Animal of the Week -- September 24, 2007

Good Monday Anifreaks!

Honourable mention to Paul Genders (age 27 and five-sixths) who was the only person to tell me that Xestus is the name of the Greek god of sea and ocean currents who helped to guide the Argo on its journey. Well done Paul, and many many thanks.

Onwards and onwards.
This week's animal of the week was brought to my attention by a friend with whom I went to see Feist last night, a grown man wearing a lovely knitted jumper with the shape of a shark emblazoned across it in red, taking up a good fifty percent of the area of the jumper frontage. With its broad head and tapered streamlined body, its stiff projecting pectoral fins and menacing pose, I recognised the animal instantly... but that's enough about my friend.

Unfortunately for my friend, his jumper had been attacked by this week's animal of the week Tineola bisselliella (common clothes moths). These little blighters seem to be plaguing people a bit this year, as this was not the first assault on a wardrobe I had heard of this year, not by a long chalk.

Clothes moths used to be important pests, but increased use of manmade fibres, less-humid housing due to central heating, more dry cleaning, and greater use of insecticides have led to a decline in damage. Nevertheless, when they do get in among your woollens, furs, and natural fibre carpets their effects can be most vexing.

The entirely anecdotal and unfounded plague of moths this year, the presence of which I have inferred from a few accounts of acquaintances and things written on internet forums (that's what a year of postgraduate science education does for you) is likely due to one of three things: global warming leading to a very wet summer, terrorism, or government conspiracy (an umbrella term for the previous two options anyway).

My love for all the animals (except slugs) is well documented, so I'd like to encourage you all to look on the bright side of common clothes moths. If you clean out your cupboards and vacuum thoroughly you should be able to control an infestation. The moths are particularly attracted to clothes with remnants of perspiration, food and drink spillages, or urine on them, so perhaps there are one or two lessons to be learned from an infestation anyway. And failing all that, because they start with the most accessible bits of your clothes, the holes they make in the cuffs of your jumper are ideal to put your thumbs through when the inevitable second grunge revival strikes (the first grunge revival occurred when I had an infestation of clothes moths in East Finchley in 2001 [ie, the heyday of emo]).

Many thanks,

Peter Hayward
Head Keeper
Animal of the Week

ps, having struggled this far through AOTW, you will be shocked to learn that I am both an editor and a writer. Now that my MSc is over and before I have to return to selling what god gave me for £20 a pop above a Soho hairdressers, I am looking for freelance/temporary/permanent work. Do you know anyone who needs any editing and/or writing done? If so, please let me know.

Animal of the Week -- September 17, 2007

Hello one, Hello all

Many thanks for your responses to my previous missive, it seems that many of you hold cartoon series Dungeons and Dragons in great affection, more than one of you seemed to harbour, er, special fondnesses for particular characters.

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. A recurring theme over the past month or so has been that of animal alphabets, first a very dear friend comes to visit and she is wearing an animal alphabet T shirt, then the following weekend I go to the Green Man festival, I turn up the day after most of the people with whom I was staying, and they tell me that the night before they had been playing a game in which participants have to name an animal starting with each letter of the alphabet.

Both on my friend's T shirt and in the Green Man naming game two letters caused particularly problems, not the Q and the Z as you might expect—quaggas, zebras, zorillas, quillas, zanders, quetzels, and zebu provide plenty of options—but surprisingly U and, perhaps predictably, X. Now, where previously in such pastimes you had to make an exception for a fictional unicorn for U, you have the previous animal of the, erm, week, the uakari. But what about that pesky X?

At the Green Man festival an ever-astute Welshman recalled the X-ray fish, a small aquarium fish with see-through skin (the kind of skin you can see through), and that was going to be this week's animal...until I spotted another fish with a name beginning with X. This week's animal of the week is Petroscirtes xestus (xestus fangblenny, bearded sabretooth blenny). Blennies are small coastal fish, and this species is no exception, unremarkable and typically brown. Fangblenny just sounds so oxymoronic, the equivalent of "werehamster", "vampire tit", "The Sloth of the Baskervilles", or "murderous death sprat of terror".

There's not much more to say on the matter of the xestus fangblenny. I have no idea what xestus means, do you? Answers in an email please, the prize being an honourable mention in next week's AOTW.

Peter Hayward
Head Keeper
Animal of the Week

ps, having struggled this far through AOTW, you will be shocked to learn that I am both an editor and a writer. Now that my MSc is over and before I have to return to selling what god gave me for £20 a pop above a Soho hairdressers, I am looking for freelance/temporary/permanent work. Do you know anyone who needs any editing and/or writing done? If so, please let me know.

Animal of the Week -- September 03, 2007

HELLO! HAI! HOW ARE YOU ALL?

I do hope that everyone has had a marvellous August, I know I have. So much has happened: floods, fires, new Harry Potter film and book, another series of Big Brother over, the baiji extinct then not extinct, but probably dead in the water whatever... It has been so very long, I am not sure I know how to do this anymore. Please forgive me if this is a little ropey, I am sure I shall be back up to speed next week.

Anyway, this week's wizard of the week is Venger from the classic TV series Dungeons and Dragons... Venger was a pasty-faced cross dresser who in an act of rebellion as a teenager filed his teeth and started wearing a cape. He never grew out of the goth phase.

Lording it over the evil and corruptible characters of The Realm, Venger repeatedly tried to trap, trick, crush, or magically imprison Hank, Diana, Presto, Eric, Bobby and the useless unsteady bint with the invisibility cloak to rest from them the gifts bestowed on them by Dungeon Master to help them navigate their way home. Venger was thwarted at every turn, which given that his foes were a bunch of kids who arrived from another dimension on a fairground ride who didn't know how to use their magical weapons and, in some cases, could barely stay upright for more than five minutes suggests to me that he had the wizarding skills of a teaspoon.

Venger's mortal enemy in The Realm was a five-headed dragon called Tiamat, named after a goddess of Babylonian mythology. Whenever the two squared up Venger would, almost without fail, flee in the knowledge that whatever artifice he could come up with was no match for Tiamat's powers of burning and freezing and speaking like Bea Arthur on helium.

Most of Venger's problems likely stem from the fact that his father was the walking nutsack, Dungeon Master. An interfering gnome-wizard whose main power was to appear and disappear when walking behind rocks, Dungeon Master was supposedly trying to help the kids find their way home and stop Venger getting hold of the magical gifts he gave them. Although given his purported wisdom, he should have realised that if they were ever going to get home, Bobby and his mates needed to ditch the bloody unicorn for a start.

Venger was the name of the car on the story on the sleeve of Kenickie's 1995 Skillex EP. So there we are, wizard of the week, Venger....

... what?

... animals?

... really?

... why would anyone do that?

A what? Oh, right, a zoologist, uh, I thought that was all a dream... ... OK... have this bum-headed monkey... Cacajao calvus (bald uakari). The name uakari is believed to be derived from an Amerindian word for Dutchman.

See you next week lovelies!

Px