A cure for forbidden love

"If you are enchanted by forbidden love of a woman, you must put on a pair of shoes and walk about until the feet sweat. But walk quickly, so quickly that the feet do not begin to smell. Remove then the right shoe and drink from it some ale or wine, and at once all love for her will be lost."

I found that remedy in Olga Ravn's The Wax Child, which has been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.  I'll review the book when I finish reading, but thought I'd post this tidbit now, in case any readers are having relevant problems.  Sounds like it might work...

Rat kings, squirrel kings - and their relation to a Christmas tradition

"Rat kings are cryptozoological phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, and excrement. The animals consequently grow together while joined at the tails, which are often broken. The phenomenon is particularly associated with Germany, where the majority of instances have been reported...

Most researchers presume the creatures are legendary and that all supposed physical evidence is hoaxed, such as mummified groups of dead rats with their tails tied together. Reports of living specimens remain unsubstantiated…

Specimens of purported rat kings are kept in some museums. The museum Mauritianum in Altenburg (Thuringia) shows the largest well-known mummified "rat king", which was found in 1828 in a miller's fireplace at Buchheim [above]. It consists of 32 rats. Alcohol-preserved rat kings are shown in museums in Hamburg, Hamelin, Göttingen, and Stuttgart. A rat king found in 1930 in New Zealand, displayed in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, was composed of immature Rattus rattus whose tails were entangled by horse hair.

The term rat king has often led to the misconception of a king of rats... The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, adapts a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann that features a seven-headed Mouse King as the villain..."

Image and text from Wikipedia. Credit to Neatorama.

Addendum #1:  Reposted to add this example of a "squirrel king" -

The Animal Clinic of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, got a surprise this week when a city worker brought in six squirrels fused together by their tails...

This particular group of six were nesting near a pine tree and sap fused their tails together. A city of Regina worker found the young squirrels and brought them to the clinic. The animals were sedated and the veterinarian team worked to untangle the mess of tails. Their tails were then shaved of the matted fur and they were given antibiotics to prevent infection.  (Via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

Addendum #2:  Reposted in order to add this related interesting phenomenon found by my wife at the Buck Manager website:

[T]hese three white-tailed bucks were found locked during the rut. The bucks were located on a ranch in east-central Texas and, from the information that I received, one of the bucks was still alive when the trio was found. Apparently, the antlers were cut from the dead deer and one very tired buck was lucky enough to run back off into the woods.

There are lots of comments at the site, some opining that the event was faked and arguing the method of death, and one who reported seeing a buck attack a pair that was already locked.   My wife found another example at the same website:

 "...there is nothing worse than finding a dead buck that you did not shoot, but how would you feel if you found not one, but three dead bucks on your property? Okay, it gets worse. What if those three bucks totaled 450 inches of antler? That is exactly what a hunter in the mid-West found on his Ohio farm..."

"They had the bank of this creek all tore up."

Addendum #3: And reader Lisa knew of a ancient example of the phenomenon involving Ice Age mammoths.

Addendum #4:  Reposted from 2013 to add this image found by an anonymous reader -

- of a squirrel king in Nebraska, with the victims, as in the example cited above, fused at their tails by pine tree sap.

Addendum #5:  Reposted yet again to add this "squirrel king" found locally here in central Wisconsin:

Their tails had become entwined with "long-stemmed grasses and strips of plastic their mother used as nest material," the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center wrote on Facebook... "It was impossible to tell whose tail was whose, and we were increasingly concerned because all of them had suffered from varying degrees of tissue damage to their tails caused by circulatory impairment," the post read.

See also: A squirrel king, which has this explanatory note -

In the wild, squirrels make their nests of dried leaves and branches...  A strange natural accident that sometimes occurs is sap from pine branches that the nest is constructed of can adhere to the squirrels' tails and ultimately to each other's tails. Squirrels normally have litters of 4 to 6 babies. As they are fed in the nest, they are quite "squirmy" and move around frequently. Once their tails become stuck together, movement is limited amongst them and they jump under and over each other trying to reposition themselves. In the process, they literally knot or braid themselves together. The squirrels pull in many directions, thereby worsening the situation. They can actually live quite a long time like this, as the mother continues to feed them.

