‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’
-Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher
fuck OFF
Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.
So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.
every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing
This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
It was an actual, TINY bear. Just. like a babbeh polar bear.
Ninja Update: Wanna see something fun? Mention Shakespeare in a sentence and see what happens.
Poe kept writing distinctly into my sentences so I wrote ”Edgar, you’re not funny” aND HE BLATANTLY DELETED THE NOT I AM SO DONE WITH THIS ASDFKJL
OH GOD IF YOU TYPE “EDGAR ALLAN POE” POE ADDS A :( AFTER HIS NAME PRECIOUS BABY
Oh my God so I typed ‘Shakespeare’ and Shakespeare butted in and wrote ‘The lovely and handsome Shakespeare’ but Poe burst in saying ‘The dreadful and lonely Shakespeare’.
aND FYODOR DOSTOYVESKY ADDED ‘ I do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners.”
I’M DONE.
Look what they did to All Star by Smash Mouth
“Somebody once hushedly told me the world is going to roll me. I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of glocky with her finger and her thumb in the shape of a “L” on her forehead. Well, the years start voraciously coming and they don’t stop coming; fed to the rules and I hit the ground running. It didn’t make sense absolutely to live for fun. Thy brain gets smart but your head gets dumb. So much to do, so much to behold. So what’s wrong with taking the back busy thoroughfares? In everything one thing is impossible: rationality. You’ll never know if thou don’t go. “You’ll never shine if you don’t glow”, he growled incoherently. Hey presently, you’re an All Star. Get your game on; go play. Hey now, you’re a Rock Star. Get the show on; get laid. As well as all that glitters is gold, only shooting stars break the mold. ~All Star by Smash Estuary of opinion…”
Imagine putting your research paper in here and letting them go at it.
OH MY GOD I WAS WRITING AND EDGAR WOULDN’T STOP FIXING THINGS SO I WROTE “Edgar shut up I’m trying to write” and he changed it to “Edgar shut up I’m meagerly attempting to write” THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE
I typed in “Hello” and Shakesphere erased it and wrote “Begone with this rubbish.”
HOW R00d
I typed “party in the Usa” and Poe changed party to “ill-fated gathering”
I just used it to yell at Dickens about Tale of Two Cities, I am happy now
I typed in ‘hello other writers’ and Edgar Allen Poe changed it to ‘Hello secondary writers’
After I had been writing for a while Edgar suddenly deleted my last sentence and wrote “THE END.” rude son of a bitch
I have to try this.
Rebageled again but to add if the link above doesn’t work, try this one instead.
@simonalkenmayer a new toy for you. I expect an entire book written like this! My apologies to your editor.
Interesting.
Oooo! Try to retype one of your short stories in and see what happens!
I’m not certain I want to know…given what I know about Shakespeare. The first production of Hamlet…in particular.
Hamlet, you say…
Shakespeare himself made the first “correction” before I’d hardly started and Poe cut me off long before I was done. Rude the whole lot of them.
do you guys think that queen breha organa, dukesa of house antilles, prinsesa of aldera, jewel of the core, exiled from court the first (the only) minister to refer to leia as “not her daughter”
because I definitely think that happened, and everyone in the beautiful pearl-silvered city of aldera has heard the story of his total and abect disgrace, and no one since has dared refer to leia as anything but the daughter of queen breha organa, dukesa of house antilles, prinsesa of aldera, jewel of the core—
even legislation isn’t referred to as “adopted” anymore.
…..most of alderaan probably thought leia was a jedi anyway.
I mean, one minute the viceroy is a lauded senator and alderaan’s queen is childless, and the jedi are heroes, fighting a noble war against the separatists. Then suddenly the chancellor emperor is declaring that the jedi had to be cleansed, and senator organa slinks back to alderaan in unexplained semi-disgrace, and the queen has an infant daughter who is just Way Too Pale to be either bail or breha’s natural-born child
“an orphan,” the queen and viceroy of alderaan tell absolutely everyone.
“a jedi orphan,” absolutely everyone replies. “saved from the destruction of the jedi temple. where the jedi lived.”
“no no, just a regular normal orphan with nothing force-sensitive about her! what a silly idea, our daughter being a powerful jedi. are we even sure jedi really existed? emperor palpatine makes some good points, about them never having existed.“
“we literally have 700 hours of holonews footage that’s just viceroy organa hanging out on the warfront with a bunch of jedi.”
“I don’t recall that,” bail says cheerfully. “and neither does my daughter, who is force-sensitive as a box of bricks.”
(leia is eight when she dreams of her father in the war. he is holding a sword of fire, and he breathes too loudly, harsh in her ears—she is scared, and so she reaches for him, seeking comfort,and suddenly he turns on her. he is shadow and death and that awful sword of fire, not her father at all, and he says in a breath of smoke, who—?
she wakes up to her father’s arms, real and warm, cradling her to his chest. it was only a nightmare, bail says, as she cries. shh, it wasn’t real.)
”on alderaan, they say she was an orphan rescued from the destruction of the jedi temple,” general tarkin says. “that she is a jedi too.” the footage is grainy, but tarkin can make out the shape of her well enough, the princess throwing herself against the cell door. such dramatics.
“impossible,” darth vader says from beside tarkin. the vocoder makes it hard to read his tone. “I killed every child that breathed.”
