Peck

Juvenile penguin at London Zoo's Penguin Beach

Another photograph of the very fine juvenile penguin I mentioned in this previous post. I'm not sure quite what he hoped to achieve by pecking this rock, but penguins are not known for their intellectual capacity so I guess we'll just have to cut him some slack and hope he learns to distinguish rocks from fish sometime soon.

Hey Hey We're The Monkeys

Two squirrel monkeys

And we're back to photos of squirrel monkeys! This photograph was taken, as you've already worked out, at London Zoo.

The most famous squirrel monkey of them all was of course Miss Baker, one of the first two animals who were launched into space in 1959 and survived, along with the rhesus monkey Miss Able. She went on to live for twenty five years afterwards, receiving copious amounts of fanmail from children who'd heard of her exploits, and when she died of kidney failure in 1984, over 300 people attended her funeral.

Who knew!

Funny Looking Penguin

Juvenile Penguin at London Zoo

This photograph is of what I can only describe as a funny looking penguin at London Zoo's Penguin Beach. Penguin Beach contains four species; the rockhopper penguin, blackfooted penguin, humboldt penguin and macaroni penguin. I've looked up  pictures of each of these species, and this penguin looks like none of them. (On the day I visited, Penguin Beach also contained two pelicans who had escaped from their own accomodation and jumped into the penguin pool, but clearly this is not a pelican either.)

So on balance, I suspect this photograph is of a juvenile humboldt or blackfooted penguin, but who knows which! It's tricky to judge before their adult feathers come in. Alas, I obviously make a poor ornithologist. Ho hum! He was an obligingly photogenic fellow, whatever he is, unlike all his friends who were waddling and splashing and zooming around the pool with no thought for the humans vainly trying to get a good shot of them.

Welcome to the Jungle

Squirrel monkey at London Zoo

It's a monkey!

This weekend I went to ZSL London Zoo with my boyfriend. We had been meaning to go for about a year, because last year for his birthday present I adopted a squirrel monkey for him from the zoo,* but obviously we had to wait until the coldest weekend in the year. Being a naturally chilly person (both in temperature and personality), I wore eight layers of clothing to ensure I wouldn't get too cold. I was so bundled up I couldn't lift my arms above shoulder-height. But it was worth it!

But anyway, we had an awesome day! It was the first day of half-term, so I had expected it would be pretty busy, but in fact it was fairly quiet - I think the cold kept people at home. It was really nice being able to walk around the zoo without being buffeted by hordes of people. We went to visit my boyfriend's adopted squirrel monkey, Bounty, who lives with his monkey clan in an awesome exhibit which you can walk through. It's highly entertaining to watch them all bouncing around the place, and consequently I have a whole lot of monkey photos which will probably take over this blog for some time! Prepare to learn more than you ever needed to know about squirrel monkeys...

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*Because I kept asking what he wanted for his birthday and he kept giving me silly answers like "a monkey". I am nothing if not literal :D

Snowy Gates

Not as wonky as my previous offering, happily! If you look closely you can see the nubbins of snowmen that appeared to have been decapitated by the time I got there.

Flower... or flour?

Pictures of flowers, pictures of flowers, pictures of flowers, picture of a leaf... It's enough to make you want to scream. Like this fine gentleman, a sculpture at Buckfast Abbey (in fact, I like to imagine the sculpture represents the facial expression which is induced by trying Buckfast tonic wine. It's like alcoholic Calpol).

Being mildly obsessive, I have been monitoring my blog stats and it turns out that by far my most popular post was one in which I talked at length about the strange fact that whales are dinosaurs are always compared to buses. Unsurprisingly, these musings were unrelated to the picture of the day, which was of a flower. I'm sure that all the people wanting to find out how many buses equals a humpback whale were wildly disappointed when they discovered my blog is almost solely comprised of photographs of flowers, but at least this knowledge has somewhat strengthened my resolve to continue writing about random bits and bobs. Because it's interesting to find what people find interesting.

And so. I have been racking my brains. After my recent post about pandas, I was trying to think of something else to discuss. And then it hit me. Flower. Flour. What's going on there?

Flower vs. Flour

As it turns out, there are multiple companies whose names were inspired by these homophones. Predictably, they are bakers (I nearly said "cakists". But obviously that's not actually a word. Although possibly it should be, to distinguish between those who waste their time making bread, and those who concentrate on delicious, delicious cake).

Those who have trouble spelling will no doubt be delighted to learn that originally, the words "flour" and "flower" were spelled the same way. They both apparently derive from the Old French word fleur, which meant both "flower" in its modern sense, and also had a sense of "the finest", as in the finest part of the meal. The meal as in the ground-up grains, not the meal as in lunch dinner breakfast. Etymology is baffling. Apparently Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary did not recognise a difference in spelling between the two words, but by the 1830s there had, presumably, been a few incidents of unwary cooks feeding their families cakes made out of the shrubbery, and the whole mess was gradually straightened out.

I've not seen anything to support/prove this in any of the etymologies I've found, but based on my research (coughgooglingcough) I wondered whether the eventual clarification of the two words had something to do with the city of Rochester, New York; in the 1820s the town developed a famous and booming flour mill industry and then in the 1830s it also gained a renowned and thriving seed-selling business. Perhaps the residents of Rochester found it especially important to differentiate between flour and flowers; certainly the town's nickname is given initially as the Flour City and, later, the Flower City. Given how neatly the dates line up, I'm surprised I haven't been able to find anything linking the town to wider acceptance of the two spellings. Rochester, you're missing a trick.