Gator Loving
Regulars of this blog know my love for all film crocogator-ish, so I thought it was about time we actually discussed us some crocogatorish loving news. According to a 10-year study of gator nests in Louisiana, some alligators monogamously pair bond.
The ecologists were surprised to find that out of 10 alligators' nests that were studied, seven females chose to mate with the same male over the course of many years. The open habitat and dense population of alligators in this area makes it likely that females encounter many males during the breeding season, further corroborating the idea that mating fidelity is by choice, not chance. As Lance said in a press release: To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.
Ain't it sweet.
Heads Will Roll
Over at Largehearted Boy, the regular "Book Notes" column features Marc Estrin's historical novel The Good Doctor Guillotin. The novel follows the different lives of five men, all of which meet at the gallows for the first guillotining of the French Revolution.
For fans of popular music (in the folk sense rather than the current mass cult sense) Estrin links to three revolution era songs beloved by the revolting masses.
The Marseillaise needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.
Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.
La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at Wikipedia. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.
Next time you're drunkenly stumbling down the streets of the Financial District, raging impotently at the self-appointed masters of the universe, and promising to wash the nation free of sins of their corruption in a tidal wave of their accursed blood, you now have a couple of songs you can sing at the top of your lungs.
Nifty.
This Is a Picture of a Mummy Monkey
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