star-glazers.
[T]hose who cut the panes out of shopwindows.
—Henry Mayhew, from an analysis of the London underworld in London Labor and the London Poor, 1862; quoted by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
snow gatherers.
[T]hose who steal clean clothes off the hedges.
—Henry Mayhew, from an analysis of the London underworld in London Labor and the London Poor, 1862; quoted by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
The black-spice racket
“The black-spice racket consisted of stealing bags of soot from sweeps. . . .”
—Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
a purple dromedary
“O all the myriad kinds of thief [in 19th century London] . . . the most dextrous were the files and buzz-gloaks, or pickpockets. . . . A pupil with no talent for this was scorned as a purple dromedary.”
—Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
his red shirt
“Even 25 lashes (known as a tester . . . ) was a draconic torture, able to skin a man’s back and leave it a tangled web of criss-crossed knotted scars. . . .
The scarred back became an emblem of rank. So did silence. Convicts called a man who blubbered and screamed at the triangles a crawler or a sandstone. (Sandstone is a common rock around Sydney; it is soft and crumbles easily.) By contrast, the convict who stood up to it in silence was admired as a pebble or an iron man. He would show his shapes (strip for punishment) with disdain, and after the domino (last lash) he would spit at the feet of the man who gave him his red shirt. There were always more sandstones than pebbles.”
—Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
a dark cloud
“And always, everywhere on the expanding limits of settlement, the Aborigine was seen as a mere native pest, like a dingo or kangaroo. He was a myall, a murky, a boong or (in a phrase that precisely expressed the whites’ belief in his inevitable passing) a dark cloud.”
—Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
Why do some chickens lay brown eggs and others lay white eggs?
The color of eggs comes exclusively from the pigment in the outer layer of the shell and may range from an almost pure white to a deep brown, with many shades in between. The only determinant of egg color is the breed of the chicken. . . .
A simple test to determine the color of a hen’s eggs is to look at her earlobes. If the earlobes are white, the hen will lay white eggs. If the earlobes are red, she will produce brown eggs.
—David Feldman, from Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? and other Imponderables, 1988.
Why is seawater blue and tap water clear? Why does the color of the ocean range from blue to red?
White light consists of all the primary and secondary colors in the spectrum. Each color is distinguished by the degree to which it scatters and absorbs light. When sunlight hits seawater, part of it is absorbed while the rest is scattered in all directions after colliding with water molecules.
When sunlight hits clear water, red and infrared light absorb rapidly, and blue the least easily. According to Curtiss O. Davis . . . ‘only blue-green light can be transmitted into, scattered and then transmitted back out of the water without being absorbed.’ By the time the light has reached ten fathoms deep, most of the red has been absorbed.
Why doesn’t tap water appear blue? Curtiss continues: ‘To see this blue effect, the water must be on the order of ten feet deep or deeper. In a glass there is not enough water to absorb much light, not even the red; consequently, the water appears clear.’
Thus if clear water is of a depth of more than ten feet, it is likely to appear blue in the sunlight. How can we explain green and red oceans’
Both are the result not of the optical qualities of sunlight but of the presence of assorted gook in the water itself. A green sea is the combination of the natural blue color with yellow substances in the ocean—humic acids, suspended debris, and living organisms. Red water (usually in coastal areas) is created by an abundance of algae or plankton near the surface of the water. In open waters, comparatively free from debris and the environmental effects of humans, the ocean usually appears to be blue.
—David Feldman, from Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? and other Imponderables, 1988.
rainbow jellies
“Go where the branching coral hives
Unending strife of endless lives,
Where, leagued about the ’wildered boat,
The rainbow jellies fill and float;
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The starfish trips on all her fingers;”
—Rudyard Kipling, from The Palms, the poem which opens A Matter of Fact.
the great god Krishna
“‘They prayed, an’ the butter-fires blazed up an’ the incense turned everything blue, an’ between that an’ the fires the women looked as tho’ they were all ablaze an’ twinklin’. . . . The women were rockin’ in rows, their di‘mond belts clickin‘, and the tears runnin’ out betune their hands, an’ the lights were goin’ lower an’ dharker. Thin there was a blaze like lightnin’ from the roof, and that showed me the inside av the palanquin, an’ at the end where my foot was, stood the livin’ spit an’ image o’ mysilf worked on the linin’. This man here, ut was.’
He hunted into the folds of his pink cloak, ran hand under one, and thrust into the firelight a foot-long embroidered presentment of the great god Krishna, playing on a flute. The heavy jowl, the staring eye, and the blue-black moustache of the god made up a far-off resemblance to Mulvaney.”
—Rudyard Kipling, The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney.