Tag: feral pigeon

Pirates and Kleinecke’s etymology of “pidgin”

It is suggested that an old Spanish slang word has nothing at all to do with Dutch pirates but instead adds weight to David Kleinecke’s generally discarded South American etymology of the word “pidgin”.

St George and the pigeon

This cemetery photo was taken near the beginning of an as yet undocumented walk which culminates in a bath in a 30m waterfall. It’s interesting because the flying beast rather resembles a dragon in dove’s clothing. Offhand I can’t think of any dove dragon myths, but there are plenty of references to pigeons and dragons…

Animals in mediaeval visions of the hereafter

In the Middle Ages anyone of any commercial talent (and his/her mum) had visions and stored some human bones in the new toilet chapel extension of the pig shed nave of the temple next to that handy spring holy source on the hillside. Here, extracted by moderately cunning device from Amazon, is the relevant part of the ToC of Eileen Gardiner’s (not completely exhaustive) Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook:

Cowbike drawing competition

With reference to several recent items (1, 2, 3), Emma Moo-Cow bets we can’t produce a cow on a bike. Well, finding what a number of sites call Cow-A-Saki wasn’t too difficult (anyone know who it is?). However, I think she probably meant a pushbike. That’s harder, but let’s try: One of the episodes of…