I have received a letter from my very good friend Siganus Sutor, in Mauritius:
A colleague of mine has recently sent me a number of photos said to have been taken in India. Among them was one showing a goat on which a very large blue underwear has been pulled — for a reason that is not evident at first glance, though I doubt it would have been done just for the fun of it.
I must say I can’t think why a goat would need such an outfit. Here are more of the pictures.
What a wonderful country it is. They even drive on the left.
A Bad Guide 
Maybe the goat was recently shorn in an unprofessional manner, resulting in unsightly friction wounds and patches of remaining hair that the owner does not want the neighbors to see.
Of course one cannot assume that the visible clothes are the only ones the goat has on. Perhaps it likes to wear black frilly undergarments. That would definitely need to be kept from the neighbors.
Then it would need a wig, not underwear. There is a difference, Stu.
Some people don’t know much about goats. They don’t even know whether, like a bitch, a goat can be in heat.
Maybe that was the case for that goat and that large deformed undergarment was supposed to act as a kind of chastity belt.
What I meant is that the sweater and blue track shorts may be a cover-up for frilly undergarments worn as well beneath. I don’t see where a wig comes into it. Also, the track shorts must have been for a very traditionally built lady, like Mma Ramotswe in McCall Smith’s books.
The guy with empty coke bottles around his waist is afraid of drowning. On TV I’ve seen beaches where everybody even only barely in the water nevertheless wears some kind of flotation device, like the inner tube of a tire. This was in a Muslim country (can’t remember which), but you see the same thing in China.
It’s as if the people in these countries had discovered swimming only around the same time as democracy and capitalism, and are still leery of the whole business. As I have said before, you don’t need to peer into outer space to find unusual forms of life.
Sig, you might be right, but then why the shirt? The man behind isn’t wearing a shirt. Could the man be using the goat to look after his clothes? As a goat hanger?
Track shorts is a good name, and it’s not everything that fits a goat, as you say. I can’t see Mma Ramotswe wearing track shorts instead of, you know, underwear.
It could be they wear flotation devices as protection in case of tsunamis. I’ve been swimming on and off for about fifty years and it still doesn’t seem natural.
At present there are revolutionary waves of anthropologists rolling in, who claim homo sapiens developed by seas and lakes, not in the savannahs. Last night on Arte there was a rerun of a documentary on this subject.
The theory explains why we aren’t covered with hair (except for those disgusting Italian men of a certain age) – we don’t need hair in the water, since it reduces mileage ! Have you ever seen a hairy dolphin ? No, you haven’t.
So it’s rather unnatural that swimming still doesn’t seem natural to you. Pardon my indelicate curiosity, but do you have Italian ancestors ?
Most architects would love to have Italian ancestors, I have none to my knowledge. Seals and polar bears aren’t Italian, Stu; I don’t think this theory is thought through.
Yes, that was my impression too. I am rather tired of being confronted with revolutionized versions of world-views that were not on my plate anyway.
Perhaps I am beginning to understand the cool reception often accorded to my Luhmannesque enthusiasms. Well, see if I care !!
In the twilight of my years, I am doomed to moderation. What a load of … dead leaves.
No one is cool to Luhmann – let’s see if I can spell his name right this time – it’s just that no one else has read him, so it’s hard going if you’re using him to warm up a conversation. The best thing is probably to slip him in halfway through. What does he have to say about hairy Italians, for instance?
A lot of mixed metaphors there. Sorry.
I just bought Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Unfortunately there is no index entry for Esau, so I’ll have to report back when I’ve read the book.
The penny drops. He’s a football supporter – perhaps Aston Villa, or West Ham or Burnley.
I don’t know anything about Burnley, but you’d have to be colour blind to support the other two, mauve and sky blue outfits, possibly with yellow stripes. It’s obscene, like trifle. I believe Prof. Luhmann is, if anything, an ex-football supporter, having died some years ago.
It’s been only 14 years, he hasn’t even begun to acquire a patina.
Just for comparison, copper would have turned black after ten years and be on its way to pale green by now.
It turns black first ??
Oh, a word has been removed from the tittle. (Why?) But it still appears in the URL.
Because I couldn’t stand to see the word panties every time I opened the door. Especially since I’d hung them out without anyone even asking me to (or not to).
The URL is wordpress’s responsibility. They must remove their own panties.
It turns black first??
Yes, it does. For several years from my office I watched these copper roofs in New York turn, from shiny copper colour, first black and then green. They are at the World Financial Center, across the street from the World Trade Center, and I think they must have been damaged when it collapsed (it was more than twice their height).
