Day: July 26, 2010

Swan-upping, anyone?

Today was pretty uneventful, even for a Monday.

My Forgotten English calendar informs me that it’s the Traditional Swan-Upping Day, when

…since the Middle Ages, the Worshipful Company of Dyers and that of Vintners have annually rounded up and marked mute cygnets’ bills upriver from London — a bit like old-fashioned American cattle-branding. Using sharp knives, the companies’ swan-wardens once indicated ownership with one or two nicks respectively to distinguish their own from unmarked, royal birds. But now the birds’ legs are banded instead. At one time, swan ownership in Norfolk and Suffolk was indicated by a wide range of nicks, as seen in a 500-year-old scroll depicting ninety-nine distinctive marks. A remnant of this practice can be seen in the pub name, The Swan with Two Necks — a corruption of The Swan with Two Nicks.

Around here? Not so much.

Song of the day

My oh my oh my it’s a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one)
I like swimming in the sea

That’s Colin Hay, perhaps best known as the lead singer of ’80s band Men at Work, with his song “Beautiful World.” This is the “alternate mix,” which is still my favorite.

Monday various

  • Rachel Maddow takes on the “Scare White People” tactics of the right. That this is a tried and tested method for securing votes is only slightly less disheartening than the fact that it seems to be working even today. [via]
  • Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose story “Mouse and I” appears in the April 2010 issue of Kaleidotrope, writes about finding her voice as a Filipino science fiction writer:

    I found myself thinking, yet again, on what kind of science fiction a Filipino would write, and how a writer can break free from being someone who emulates the works of writers he or she has admired to become a person who writes with a voice and with a story that comes from the writer’s own soul.

    What things influence the Filipino writer then? What’s our backstory? How can I as a writer coming from a country that has been so colonialized and that is still trapped in a colonial mindset free myself so I can write the fictions that only I can write?

  • She also shares a really terrific talk on “The Danger of a Single Story” by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  • Apparently there is no gravity [via] and time is disappearing from the universe. [via] Or at least, those are some theories.
  • And finally, I don’t know if this story, about a Bosnian man who claims to have been hit by meteorites six times, is made more or less strange by the possibility that it’s all a hoax.