'm not going to apologise for going off on a tangent. The other person involved with speechifying fauna was Doctor Dolittle. Art?
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| The stories are set from 1820 onwards, lest you ask |
The only character that Your Humble Scribe remembers by name is Gub-Gub the pig, though of course there were others, including a parrot. Now, not only can the good Doctor speak to and understand all animals, they seem to, once again, have a human level of intelligence. I distinctly recall the parrot pushing nuts through the cleft in a cave to people trapped inside, quoting as it did so how nutritious nuts are. Dietitian it may not be, eloquent it certainly was. How can that be? Yes, parrots are pretty clever - for birds. I can't see one performing quadratic equations, or memorising the Collected Works Of Shakespeare (which would probably get the RSPCA involved).
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| What, they can write, now, can they? |
Of course, I may be overthinking this ...
Oh, I must apologise for Friday's post going out a bit short and rather wonky to boot. I'm not sure how but the glitch that makes the cursor reformat everything it touches occurred, and it would have taken ages to resolve, so I just posted and to heck with it. So you missed out on perhaps 50 words more. Which is bearable***.
Finally -
"EMBARGO" was the answer, though Conrad cannot quite remember what the crossword clue was. Something about stopping or preventing or banning? Anyway, he is of the opinion that any word ending in "-o" cannot have an English root, and - you know what? I'm right. About this one, anyway. It means, as you should surely know, that a ban on importing or exporting has been put in place by a government. One presumes that anything to do with corruption, gangsterist politics, corrupt gangsterist politics and the like are under an embargo from Tsar Putin, as he doesn't want people getting ideas outside the box -
Anyway, that was another tangent. What I meant to say is that "Embargo" has roots in Spanish, from combining the Latin "Im-" with the Spanish "Barra" (which means "Bar", in the sense of preventing something, not an iron rod or a pub).
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| One of the longer-running ones |
Actually "CUBA" was an answer to another clue. And we should keep up said embargo, since everyone hates sugar and cigars nowadays, right?
And with that, we are done!
* Sorry, pervos, there is no such thing as the "Sex Galaxy", I made it up. But it will shift product off the shelves like whiz-o.
** Hey, everyone's got to have a hobby, right?
*** We hope
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