77 year old cat

This black mohair plush cat is standing with an arched back and upright tail. His eyes are green and his nose is pink.

It was manufactured by the German toy manufacturer, Schuco in 1935.

He now lives at The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Source

Secret message - received a little late

Secrets from World War II may have been found in a coded message attached to the skeleton of a carrier pigeon found in an English chimney.

The bird was found when David Martin in Bletchingly, Surrey, was renovating his fireplace.

Martin told the BBC that he began “pulling it down, pulling it down…then the pigeon bones began appearing one by one by one. Down came the leg with the red capsule on with a message inside.”

 More than 250,000 carrier pigeons were used in World War II. They were called the National Pigeon Service and were relied on heavily to transport secret messages.

 Government code breakers are working to read the message found in Martin’s chimney.

Source

Save your hair

Would you believe this bracelet is made of hair?

It's a Victorian snake coil bracelet with 14 karat yellow gold and garnets and a woven hair band, approximately 14" total length by 1/2" wide, snake head 2" long. For sale here.

 Hair jewelry was the height of the romanticism and sentiment that characterized the Victorian era.

 Watch chains and bracelets often show the most ingenious hair weaving techniques with more than one color of hair often used, as perhaps a chain given by three daughters to their father.

via

From Arabia to Royal Ascot - History of horses

Timed to coincide with the diamond jubilee, a British Museum tribute to the horse charts its impact on humanity, from ancient times to the present day.

 The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot is at the British Museum, London WC1, until 30 September.

More photos here.

9 Famous Animals Who Met Tragic Deaths

HBO's Luck, a drama about the horse racing circuit, has been cancelled in its first season after several horses were hurt and subsequently euthanized on set.

Show business remains a dangerous place for animal actors. While poor working and living conditions are the most common causes of animal death, an unfortunate few have met their end through brutal police action, self-asphyxiation, and even pre-meditated acts of murder.

The most recently infamous former celebrity animal is probably Travis, who had it all, as far as the lives of chimps go, having starred in commercials for Coca Cola and Old Navy and made appearances on Maury and The Man Show.

On February 16, 2009, emergency operators received a 9-1-1 call from Travis’s owner Sandra Herold. Travis had attacked and horribly disfigured a friend of Herold’s, 55-year-old Charla Nash. When police arrived on the scene, Travis approached one of the squad cars and attempted to open the driver-side door, at which point an officer fatally shot him several times.

Continue reading "Before 'Luck,' 9 Famous Animals Who Met Tragic Deaths" at the Atlantic.

Horses at war

World War I, in addition to its millions of human casualties, also saw the death of hundreds of thousands of military horses. Steven Spielberg's latest film “War Horse” — the story of a young cavalry soldier and his beloved horse — has brought their exploits and plights to national attention. As a fascinating supplement, these photos (from Simon Butler’s “The War Horses”) are worth considering. Through their gritty beauty, they provide a powerful and at times terrifying sense of equine — and human — life during wartime, from parade ground to battlefield A young horse stands over the body of the rider who, even in death, clutches the reins of his mount. Source via

Semper Fido

1925. "Sgt. Jiggs." The Marine Corps mascot in Washington, D.C., with an actual Marine. National Photo Company Collection glass negative. The USMC got the nickname "Devil Dogs" from the Germans in World War I. The term "Devil Dog" in German is a legendary boogeyman from hell in German folklore. When they saw the fierceness with which the Marines fought in France, the Germans gave the USMC this name out of fear and respect. The Corps loved it and adopted the Bulldog as their mascot. The name persists today even though it is not widely known among the general public. There are some excellent history references on this subject at the Marine Museum at the USMC Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina. Source

Red Cross Dog

Washington, D.C., circa 1917. "Miss Carter Mullikin, Holton-Arms School." Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative. (The full size is excellent.) Source via

Another monster fish

A world's record 384-pound black sea bass caught by Franklin Schenck of Brooklyn with rod and reel off Catalina Island, California, on August 17, 1900. via

Monster fish

The monster sun fish caught by W.N. McMillan of E. Africa, at Santa Catalina Island, California on April 1, 1910. The weight was estimated at 3,500 lbs. via More on sunfish here

Soviet dog’s space capsule could fetch $10 million at Sotheby’s

The Vostok 3KA-2, a giant rusty ball, orbited the Earth on March 25, 1961. It carried a life-size cosmonaut mannequin and a live dog, and landed two hours after launch in a snow-blanketed field about 700 miles from Moscow. Three weeks later, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin climbed into an identical vehicle and became the first human to travel into outer space. The test capsule could fetch as much as $10 million when auctioned on April 12, the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s voyage. The four-legged cosmonaut traveling on 3KA-2 was named Zvezdochka and fared better than some of her canine predecessors just by surviving. The documentary footage played at Sotheby’s shows the dog looking alert, if slightly out of breath, when removed from the capsule. Sotheby’s offered the test capsule in 1996, with an estimate of $800,000 to $1 million. It didn’t sell and was later acquired privately by an anonymous U.S. businessman directly from the Russians. Source

- . - . -

Zvezdochka photo from Corbis "The dog shown is "Zvezdochka" (Little Star), one of Russia's "Space Dogs," which was reportedly launched and returned safely to earth upon command, in a five-ton Soviet space vehicle, on March 25th. This was the fifth such vehicle to be successfully put into orbit by the Russians, in their attempt to put a man into space and return him safely. The soviet news agency, TASS reported that the dog "feels normal." The main purpose of the launching was "the further improvement of the design of the satellite spaceship and its system" for putting a man into space and returning him to earth."

World's oldest known dogs from France were poodle-sized

The oldest dogs from France were small, lap-sized canines that lived up to 15,000 years ago, according to new research. These poodle-sized dogs raise a lot of questions about the earliest domestication of dogs, due to their impressive age and the fact that most other prehistoric pooches were much larger. "One or many domestication events could have occurred in France and, more generally, in the western part of Europe," Maud Pionnier-Capitan told Discovery News. She led the French project, described in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science. In 2008, Mietje Germonpre, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, and her team identified what they believe is the world's first known dog. Found in a Belgian cave, the remains for this possible dog suggest that it lived around 32,000 years ago and resembled a Siberian husky. But it was about the size of a large shepherd dog. Germonpre told Discovery News that it's unclear now whether these much smaller French dogs descended from the European Paleolithic stock of large dogs, were introduced from elsewhere, or resulted through selection for a smaller body size. Read more . . .

Native Americans & dogs - companions in past centuries

The close, personal bonds between humans and their dogs date back centuries in California, according to new archaeological research that illuminates the relationship between the state's Central Valley Indian tribes and their dogs. The evidence: Central Valley Indians buried their dogs carefully and with ceremony. People and their dogs were often buried together, curled up side by side. Paul Langenwalter, a professor of archaeology and anthropology at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif, has examined dog skeletons dating back to the 1700s. "There are no pet cemetery areas, and we don't find the dog burials on campsites or any place where there aren't human burials," said Langenwalter, who specializes in human and dog relationships among California tribes. "They were buried with the people." Read More . . .

Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

I've had the most fun this morning. Exploring, hunting, learning - THIS is what the internet was meant for, isn't it? I started at Albert's Window, where the portrait to the left caught my eye. AND - I had a little moment of Déjà vu. Something about that painting was so familiar. Now, why would such a bizarre piece of art be familiar to me? I thought I'd keep exploring. The letter which Antonietta Gonzalez the subject of the portrait is holding says,

"Don Pietro, a wild man discovered in the Canary Islands, was conveyed to his most serene highness Henry the king of France, and from there came to his Excellency the Duke of Parma. From whom [came] I, Antonietta, and now I can be found nearby at the court of the Lady Isabella Pallavicina, the honorable Marchesa of Soragna."

Now I detoured to Wikipedia, to read about hypertrichosis, also known as "werewolf syndrome." There, I learned that Antoinetta's father, Petrus Gonzales, has gone down in history as the first recorded case of hypertrichosis. There are more recent people who are afflicted with hypertrichosis, but they unfortunately are ostracized, or treated as freaks of nature and put on show in traveling carnivals. This was not the fate of Petrus Gonzales and his children. In Failure Magazine, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, author of “The Marvelous Hairy Girls”, states that,

"They lived at court and Petrus and his sons were given minor positions, Petrus being an assistant bearer of the king’s bread. The Gonzales family was at court because of their hairiness, in a situation similar to that of court dwarves. They were not exactly free to come and go as they pleased, but they were not slaves. Their noble patrons dressed them in luxurious clothing."

In reading an article which Merry Wiesner-Hanks wrote for National Sexuality Resource Center (NSRC), I was thrilled to see that the portrait of Antonietta Gonzales now hangs in the castle of Blois in France. Then, I had that "Aha moment." See, I've visited Blois! In 2006, we made a trip to France to visit some of the Chateaux of the Loire Valley. I had visited the Chateaux of Blois and had seen that painting before! It just took me about four and a half years to learn its history. I'm so glad that I did! (click for larger) Portrait of Antonietta Gonzales, by Lavinia Fontana

An unusual painting

While we often see dogs in art, one very seldom finds a cat. Painted many, many years ago - but preserved forever ... I love this painting: Francois Boucher, La Toilette (A Lady Fastening Her Garter). 1742, oil on canvas. Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza. (click for larger) via

Dogs Were Man's Best Friend Even 9,400 Years Ago

PORTLAND, Maine -- Nearly 10,000 years ago, man's best friend provided protection and companionship - and an occasional meal. That's what researchers are saying after finding a bone fragment from what they are calling the earliest confirmed domesticated dog in the Americas. University of Maine graduate student Samuel Belknap III came across the fragment while analyzing a dried-out sample of human waste unearthed in southwest Texas in the 1970s. A carbon-dating test put the age of the bone at 9,400 years, and a DNA analysis confirmed it came from a dog - not a wolf, coyote or fox, Belknap said. Because it was found deep inside a pile of human excrement and was the characteristic orange-brown color that bone turns when it has passed through the digestive tract, the fragment provides the earliest direct evidence that dogs - besides being used for company, security and hunting - were eaten by humans and may even have been bred as a food source, he said. Source

You learn something new every day

This is a Zibellini, or Flea Fur Zibellinis were a popular accessory item for noble men & ladies during the 15th and 16th centuries. A zibellino, from the Italian word for "sable", is the pelt of a sable or marten worn draped at the neck or hanging at the waist, or carried in the hand. The plural is zibellini. Some zibellini were fitted with faces and paws of goldsmith's work with jeweled eyes and pearl earrings, while unadorned furs were also fashionable. The traditional costume historian's term for this accessory, flea-fur, is from the German Flohpelz, coined by Wendelin Boeheim in 1894, who was the first to suggest that the furs were intended to attract fleas away from the body of the wearer. There is no historical evidence to support this unlikely claim. Italians simply called these accessories "zibellini", their word for sables, and speakers of other languages called them "martens", "sables" or "ermines" in their native tongues. Zibellini was the entire pelt of an animal, usually marten or sable, but also ermine and lynx were used, and was carried in the hand, over the shoulder or around the neck, and was suspended from a gold chain attached to a girdle. The head and feet of which were often bejewelled replacements for the animals original body parts. There are accounts of clocks being set into the heads. Gold and silver were the norm for the head and feet of the Zibellini, but crystal and jet were also used. Zibellini were further embellished with diamonds, rubies, pearls and enamel work. The fashion for carrying zibellini died out in the first years of the 17th century, although fox-pelts were worn in similar fashion in the 19th and 20th century. [wiki] (via Scribal Terror)

How old is that in dog years?

This puppy was photographed in 1845, which would make it 164 years old. The photo, "Harriet Farnie and Miss Farnie with a Sleeping Puppy, Brownie" is from the National Galleries of Scotland's photostream, now available on Flickr. Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill 1920 (original negative around 1845) Accession no. PGP HA 390 Medium Carbon print Size 15.40 x 20.20 cm Credit Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

Looking back - origin of the 'Poodle Cut'

Jan at the Poodle (and Dog) Blog posted a great explanation about the origin of the canine hairstyle known as the "poodle cut." Here's Jan's theory ...

Simpler times

During the next few months, Google will be digitizing the entire LIFE photo archive — about 10 million photos stretching from the 1750s to today. This photo:

Edwardian era group of women, children and pet dog posing for informal portrait outside at resort.

Location:	Lossiemouth, Scotland
Date taken:	1910
Size:	1280 x 991 pixels (17.8 x 13.8 inches)