The new Subterranean Press edition is gorgeous so I couldn’t resist posting a few pictures:

An intriguing black cover

Oh, ok, it was the wrong way up..

Inside the slipcase (Jungle Book style)

Photographic fold-out art

Signed by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Gorgeous title page

Rejected Covers

Rejected Wrap-around cover

Spooky artwork

People who bought the book had the chance for their names to appear in the back to join the ghostly protectors of Bod in the graveyard..

Hey! That's me!

The Young Charles Darwin

Picture the bearded figure from the standard paintings.  He begins to study the Galapagos tortoises, perhaps noticing that some varieties have a saddle-like shape to their shells, whereas others on different islands don’t.  Alternatively of course, he just decides that it would be good fun to sneak up on them and have a ride:

The inhabitants believe that these animals are absolutely deaf; certainly they do not overhear a person walking close behind them. I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then, upon giving a few raps on the hinder part of the shell, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.

The general approach seemed to be to eat most of the potential specimens, to the extent that ’staying out of Charles Darwin’s way’ was probably a pretty good survival strategy.  Take the armadillo for instance:

we were obliged to be content with a frugal meal on an armadillo which we had shot by the way. The flesh of this animal has, indeed, an agreeable taste, resembling fowl, but is very fat

Or the puma

I was suddenly struck with horror at thinking that I was eating one of the favourite dishes of the country, namely, a half-formed calf, long before its proper time of birth. It turned out to be Puma; the meat is very white, and remarkably like veal in taste

The tortoises didn’t get away with just being ridden either:

While staying in this upper region, we lived entirely upon tortoise-meat. The breastplate roasted (as the Gauchos do carne con cuero), with the flesh attached to it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is very indifferent.

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking that he stuck to merely eating animals unimportant to his records, I refer you to the Lesser Rhea

When at the Rio Negro, in Northern Patagonia, I repeatedly heard the Gauchos talking of a very rare bird which they called Avestruz Petise.

He found one eventually, after eating most of it:

The bird was cooked and eaten before my memory returned. Fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved.

Preserved for his sandwiches in the morning presumably.

Darwin's Notebook

What isn’t mentioned is the pre-edited title of his most famous work was ‘The Origin of Species and 1001 Ways to Cook Them‘, or ‘Our tasty ancestors, an evolutionary journey into yummyness‘ .

Cooking tips aside, it’s an interesting exhibit, although the placement of the live iguana as an example of animals which didn’t live on the Galapagos, seemed a bit unnecessary.  I’ll let the Horned Frog slide though (I like frogs).

It covers the famous voyage of the Beagle, examples from his notebooks, including the first sketch of the familiar tree structure of animal classification.  It then shows a reproduction of his study, complete with wheeled chair to save getting up and various animal skeletons to show similarities in bone structure and development.  It finishes with a brief look at some of the controversies which surrounded his theory which, ironically, seems to be more challenged these days than it was at the time!

Give it a look, but remember to take some lunch with you, you might come out feeling peckish and I think they’d object if you tried to eat the iguana.

It seemed particularly odd being addressed to an audience in London who, I would imagine, were largely old-school Eddie Izzard fans and are pretty unlikely to have the sort of closed religious fundamentalist opinions he seemed to be attacking.

To me, attacking organised religious belief is like shooting fish in a barrel.  It’s easy to dismiss as founded on ancient myths and legends in the 21st Century if you take a logical viewpoint.  The days where this was a controversial issue were surely buried in the middle ages.  I did wonder whether spending time in the USA, as presumably he does these days, it’s closer to the surface and perhaps I’m misguided in my judgement that the intelligent majority these days are largely non-religious.  Certainly skeptics I’ve met over there are very fond of preaching to the choir to demonstrate their own non-religious superiority.

I will accept that the rise of fundamentalist Islamic belief is a cause for concern, but I still think that it is the beliefs of a relatively small number of people which are being inflated as being much more important than they actually are by religious leaders anxious for power and control.

If you’re a comedian and you want to make jokes about religion, go ahead, it’s a subject ripe for parody, but don’t insult the intelligence of your audience by preaching at them, that’s just lowering yourself to the level of the evangelists.  Be funny – that’s what people have paid for.

I’ve just been reading ‘The Meaning of Tingo‘ by Adam Jacot de Boinod, which lists a whole host of words and expressions from around the globe which we just can’t express in English.  I’ve only just started it, but I thought I might pass on a few of my favourites so far, which I think we need to adopt immediately:

• iktsuarpok: To go outside often to see if someone is coming  (Innuit)
• puniu: The skull of a man who resembles a coconut (Hawaiian)
• nylentik:  To flick someone with the middle finger on the ear (Indonesian)
• tsuji-giri:  To try out a new sword on a passer-by (Japanese)
• nakhur:  A camel which won’t give milk until her nostrils have been tickled (Persian)
• nglayap:  To wander far from home with no particular purpose (Indonesian)
• ichigo-ichie:  The practice of treasuring each moment and trying to make it perfect (Japanese)
• achaplinarse:  To hesitate and then run away in the style of Charlie Chaplin (Spanish, C America)
• giomlaireachd:  The habit of dropping in at meal times (Scottish Gaelic)

and finally, I guess it has to be

• Tingo:  To borrow things from a friend’s house one by one until there’s nothing left.

Incidentally, I also notice from his book that 42 in Japanese (shi-ni) means to die.  Is that a rather morbid take on the meaning of life?

The second half is probably the stronger of the two, and features a strong contribution by the internet’s instrument of choice, the cowbell, in a performance reminiscent of Morecambe and Wise at their best.  Watching Bill putting the excellent BBC Concert orchestra through their paces in a nail-biting cop-drama too is strangly mesmerising.  If he’s performing anywhere near you it’s well worth catching.