There was an item on the news this morning about, believe it or not, hippos in a gravel-pit in Norfolk. Not right now of course, but apparently around 750000 years ago ice-age Norfolk was home to these big buggers, twice the size of today's hippos. Which is one big fucking hippo. The scientist being interviewed said the technique used to determine the age of the bones they'd found was "Palaeo-Magnetic Dating", which gave me a brief Larsonesque vision of little fur-clad blokes with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a big club in the other, but I'm determined not to take that one any further. He also said that the bones hadn't moved very far after the hippos' death, which didn't really surprise me. I shouldn't think they were exactly light on their feet when they were alive; they're hardly likely to have done much scampering about when deceased. (Okay, I know he was probably thinking about tectonic plates wiggling about or some other kind of scientist stuff.)
Norfolk has always struck me as a weird kind of place. There seems to be something about England's flat bits (Norfolk, Lincolnshire, the Cambridgeshire Fens) that produces people who could move to rural Kentucky and blend in pretty seamlessly apart from the odd "Uhhhhhh, you guys talk real funny." comment. Maybe they're genetically predisposed to agoraphobia, and the fact that you can stand on a phonebook and see the whole county drives them nuts.
The last time I was there I had what politicians call "a frank exchange of views" with someone who not only believed that shooting burglars was fine as long as you remembered to feed the bodies to the pigs, but that the Saudis have the right idea, and it it "isn't brutal any more because they don't actually chop the hands off now, they just cut the tendons" so that they have these things flopping around like gloves hanging from a child's coatsleeves. I shut up after a while. I just had this feeling that I wouldn't have been the first visitor whose fancy ideas had caused him to end up inside a sausage.
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2 comments:
So, as we scientists have determined, the bigger and slower the creature the flatter the land... which came first?
It's odd that you should mention Kentucky. The early European settlers for the Kentucky area actually were predominantly from Britain. Whereas places like Iowa have a strong German culture (during WWII, the German POWs held in Iowan camps were often taken into town for a beer and dancing), many southern states where settled pretty much by English folks.
LibertyBob
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