Reposted yet again, to add some information from a Longread article "All Hail the Rat King" -

The Thuringian town of Altenburg houses perhaps the most spectacular exemplar. A mad bramble of no fewer than 32 rats sits mounted on a plexiglass pane in the entrance hall of the Mauritianum, the town’s small natural history museum. It was found in a village not too far away, in a warm space underneath a chimney...

The first visual representation of a rat king is in Johannes Sambucus’s Emblemata, from 1564, a collection of moral truths “wrapped up in certain figures.” Sambucus introduced the rat king as both natural phenomenon and symbol, and a sense that its sheer bizarreness has something to tell us has never gone away...

Some have considered the joke to be literal: as old as the discovery of rat kings is the suspicion that they cannot possibly be real. “We present it as a natural phenomenon,” says one of the curators in Strasbourg. “If someone made it a sport to tie rat tails together, it would be a major effort, unless you have steel mesh gloves.” The rat king is just as inexplicable when you think it’s a fake as it is when you assume it’s authentic...

One element that stays mysteriously stable across the centuries is rat kings’ geographic spread: the history of the rat king is uncannily, at times uncomfortably entwined with the history of Germany. Rattus rattus exists across the globe: it spread across Europe and North Africa with the Romans, then across the rest of the globe with European colonizers. And yet rat kings come from a curiously limited area. All but one of the specimens preserved today are from Western and Central Europe. Marten t’ Hart notes that “from 1564 to 1963, fifty-seven rat kings were discovered and described.” The vast majority of those discoveries took place in areas that make up present-day Germany.  This curious geographic concentration has led some researchers to suggest that rat kings are cultural, rather than natural phenomena. More bluntly put, they could be elaborate, centuries-old hoaxes...

In 1816, two years before Arndt published “Rat King Birlibi,” E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote Nutcracker and Mouseking, which inspired (via Alexandre Dumas père) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s inescapable ballet.

If you watch The Nutcracker today, the mouse king has gone missing several times over. He has disappeared from the title, only shows up in one of the acts as the leader of an evil army of mice, and goes through a busy and less-than-iconic mass scene before exiting the stage as Masha explores the Land of Sweets with her nutcracker-cum-prince. But Hoffmann’s rendition not only lavishes a great deal of attention on the army of mice and their vicious battle with the nutcracker’s tin soldiers, but also makes it clear that the mouse king is a close relative of the rat king. This is how we first meet the monarch:

Seven mouse heads with seven shiny crowns rose, hissing and whistling dreadfully, rose out of the ground. Soon after the mouse body to which these seven heads were attached emerged fully, and three times the entire army squeaked in triumph at the great mouse garlanded with seven diadems…

So, just in time for Christmas - a new way to interpret the "Nutcracker." My next step was to search Google Images for Rat Kings in the Nutcracker.  Most of them are benign and cuddly.  At NPR I found Maurice Sendak's version -

- which has a certain menace to it, but this one at Deviant Art was the best:

Your choice how much of this to share with your impressionable children before taking the family to a Nutcracker performance at your local school or concert hall.

Merry Christmas to all !!

Reposted from 2019 to add this image of "rat king dumplings" -

- which you can read about in John Farrier's post at Neatorama.

"What a wonderful world" (David Attenborough)

My rule of thumb: if it's a David Attenborough video, it's worth blogging.

BTW, if you've never used the "fullscreen" button on a YouTube video [lower right corner], now would be a good time to try it...

Here's a background on the lyrics:

"What a Wonderful World" is a song written by Bob Thiele (as "George Douglas") and George David Weiss. It was first recorded by Louis Armstrong and released as a single in 1967...

The song gradually became something of a standard and reached a new level of popularity. In 1978, Armstrong's 1968 recording was featured in the closing scenes of the first series of BBC radio's cult hit, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and was repeated for BBC's 1981 TV series of the same. In 1988, Armstrong's recording was featured in the film Good Morning, Vietnam and was re-released as a single, hitting #32 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in February 1988. The single charted at number one for the fortnight ending June 27, 1988 on the Australian chart

Via truthdig.

Reposted from 2012 (!) to insert the Louis Armstrong version:

Reposted again in honor of David Attenborough's 100th birthday.

Can you find the missing seven states in this map?

Take your time pondering this clever map from xkcd.  When you give up, there is a link to the answer at the Kottke via.  (New England is o.k.)  I thought six of them were easy, but the seventh was hard.

Anne Boleyn's hands and fingers

Anne Boleyn’s Hever “Rose” portrait is one of history’s most iconic faces, with her “B” pendant, her French hood, her dark eyes and a red rose in her right hand... Scientific analysis of the painting at Hever Castle, her childhood home in Kent, has uncovered evidence that an Elizabethan artist sought to create a “visual rebuttal” to claims that Henry VIII’s ill-fated wife was a witch with a sixth finger on her right hand...

In her 2025 book, The Many Faces of Anne Boleyn, Helene Harrison suggested that Anne’s hands were prominently displayed in the Hever Rose portrait to counter claims by Nicholas Sanders, a 16th-century writer and activist, who campaigned for the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England. He sought to undermine Elizabeth I’s legitimacy, writing that Anne had “on her right hand six fingers”. On being told of the new evidence, Harrison said it was amazing to find that the analysis supported her theory.

Kate McCaffrey, who is also an assistant curator at Hever, said: “It’s really thrilling. This is very strong evidence of a visual rebuttal of a very specific myth of witchcraft and six fingers, which is really quite extraordinary. The scientific analysis extends this to a very specific political moment in time.

“It’s Elizabeth’s way of not only reclaiming her own legitimacy and lineage, but also restoring the legitimacy of her mother. It’s impossible to say that Elizabeth herself commissioned this portrait, but it certainly seems too much of a coincidence for it not to be in response to rumours that were circulating at this time.”

Additional discussion at The Guardian.

Undersea data cables as wartime leverage

The United States has been learning some unpleasant realities about "asymmetric warfare" in which the country with the most bombers and aircraft carriers is not necessarily a guaranteed winner.

The embed above comes from an article last week in Reuters, which begins by discussing accidental damage during wartime -

"In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintentional damage increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the higher the likelihood of unintentional damage," Kotkin said. A similar incident occurred in 2024, when a commercial vessel attacked by Iran-aligned Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.

- and then the difficulties of repairing during wartime, and the impossibility of switching to satellites:

"It's not as though you could just switch to satellite. That's not an alternative," Mauldin said, noting that ​satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.  Low-Earth-orbit networks such as Starlink are "a boutique solution, which is not scalable to millions of users, at this time," Kotkin added.

But it's an article in The Eurasian Times that more directly speaks to the possibility of aggressive attacks on undersea cables -

Iran sits on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz and controls long stretches of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. These waters host all the major cable routes that link Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. This geography gives Tehran physical access to infrastructure on which the world economy depends.

In fact, disrupting undersea cables is a low-cost, high-impact option that can cause global disruption without a direct missile strike. A damaged cable in the Gulf can slow internet traffic from Mumbai to Frankfurt within minutes, delay international banking settlements, and degrade cloud services used by hospitals, airlines, and power grids.

Significantly, it could also cripple military communications for US CENTCOM, and regional partners would be forced to rely on backup satellites with limited bandwidth.

But the situation in the Middle East is such that people are not even talking about overt operations to damage the undersea cable networks on the seabed. They are apprehensive that Iran will resort to doing so openly, which it has the capacity to do, aided by its geography. This additional maritime disruption will only add to its strategic leverage against not only the Gulf countries but also America.

But for an in-your-face salty appraisal of the potential, read the post in the "I Fucking Love Australia" substack of April 26:

A few days ago, Tasnim, the IRGC’s tame mouthpiece, published what looked like a harmless technical explainer. Maps of undersea internet cables. Locations of cloud infrastructure. Landing stations in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. A polite little observation that the southern Gulf relies on these routes far more heavily than Iran does. No podium. No death to America chant. No uniformed general doing the finger wag. Just a map. Because when you have already put drones through 3 AWS data centres and an Oracle facility, you do not need to threaten anything out loud. You publish the coordinates. You let the insurance market translate for you. You let the CEOs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh shit their expensive trousers in private. That is how grown-ups signal escalation, and it is a mode of communication that requires a functional prefrontal cortex to receive, which is why the sunburnt Big Mac wrapper in the Oval Office has completely missed it.

