Courtney Humphries writes it better than I can retell it:
Thom Verhave, a psychologist working at a pharmaceutical company in the 1950s, tried to apply pigeons to an onerous aspect of commercial production: quality-control inspection. Touring the area where capsules were manufactured, he watched as about seventy women examined each capsule one by one on conveyor belts, discarding the “skags,” capsules that were dented, misshapen, or discoloured. Figuring that pigeons could do the same task, Verhave proposed the idea to the director of research, who had just managed an expensive but failed attempt to use a machine to inspect capsules. Verhave was given permission to develop a demonstration device, and he trained two pigeons to recognize common defects and report if they spotted one. Within one week of training, both birds were inspecting capsules with 99 percent accuracy. Their performance garnered visits from higher-ups at the company, but soon the board of directors quashed the project. Even if it worked, who would buy drugs from a company that used pigeons for quality control?
As I continue reading Superdove, there are more great pigeon trivia tidbits I will be using to impress family members at Christmas dinner:
Squab meat is low in fat and rich in iron. (Turns out I have a squab recipe I clipped out from a cooking magazine article called “The Twelve Days of Christmas” - I wish I kept the recipes for the drumming drummers, piping pipers, a-leaping lords, dancing ladies and a-milking maids.)
When precocial birds like chickens, turkeys and geese hatch, they are immediately mobile. Altricial birds like pigeons are born weak, naked and blind.
Pigeon fathers and mothers both secrete crop milk to feed baby pigeons.
Pigeons as supermarket meat never really took off because pigeons can procreate about twelve times a year. Compare that to the 200 plus eggs a chicken can lay in a year.
The US’s largest pigeon meat operation is the Palmetto Pigeon Plant* in South Carolina.
According to British historian Joan Thirsk, alternative crops and livestock rise in popularity during periods of excess cereals. In post-Black Death Europe, the smaller human population meant grains could be put aside for feeding birds; similarly, the low grain prices in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries also translated into increases of raising pigeons.
Fancy pigeons like the English short-faced tumbler have such short beaks that foster parent pigeons must feed their young.
Pigeons don’t have X and Y chromosomes; just one sex chromosome, with females having one chromosome and males having two copies.
The skin around a pigeon’s eye is called a cere.
Pigeons cannot fly at night because they have terrible night vision.
Pigeons will return to a home loft even after years (hence their use as messenger pigeons - “one-way communicators” as Humphries calls them. Pigeon racing, where pigeons are timed on how long it takes them to return home, “is the ultimate test of the bonds between people and domestic animals” (page 66).
Noah sent out a raven from the ark before he sent out the dove/pigeon. The raven never bothered returning.
Messenger pigeons were used in ancient Egypt to tell the downriver dwellers when the flood waters arrived; Julius Caesar may have used them in his Gaul campaign; the Crusaders used them; and during the 1870 siege of Paris, refugees escaping with their pigeons sent messages back to those still in the city on waxed paper attached to tail feathers.
During WWI and WWII, military pigeons were divided into their own companies and even received medals for bravery (established in Britain in 1943). Some brave pigeons were Flying Dutchman, Beachcomber, Commando, William of Orange, Billy, Princess, and GI Joe (his stuffed body is now at the U.S. Army Communications Electronics Museum at Fort Monmouth, NJ).
Two-way communicating pigeons travel between home lofts and food locations.
*The Palmetto Pigeon Plant has a pigeon cursor that freaked me out the first time I went to the site. As for the “House for Forced Matings,” why didn’t they just call it the “House for Non-consensual Pigeon Sex” or the “House for Pigeon Rape”? The company has diversified since 1989, now raising cornish hens, silkie chickens and poussin chickens.
One night many years ago*, I was in the hostel by the Paris Opera and one of my dorm-mates had researched pigeon behaviour as part of a study on brains. “Pigeons are smarter than chimps,” she told us. “We taught the pigeons to use a computer to speak to us. They pecked at a keyboard to spell out words. They talked up a storm.”
I liked pigeons before I met the pigeon scientist in Paris. I like their cooing sounds on spring mornings. I appreciate their resourcefulness. Plus, feeding them is the only thing I can ever afford when I visit the Piazza San Marco.
Turns out pigeons are not the only avian urban warriors. With starlings and sparrows, pigeons are a new arrival to North America. I’d known about the Central Park Shakespearean bird project in the 1850s, when a literature fan tried to populate the park with all the Bard’s birds, including the now ubiquitous starling. I didn’t know that sparrows immigrated to this continent only from 1851.
I’m only on page 15 of the book and Humphries provides some amusing trivia so far:
The standard Italian villa has a small belvedere or tower for the pigeons.
In the 1700s, pigeons as food were in decline in England, but dovecotes remained a part of architecture: near Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire, there was a gothic-style dovecote, outfitted with battlements and “slits for shooting arrows at imaginary enemies” (page 11).
The now extinct passenger pigeon made up 25-40% of the total US bird population. (While domesticated animals are killed sustainably, the passenger pigeon “belonged to no one” so “it was no one person’s responsibility to care for their welfare” (also page 11).
Squabs are 4-5 week old pigeons. I see them in my local supermarket but I had no idea they were pigeons.
Pigeons in Persian dovecotes served mostly as poop producers. Their waste made good fertilizer.
Pigeon poop can also tan leather.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, pigeon dung provided the saltpeter for gunpowder, which was then used at least some of the time for shooting pigeons.
Pigeons were also a popular sport bird: “they maneuvered adroitly in the air and made challenging targets” (page 15).**
*It was 1996, Matt.
**No word about Dutch parrots, Matt.
Sunday November 29th 2009, 9:43 am
Filed under: Film, Romania
I always complain that women in movies are boring. They never have any interest in their careers or they always complain about their jobs. Or they sit at home all day, magically well off. They never even seem to have hobbies. What dullards. I sure would get bored if I faced a lifetime of staring across the breakfast table at them as they droned on about the challenges of being boring.
I don’t really buy into movies like 500 Days of Summer because I have no idea why the guy was so into the title character, a girl called Summer. I had some vague idea that she was aesthetically pleasing to those of us who are into the female form, but she seemed pretty boring otherwise. She must’ve been somewhat interested in Italy because she talks about having done an exchange program in Siena. I think she read interesting books and maybe dabbled in the arts. But really, were those real hobbies or just more of her hipster posturing? After watching that movie, I understood that movie chicks have no hobbies yet the directors and script writers simply figured that pretty equals interesting. I understood that what was seriously lacking in movies was women with hobbies.
So last night we watched The Brothers Bloom. Boy, did I ever meet my movie chick match. The heroine had nothing but hobbies: playing the harp, the banjo, the guitar, the piano, the accordion, and the violin, rapping, DJing, breakdancing, juggling (including chainsaws), riding two-storey unicycles, doing karate, skateboarding, doing gymnastics, photographing and playing ping-pong. The last hobby she takes up in the movie is blowing things up.
Which is where the destruction of Romania comes into the story.
The character in The Brothers Bloom, let’s introduce our Penelope, lives in New Jersey in a very large house. Only the house exterior is actually Romania’s Peles* Castle. Peles Castle is in Sinaia, in the Romanian mountains:
The 160-plus room castle rests on a site chosen by King Carol I de Hohenzollern near the border of the then-Romanian country (Transylvania still belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Castle building began in 1873 and finished ten years later. Unfortunately, Penelope’s latest hobby has dire consequences for Romania’s foremost tourist spots. Peles Castle is, however, one of two famous sites in this film. The other, Constanta’s** Casino:
Though the 1909 Casino (moonlighting as a Saint Petersburg locale) escapes Penelope’s latest hobby, its interior is shabby, as if Penelope has passed through. No matter which way we look at it, Romania doesn’t make it through this one intact, not even with its name: Peles is a New Jersey mansion and the Casino is in Russia.
I was pretty jealous when Prague got away with being Prague and Penelope spoke Czech. It might be asking too much for her latest hobby to have been learning Romanian too.
*I still haven’t had a chance to figure out how to return the accent markings to this blog. Peles should have a comma under the S, so that you pronounce it as Peh-lesh. Read more about it on Wikipedia or this Romanian tourism site. Lots of images at the official site.
**Also missing an accent mark, this time a comma under the last T. The pronunciation is Kohn-sta-n-tsa.
Even better than Tintin is this seventeenth century castle’s dogs. It’s la soupe des chiens, or the feeding of the dogs that happens at 5 pm every day during tourist season (when the tourists visit, not when they are hunted, the former from April 1 to September 15, or at 3 pm the rest of the year).
The Huraults, who still live on the third floor of their castle, keep about 70 dogs, each part English foxhound and part French Poitou. The trainers dump a line of dog food and horse and chicken meat before the dogs and, showing off their manners in front of the tourists, the dogs impatiently wait for the signal that they can scramble for a scrap.
Tuesday November 17th 2009, 8:50 pm
Filed under: Food, Japan
I never knew why MSG was bad. Someone once told me that it caused cancer. I filed that away with the intriguing idea that deodorant gave women breast cancer, a tip from a shrewish high school fundamentalist christian acquaintance. One day, I figured, I would investigate the truth in the MSG scare and make up my mind. For now, I had too much Chinese and Japanese food to eat.
Back when I lived in Taiwan, my then-boyfriend prepared a Japanese cucumber dish that tasted incredibly good. “It’s easy to make,” he said. And he showed me how after we ate the first batch: put sliced cucumber in a plastic bag with some salty looking flakes, and let sit for a while. I asked him what the salty stuff was. He told me it was Ajinomoto. Weird Japanese stuff, I thought. He was a relatively new boyfriend. I didn’t question much.
A few years later, when I moved with said boyfriend to Japan, I noticed him flavouring with this Ajinomoto stuff again. This time when I asked if Ajinomoto had an English translation, he admitted, reluctantly and in a whispering voice, that it was MSG. I filed this way next to the crazy christian virgin’s deodorant advice and said goodbye to the yummy cucumber slices.
An article from long ago in the Guardian has finally convinced me that I have nothing to fear. I still eat margarine and butter, after all. Reckless daredevil that I am. Japanese cucumbers are back on the menu.
Saturday November 14th 2009, 12:11 am
Filed under: Film
Dutch animator Sjors Vervoort’s cartoon has many cute monsters:
(Via Drawn.ca, where the discussion is about whether this is true cardboard animation or not. Vervoort’s own website, linked above, has nifty drawings, by the way.)
Ha! I got through three chapters of Ulysses. One day, I will neglect my well being and die reading it.
But he’s not some book snob. He’s also open to popular literature:
For a museum person like me (fresh out of a mid-career exhibition communication class, no less!), I love how the T-rex skull pretty well flips off the other fossils as he reaches the museum a-list:
Detail to admire: the scruffiness of the other animal specimens.
Finally, Mr. Gauld’s dystopian vacation offer is tantalizing:
To experience the excitement of Brazil for a few days! To study the class distinctions of the Handmaid’s Tale for a few weeks! To mingle with New Crobuzon’s khephri, vodyanoi and cactacae, and to lunch in remade dive bars, what a vacation!
Tuesday November 10th 2009, 11:11 pm
Filed under: Personal
Since I have still not submitted my article anywhere (since July), I needed drastic measures. I looked up motivational websites to see how I can spur myself into action.
There was one about betting against yourself. You lost if you didn’t achieve your goal. If you lost, your bet would go towards helping a charity.
No good for me. If I achieved my goal, I’d feel guilty for not donating to a charity.
Last night, I promised Matt $1000 if I did not finally submit that article by December 22. He can do whatever he wants with the money if he gets it. He threatened me with spending it on strippers or leaving it on some sidewalk. I didn’t believe him. Now he’s decided to use it to get my nipples pierced.
From Flanders: A Cultural History by Andre de Vries (page 96-97):
One of the world’s most unlikely episodes took place in Ghent: the filming of a version of Romeo and Juliet - acted entirely by cats. This 1970 oddity was the brainchild of Armando Acosta, a Spanish-American director and son of Hollywood scriptwriter Mercedes Acosta. Acosta Jr., who also runs a religious sect and has taken the name of Ganapati (after the Indian elephant god) after spending time in the 1960s following a Hindu guru, used his disciples to produce the film. The only human actor, meanwhile, was John Hurt, cast in the unlikely role of “La Dame aux Chats,” an eccentric boatwoman. (In an understatement Hurt later described it as “a fairly extraordinary film.”) The feline cast was voiced by actors, including Ben Kingsley, Quentin Crisp, Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave.
Even without special effects, the cats put in a remarkably good performance, especially when at one point two hundred of them were released across the Sint-Michiels Bridge in the direction of the Belfry. They had been kept indoors for the winter to be trained as extras and half of them did not bother to return. According to the director’s wishes, the film can only be shown to the accompaniment of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet with a live symphony orchestra. After the release, there was a tour of world capitals, but the film has rarely been shown since.
IMDB says it’s a 1990 movie (typo in my book). Such a rare movie none of us can dream of seeing it. If your town’s orchestra will play along with it, let me know what it’s like.
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