At any rate, they used to be much greener than this.(No they weren’t, you can see here they were exactly the same. Never mind.) It took about 20 years for them to turn green. It’s suppose to help if you piss on it, that’s what the architects at the late Aldo Rossi’s office used to do, but you’d have to drink a hell of a lot of beer to cover all those roofs.Once I needed a sample of a piece of copper with a green patina to show a client. I asked a sculptor I know, and he turned a small sheet of shiny copper green in seconds, using a mystery oxidation liquid (I’m no chemist) and a blowtorch. It went black first, though.
Copper in architecture – familiar; but does anyone ever use brass or bronze, Crown?
Not brass, as far as I know. It does go green – kind of, at least – so I’m not sure why not. Bronze is used, let me find some examples…
Here’s one where it hasn’t gone green.
Here are some big bronze-coloured bronze doors at St Peter’s.
And then there’s Bernini’s baldocchino, but that’s inside.
There used to be a hell of a lot of bronze on the Pantheon, but it started to be removed pretty early on:
And then the Pope stripped some more bronze from the Pantheon for Bernini to melt down and use on his baldocchino.
The most famous bronze modernist building is the Seagram Building, at 56th & Park Avenue in New York, by Mies.
Apparently the black is copper oxide and the green (verdigris) is copper carbonate. Here’s an odd phrase: liver of sulphur.
Ah, done it again, forgot my own name.
Fixed.
A couple of remarks…
I attribute the popularity of the theory (not the theory itself) that we evolved at the beach to Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman – was it mentioned in the documentary? There are many wonderful supportive ideas – like how everthing in the Savannah is large and fast and fierce and would happily eat us, while everything at the beach is small, and slow and often quite tasty raw [not everything, but you get the idea]. And women’s hair billowed out around them in the sea for their babies to hang onto, while it didn’t matter so much if the daddies became bald…I think it’s an agreeable read. Anyone read it? Ooh, there’s also a bit about the evolution of the smile, and even of speech!
Verdigris can be scraped off copper and ground up as pigment, of course. It’s pretty corrosive though (being corrosion, basically, itself) and tends to eat through vellum. There’s a beautiful green in many manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel which appear to be this colour. I’m guessing copper sheets corroded intentionally in seawater, but I don’t know. Obviously now I wonder if the monks just hung the copper in the pissoire. Do you know more about this?
Last, O Crown: Last evening I received an e-mail because I am subscribed to A Bad Guide, telling me all about a New Post called ‘Why “The United Kingdom”‘ and telling me to ‘click here’ to see it…but when I click there, I get the Bad Guide page heading with goats, followed by: ‘Not Found Apologies, but the page you requested could not be found. Perhaps searching will help.’ What does it all mean?
I was writing it last night, and then a programme came on the telly that my wife told me I wanted to watch, and in my panic I pressed “publish” instead of “save as draft”. It’s lucky I’m not in charge of nuclear weapons (not really just luck). Anyway, I managed to snatch the half-assed piece back, but not before the emails had gone out, apparently.
Very interesting about the copper, thanks for that. I haven’t read the book, but I will point out that I once got hepatitis from eating oysters on the beach in Mexico. It was jolly unpleasant, and made my life hell for six months because I turned yellow and couldn’t eat dairy products.
Ah, that explains it, then.
I am so sorry. I guess if you’d been evolving, you’d probably not’ve survived without Modern Medicine and you’d’ve removed yourself from the gene pool and nobody would ever react badly to oysters again. Or perhaps not. How horrible it must’ve been. Do you blame oysters? Do you no longer eat them? Had you picked it off the beach or was it in some sort of chiringuito/beach bar, or…? I hope the programme was worth your mental disturbance at involuntary publishing!
I had forgotten about Elaine Morgan and her aquatic ape hypothesis. A few years ago on German TV I saw the 1998 BBC documentary on her mentioned at the link, and was impressed by her well-spoken intelligence and her ideas. In the documentary there was no talk of billowing graspable hair for babies, nor of harmless waterside snails to be preferred over lions – at least I don’t remember such things.
I suppose it’s only today’s Western women who act against their purported evolutionary disposition. They are often disgusted by cold, slimy critters – reminders of how they themselves (the women) feel every day before they have put on their makeup, as a woman once told me when I was of an impressionable age. Asian women just eat the things, with or without makeup (I mean the women again).
I must say that the billowing snails etc. stuff , a product of untrammeled Hollywood imagination, is no sillier or more speculative than the standard guff proferred on TV by anthropologists, or biologists with tall tales about the everyday details of a dinosaur’s life.
I see that the reply box no longer shrinks when I fill in the commenter ID fields. Did you have to box the ears of someone at wordpress to get that change rescinded ? Do tell all.