So let me lay out who actually holds the cards in this pissing contest, because if you have been listening to the cable news lizards you could be forgiven for thinking it is the side with the aircraft carriers.

It is not.

Iran’s internet runs overland. Turkey to the north, the Caucasus to the northwest. If every single submarine cable in the Persian Gulf gets severed tomorrow morning, Tehran checks its email over lunch without noticing. The southern Gulf, by contrast, is a data peninsula. UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait. Every banking transaction, every AI cloud workload, every ride-share app, every oil trade settlement, every fucking everything gets to the rest of the world through a handful of fibre bundles running through one of the most contested bodies of water on the planet. 99 percent of international internet traffic travels over submarine cables. The Red Sea corridor is already effectively closed because the Houthis have made it a no-go zone for repair vessels. The Gulf corridor is now being mapped by the people who just put drones into Amazon’s racks. That leaves the entire southern Gulf with precisely 0 safe options for getting their data to Europe, to India, to Africa, to anywhere.

And here is the kicker. The cables do not need to be bombed. They do not need missiles. They do not need a full IRGC naval sortie. They need a fishing trawler dragging an anchor in the wrong place..."

Do not rely on my excerpts from sources.  Do your own research, make your own conclusions.

Time to start thinking about global oil reserves - updated

I'm embedding a graphic I found in a May 2 Facebook post by Christian Decle (who apparently is a "digital creator.")  It's a slightly blurry probable screencap of a report from J.P. Morgan written by Natasha Kaneva last week.  I tried to track the original and found her on various J.P. Morgan web pages, but haven't seen the original report, which may have been distributed privately to clients.  

I've added two annotations of my own.  The first is a red arrow noting the point in the graph where the global oil inventory changes from current to projected future, extrapolated on the downward slope for the last couple months, and assuming the global drawdown stays unchanged at 5.5 million barrels per day (second annotation, circled).  I inserted the arrow because the color change from purple to green is subtle, and I wanted to note that the curent level is not critical - it is about the same as ten-year averages - but the steepness of the recent fall reflects an unprecedented severity of disruption and will quickly become critical if it continues.

This topic has been discussed repeatedly on the Bloomberg business televaion channel by hosts interviewing various specialists in business and economics.  Everyone wants to know what is going to happen, and there are a lot of assumptions that need to be made.

The author of the Facebook post concludes by saying "The UK has a fuel reserve buffer — measured in days."  I have no idea whether that is true.

But it is true that after Trump made the yet-unproven claim that the U.S. was escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran did launch some drone or missile attacks on the U.A.E., which damaged a refinery and threatens the U.A.E.'s route of bypassing the Strait via a pipeline to the Indian Ocean.  Brent crude is now back at highs, and no resolution is in sight.  

Addendum:  This update posted yesterday in the Financial Times:

Global oil reserves plunged at a record pace in April, as the conflict in the Middle East strains supplies and raises the risk of a further sharp jump in prices ahead of the summer travel season.

Stockpiles of crude fell by nearly 200mn barrels, or 6.6mn barrels a day, estimated S&P Global Energy, even as higher prices triggered a collapse in demand of about 5mn b/d, the sharpest ever fall outside of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“This is massive, it is far above the usual range,” said Jim Burkhard, head of crude research at S&P, adding that in a normal month, global stocks fluctuate by between a few hundred thousand and a million barrels. “An inevitable market reckoning is coming,” he said...

Despite average pump prices nearing $4.50 a gallon, US drivers have yet to significantly curb consumption, according to Morgan Stanley. The bank estimates that one in every 11 barrels of oil is used by American motorists and forecasts that US inventories could fall below 200mn barrels by the end of August, the equivalent of roughly one week of demand...

