I still can’t say it. Laugh away, Icelanders.

Last month I found out that there was going to be a concert of Balkan brass music with four gypsy bands. I was pretty excited as this is a rare opportunity here to listen to this kind of music.

It was not to be. Not for me at least.

A few minutes after we took our seats, some middle-aged hippie woman came up to us and asked me if I was going to dance. “Because I have a few friends coming and they might want to sit where you are,” she explained.

Matt and I laughed and turned back to face the stage. The hippie then pulled out a kazoo and tested it out. Five minutes later, when her friends came, she explained that she brought, in addition to her kazoo, a pair of maracas and a shaker. She wanted to jam with the band. Maybe go outside and jam with the gypsy bands on the street. Maybe go into the downstairs bar and jam with the bands there.

Alas, she decided to stay put.

For the next thirty minutes, she shook those maracas inches from my ears along with each song the real band played. In tune, out of tune, she shook. And shook. And shook. And shook.

Other audience members began glancing backwards, with awkward smiles.

I sat seething, twiddling the flowers on the table, holding myself back from crushing them. Each time a new song started, maracas-and-kazoo hippie waited until the song got going and then began her maracas-shaking in my ear again.

My fantasies during the half an hour of suffering ranged from getting my revenge afterwards online to grabbing her maracas and hitting her on the head with them. At one point in my head-hitting fantasy, I tried to stop myself and put down the maracas - then relented, grabbed a chair and hit her with that instead.

When I could stand it no more, I got up to complain to the staff. I managed to almost walk away. Then I looked at her face and yelled, “You’re fucking annoying!”

Kazoo-and-maracas hippie looked at me in utter confusion.

Matt afterwards told me that he was fantasizing during her hijacking of the main concert too. Things like grabbing her maracas and tossing them onto the dance floor. Or crushing the maracas and spilling the beans all into the hippie’s face.

I fear I may have hurt her feelings. Weirdly, though, I feel better. Minimal guilt. Probably would have felt angry for years to come if I hadn’t blurted out my venom.

This blog post should have been written right after I read the book, but I needed to wait for a time when I had lots of work and needed the procrastinating. As luck would have it, I forgot what I was going to say. I jotted down the page numbers of two quotes for future reference. I know I Capture the Castle was a good book, but it’s probably good I don’t blurt out any spoilers here.

Just read the novel - though with a word of warning if you don’t like teenage girls and their romances. The narrator here is one, though filtered through a woman in her fifties. Playwright Dodie Smith (most famous as the writer for 101 Dalmatians) took two years to write and re-write a year in the life of a 1930s teenager with literary aspirations living in a decrepit castle in England. The writing comes out pretty good, the characters are all perfect for not being perfect - normal people with no one entirely villainous, like most people in real life. There’s comedy too, with the bear fur coat part as my favourite.

Now for my two quotes - for my reference - probably boring for you, dear reader:

Page 277, on finding help in bad times:

Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn’t. You can’t get insurance money without paying the premiums.

Page 279, the best description for the use of religion I’ve heard, which more people should keep in mind:

‘It’s merely shorthand for where we come from, where we’re going, and what it’s all about.’

Someone posted Shirley Eleanor Nash’s obituary on Facebook. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1916, she died on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 93. I don’t want to forget who she is nor how well she lived her life, so here’s the link to this great lady. Just in case, too, I am adding her photo here:

(Besides, they had more style back then. The hippies probably ruined North Americans’ fashion sense for ever.)

In case they ever remove the obituary, I made a bulleted list of her life’s highlights to refer to when I need a little push towards the life I want to live:

• In 1940, yearning to see the world, she quit school, sold her car and bought a steamship ticket to China. As the only American, her fellow passengers were Japanese diplomats being ordered home and German army officers recalled to Berlin. Shirley told how the atmosphere was very tense with the two groups barely polite to one another. Arriving in Shanghai, she worked as a daily newspaper reporter in the city guarded by Japanese tanks and barbed wire barricades. In November 1941, she boarded the last ship out of China before the war. A sister ship, with all her belongings, was blown up in the Philippines.
• In the 1950s, Shirley attended Whittier College on the GI Bill received a Bachelors and Masters with highest honors and worked as a college professor at Chaffey College for 25 years where she founded and headed the Interior Design department and taught architectural history.
• Shirley was the first white woman to explore Dutch Guiana’s Suriname River, and she did it in a dugout canoe just 5 years after locals stopped practicing cannibalism. She taught school in St. Thomas and St. Croix during the 1960s and tromped through mosquito-infested jungles to photograph ruins in Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Merida and Palenque decades before they became popular tourist destinations.
• Shirley became a scholar specializing in California’s estancia and adobe architectural history of the 18th and 19th centuries. She was part of a team of historians that catalogued many of the 19th century homes in southern California. Noted as feisty and finding ways to get things done, she once applied to Hearst Castle for permission to do on-site research of its architecture and interiors, but was declined. She then applied for a job as a guide and was hired, which allowed her to do her research and get paid too.
• An art lover, Shirley was an award-winning photographer, a skilled carver, weaver, mosaic artist and a basket maker using traditional Native American materials.

My dad sent me this video with no explanation. I thought everyone was crying with joy at the unbridled creative expression. What art lovers those Russians are, I said to myself. The artist used a light box and sand to create a performance where her drawing was almost, at parts, a form of dancing. I’ve always envied performers and musicians that their arts could be shared immediately with their audience (and make money busking should they ever find themselves on the streets), whereas poor writers and visual artists had to create something out of the public eye for exclusive venues like galleries. Ha! Light boxes on TV, I thought, that’s the trick! Maybe now we can have televised drawing on TV!

Turns out I should have researched this. The young woman is 24-year-old Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova on some sort of TV talent show. She won the $1,000,000 Ukraninan Hryvnia prize. Which is a good thing because the young mother from the Crimean lost her business in 2008.

It’s a good thing she’s got hipster bangs and dresses well.

Omlet, the company that makes those Ikea-styled chicken coops also makes sleek guinea pig homes. Their website has pages and pages on guinea pig biology and the guinea pig lifestyle. I’ve summarized some of my favourite facts below for reference:

• Guinea pigs have twenty teeth.
• There are two types of guinea pig poops: the normal hard ones and the soft caecotrophs. Caecotrphs have proteins and vitamins that the guinea pig takes back by eating right from its anus as it emerges, up to 150 a day.
• Guinea pigs have 258 bones: 34 in the spinal cord, 43 in each front leg, 36 in each back leg, seven in their pelvis as a fused tail, and the difference in their ribs, skulls, and breast.
• Female guinea pigs are sows and males are boars.
• Besides the terrible kicks guinea pigs can get from rabbit companions, the bacterial infection Bordetella is another reason to keep rabbits and cavies separate.
• Barbering happens among bored or hungry guinea pigs, when the dominant one begins chewing on the others’ coats. Better, more frequent food and more exercise helps relieve this.

As for the guinea pig language:

• The meep-meep-meep sound indicates greeting, especially greeting the imminent arrival of food. Accompanies the fridge door opening and especially the opening of the vegetable crisper. Ears go up and down during the meep-meep-meep.
• Purring happens when opposite sexes meet.
• Angry purring and teeth chattering indicates an argument among guinea pigs.
• General chirps indicate normal guinea pig conversations. Guinea pigs share tales of terror in this speech pattern after returning to the cage following a run-in with an overzealous, cuted-out human.

When I was sixteen, a teacher in social studies handed out to each of us a world map with country boundaries but no names. “Just to test out where you are in geography,” he said. “Take fifteen minutes and write the names of all the countries you know in the blank spaces.”

After fifteen minutes, I still needed more time. Some white trash chick sitting nearby looked over at my sheet of paper and said, “What? Did you memorize the map?”

“No, bitch, I simply listed the places I am going to visit while you rot here in your redneck pork palace.”

Well, it would have been really cool if I could have made that comeback when I was sixteen.

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?

(From Superdove, pages 91-92)

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.
• Cher Ami was another pigeon hero: he was shot in the chest, lost a leg and an eye. After he died on June 13, 1919, his taxidermied remains went to the Smithsonian (click on link to see Cher Ami).

*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.

“When something is everywhere, it paradoxically becomes invisible and its value diminishes in our minds,” says Courtney Humphries in Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…and the World.