” Anyone read it?” Read it? I handled it just the other day as we rearranged our books prior to a chucking out session – we got four boxes off to the local charity shop. Anyway, we kept it. A jolly good read, though the hypothesis is much sneered at by some academics. Me, I’m amused that anyone thinks that we know enough about our ancient ancestors to justify dismissing any plausible hypothesis.
P.S. I now wonder whether the goat is wearing the colours of Barcelona FC. I’ll say no more (snrfl, snrfl).
I’m amused that anyone thinks that we know enough about our ancient ancestors to justify dismissing any plausible hypothesis.
I agree. I also find it funny and sad that so many ideas are rushed into the category of Plain Truth without previously having been entertained as hypotheses. The amount of bullshit detail slipped into documentaries about “life” – cavemen discovering fire, dinosaurs growing feathers in order to fly, “nothing happened for millions of years and then the first trilobite appeared” – really gets me down.
It want’t a trilobite, but something else mentioned on a German documentary channel last night. First meteors bring water to the earth, then smokestacks at the bottom of the seas create the “hot soup” in which protozoa “develop”, then “nothing happens for millions of years”, then the first “primitive” life form turns up in the sea.
The first primitive life form ?? The thing they showed (in an video animation) already had eyes. The whole business of evolution must be unutterably complex. What actually took place must have consisted of 99.99999% didn’t-work-out phenomena. But you can’t find records of ephemeral “failures”, by definition of ephemeral and failure.
So trying to understand evolution must involve 99.99999% guesswork and speculation – yet all we hear about are the currently fashionable certainties back-projecting from what we can see. I wish I knew more about what serious palaeobiologists do, but I don’t have the background.
What I found fascinating is that water is of extraterrestrial origin. It makes sense when it’s explained – after all water doesn’t grow on trees or just “happen” – but It have never occurred to me to wonder about it.
More evidence that correct spelling is not necessary for survival.
What actually took place must have consisted of 99.99999% didn’t-work-out phenomena.
It’s still going on. Just look at Tony Blair.
I don’t blame the oysters, I blame both the young man who was flogging them on the beach and myself for eating warmish oysters. I love them, but I’m more cautious nowadays about ordering them. Not that I get much chance. I might as well be living in Switzerland, for all the oysters that are available round here.
For those of you who communicate by other means than looking at the website:
I’ve now issued the United Kingdom post.
https://abadguide.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/indian-goat-wearing-what-panties/
Indian author Kiran Desai (the daughter of Anita Desai) writes about the house of two aged friends of a seventeen-year-old girl living in a village near the Himalayas and in doing so she uses a word that, at times, has been quite controversial — but she uses it in a very mundane, ordinary, plain way :
“In fact, Budhoo had been a comforting presence for the two sisters who’d reached old age together at Mon Ami, its vegetable patch containing as far as they knew, the country’s only broccoli grown from seeds procured in England; its orchard providing enough fruit for stewed pears every day of pear season and enough leftover to experiment with wine making in the bathtub. Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spencer panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favored with views of Kanchenjunga collared by clouds.”
(Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, page 44.)
Maybe I should add that it all started there:
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003262.php
Ok, that works well, Sig. Referring to “a washing line of Marks & Spencer panties” depicts the scene much better than “underwear” or anything else. They’re probably pale pink, or white with lace panels. Go into M&S and I expect they have a sign pointing to the panties department.
That does not mean I’m ever going to use the word myself, not unless I’m writing a novel and I’m trying to evoke something or other. It’s a horrible word. You might as well start talking about doilies (whatever they are).
I see doilies are rather interesting and very out of style, so probably no one is going to ask me to use the word, thank God.
Your book, The Inheritance of Loss, sounds really great from that excerpt. I must try and get hold of it. I like the title too.
It’s a horrible word.
Well, I suppose everyone has his own lot of likes and dislikes and nothing much can be done about it.
Regarding The Inheritance of Loss, I found it a bit of a disappointment. It’s not an entirely bad book though. It only wasn’t up to my expectations. (Or maybe it wasn’t the right time to read it? Sometimes moods can play a part in how a book is appreciated.)
When we first moved to Oz my daughter was young. I was sent shopping, so in the department store I asked the assistant where the girls underpants were. She looked at me in horror and then yelled “Knickers”.
Another Oz usage: I assumed that they would use “plimsolls” as in England. Nope; they used “sandshoes” as in Scotland.
She sounds like Dame Edna.
My mother always used to call my school gym shoes my sandshoes, to my great annoyance. I wonder if she picked it up in Australia.
This evening I caught Dick Francis red-handed — or maybe his wife — using the horrible word p… (Wild Horses, page 311).
Ding! dong! — Comment disappeared…
See? That’s what happens if you write about the p word.