He said a sharp drop in US stockpiles could be the trigger for wider alarm. “The worst of the crisis is ahead of us,” he said.

Note the drawdown of reserves is not decreasing, even despite some demand destruction.  This morning American equity market futures are trending up, based on anticipated rising earnings from the controversial AI sector and on the assertion from Trump that there are hopes for "a deal", when what he wants is total surrender by Iran of their nuclear material and their sovereignty, and what they want is retention of the enriched uranium plus control of the Strait plus reparations for damages incurred to date.  A "compromise" between those two viewpoints is an utter fantasy.  I have to add the mandatory "IMHO", so do your own research.

Addendum:  Here is an updated (May 9) detailed discussion of world oil reserves.

A brilliant turn of phrase

"A beleaguered grunt from the other room interrupts him.  Moments later, a teenage boy lopes out... Without a glance at Cameron, the boy holds up a cereal box and moans, 'Mom!  We're outta Cheerios."...

A look of surprise crosses Avery's face, then she inhales stiffly... "Marco, hon, what do we do when we're out of Cheerios?"

Marco rolls his eyes.  "The list."

"Right.  We add it to the shopping list," she says, her tone pointed  "I'm sure you'll find something else to eat in the meantime."

Marco mutters, "We're out of chips, too."

"Oh, the humanity," Avery says dryly.  "Look I'll try to get to the grocery store later..."

-  excerpted from Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt.

Very seldom do I actually laugh out loud when reading a book, but the mother's phrase of exasperation with her teen's complaint was truly chuckleworthy.  In the past, when confronted with such a situation, my response probably would have been to say (or at least think) "First World Problem."  But this response is better.

Relevant reference (0:40)

"Remarkably Bright Creatures"

Enjoyed the book and am looking forward to the movier.  Here is the New York Times review of the book back in 2023.   The movie drops on Netflix on May 8.

A glimpse of the future of AI-produced movies

Absolutely amazing.  Imagine being a human actor viewing this and wondering what your future holds re 

employment.  Imagine what fake celebrity porn must look like now.  Imagine how unsophisticated viewers can now be duped into believing false realities re their political leaders.  Imagine being able to create one of your own using generative AI...

Addendum:  I'm now seeing a "Video Unavailable" message in place of the video.  I'll see if I can find a workaround for the embed.  In the meantime, you can view it at this Reddit thread.  And if that disappears, try Googling "The AI movie Pi Hard shows Neil deGrasse Tyson teaming up with Sam Bankman-Fried to stop an evil Stephen Hawking from destroying the multiverse by dividing by zero. Bill Gates is a robot and Elon Musk is panicking."

Just found this on YouTube.  Don't know if it will stay up...  I gotta go do yard and garden chores.

The role of rare earths in future wars

Interesting development re AI in Chinese court system

Screencap from moments ago (Sunday May 3) on Bloomberg's The China Show.  The case was brought by a tech worker in Eastern China (Hangzhou) whose job was to evaluate the efficiency of large language models.  The company used AI to replace him.  He sued, and on April 28 the court ruled in his favor, saying that workers can be laid off because of external influences [presumably bad sales etc], but not if the company develops or purchases software to replace the employee.  

I wonder how American courts will rule when this (inevitably) arises.

Public service announcement

Viewers at Neatorama are advised by Miss Cellania that this brief video is a public service announcement, so I was alert to the possibility, but didn't figure out the message until the 3:40 mark.  I'm reposting it not so much for the message as for the artwork, which I find very appealing - especially the styling of the willow tree by the pond.

Huge losses by the U.S. in its war on Iran

I found a CNN video report on this matter, posted yesterday.  I've seen similar reports at Al Jazeera English and other miscellaneous sites; this seems to be the first one released on mainstream US media.

"Blind Faith" - a new Banksy

Cleverly conceived, and well-executed.  Not apparent from this view is that the subject's front foot is going to lead to him fallling off the plinth.

Addendum:  Side view of the statue stepping off its plinth -

- cropped for emphasis from the original posted at the BBC.  Hat tip to a reader for sending me the link.

One more.  The best view, via Kottke: