Jacopo del Sellaio's "Plain-clothes John the Baptist in stand-by mode" (1480). Although it is unlikely that John the Baptist ever set foot in Tuscany, the painter preferred a background of Florentine landmarks to other places that John had probably never visited such as Walt Disney World, Florida, or Eggborough power station, North Yorkshire.
 

Jacquemart de Hesdin's "Fool" (1386) gets his name from his failure to envisage forthcoming paradigm shifts in the jester accessory sector and to cash in on his mock sceptre's potential as a 7-iron 

erithacus' saga: up in the world

That no longer mattered as another opportunity had arisen; one that very much suited my JobCentre-database client profile. I was bound for the world of logistics and warehousing and a non-tie wearing career in the Vanguard Fashions loading and unloading department. My first job was Cardboard Man (or Box Manager) that consisted in folding up the empty cardboard boxes from which the imported clothes that arrived in the warehouse had been taken. Vanguard Fashions had formerly produced its own garments but a new generation of managers had discovered it was more profitable to import garments manufactured in the Far East by children in sweatshops. The company could therefore get rid of staff and reduce costs, not get their hands dirty and spend time on important strategic business and marketing activities such as building brands, enhancing brand images and equity and providing customers with added value. Company sponsorship schemes even included a Vanguard Fashions university chair in brand management, the professor of which was a director on the Vanguard Fashions board.

Hans Burgkmair's "Madonna with Grape" (1510) or "Madonna successfully uses Pavlovian nipple/grape substitution technique
to assuage page-ruffling, middle-aged looking child's tyrannical craving for attunement at the breast"
 

Monastic neurosurgeon and in cognito convalescent look on as Sister Dot expertly performs a delicate whiskerectomy operation prior to the insertion of a wimple prosthesis 

erithacus' saga: occupational ties

This routine went on for a week. Then I gave the job up. Termination of contract was both the result of the hotel insisting I should use my future earnings to pay for the black bow tie and white shirt they required me to wear, and because I had found a more appealing employment opportunity. The bar manager, Mr Wilmslow, did not understand my objection to paying for my own bow tie. “Everyone else has to” he argued to support his case.

Faced with the prospect of a long, costly and energy-eroding legal battle I bowed to Mr Wilmslow’s infallible logic and we eventually reached an out-of-court settlement whereby the hotel would hang on to the white shirt (upon which the “Wayfarer’s Hotel” logo was delicately embroidered in Marine blue) and I would get to keep the black bow tie, which I would be able to use “whenever and wherever I liked”.

Business ideas that changed the world: to prevent embarrassing repetitions of Popess Joan's sneaky imposture as Pope John VIII in 855, all ambitious clergy are strongly advised to get a Pont-o-genita-check-a-matic (featured above). The pontiff-elect is simply required to sit underwearless on any horseshoe-shaped seat while a junior deacon slides under the chair on this easy-to-use, fuss-free unit. Upon verification that the would-be Pope is indeed male he shouts either "testiculos habet!" or "It'll be ready on Friday".
 

erithacus' saga: hunter-gatherer turns wage earner

A diet of woodlice and nettles soon began to lose its appeal. I needed to improve my station and to do so would require involvement in economics and relationships with my own species. In other words I would have to find some way of getting money.

So I strolled into the JobCentre (formerly the employment exchange – “I’ll swap you encyclopaedia sales for plastic dinosaur quality control”) and walked out as barman in the Regency Bar of the Wayfarer’s Hotel. The hotel was 1960s brick affair that bore no resemblance to Ye Olde travellers’ inn. Its bar was as cold and uninviting on the inside as the hotel’s external architecture suggested. It had a stained lilac, malt-vinegar effervescent, semi-shag pile airport-lounge carpet and was frequented by very few guests or drinkers. Easy-listening music accompanied the lounge’s inhabitants as they aged. There were only two regulars, an old man and his wife, or an old woman and her husband. I assumed they were woman and husband because of their lack of complicity. Their daily routine involved entering the bar at around half past six, after they had finished their dinner. The man would come to the bar while his wife took her seat in the corner. He asked for a lemonade for her and a small beer for himself. He quickly drained the beer, gasped, took a shifty glance at his wife to make sure she wasn’t looking, and then told me to serve him another, putting his finger to his lips to assure himself of my silent complicity at his daredevil act in defiance of female oppression. Despite the semblance of futility in this non-interactive routine, it would prove a useful stepping stone to more complex future relationships.

Saint George's come-uppance: Komodo dragons have a strong bite, the severity of which is increased by severe infection of wounds, caused by some 50 different strains of bacteria in their saliva. Like Mormons in Salt Lake City, who are resistant to conversion by their own kind, Komodo dragons are themselves immune to bacterial infection from bites from other dragons. 

erithacus' saga: unsnagging flaccid skin from bramble thorns

I set about making my residence homely. Privacy was no problem: the garden around the shed had not been tended for years. It was winter and the undergrowth was not rampant enough to obstruct the shed’s only entrance but it was thick enough for intrusion-free toileting (unless would-be snoopers were equipped with infra-red gear or industrial X-ray equipment, a possibility I tended to disregard). I bathed and washed my wardrobe in a dense thicket of Rubus fructicosus and Urtica dioica, sheltered by Sistine chapel-like cupola structure made from a couple of fertiliser bags. This would protect me from blizzards in winter and the biting wind and rain of the hot season. Showers required heating a metal watering can, half-full of water taken from the rain barrel. I would rinse my body with cold water from a large paint can. Sometimes I would treat myself to a shower in a local sports centre in which I managed to sneak using a membership card of a young executive-looking type that I had found in a puddle on the pavement.

Medieval Dutch folklore held that the removal of a stone from the head would cure urges to lead battalions or direct traffic. In the image, Wizard of Oz Tin Man cum monastic brain surgeon extracts what is apparently a tulip, while a nun looks on and balances the instruction manual on her head. 

What the experts say: 'Neither Botticelli's "Chart of Hell" nor GPS enable users to be 100% certain of their real-time whereabouts in the underworld. Would-be sponsored rollerbladers who do lose their way should therefore rule out salvation from the US Calvary and ask the sodomites in the inner ring of Circle 7 or the thieves chased by venomous snakes in Ditch 7 of Circle 8 for directions to the nearest exit'  

Today's thrifty tip for pennywise shoppers: five pounds of new tatties, fresh from React-o-Cat's Santa Maria del Fiore veggie garden.
 

erithacus' saga: sleeping beauty

Eventually, the camp bed was up and on the floor, with only a height difference of 30 centimetres between the two ends. I brushed off the dust, motor oil and slug trails and sat down. Part of the rotten canvas ripped and I fell through on to the floor. To get a horizontal night’s sleep, I’d have to find some way of supporting my body and my head. The Rubens, torn into strips, was just the thing to patch up the canvas. I sat down again and this time it didn’t break.

I was hungry and thirsty but was too tired to collect the water coming in through the roof or to hunt down woodlice. Content to have something vaguely horizontal that was not the floor to lie half my body on, and a cosy ex-fertiliser bag in which to snuggle up, I lay down and managed to doze off.

This miserable-looking individual is Gericault's "Man with delusions of military command", a forerunner to his "Man with an overwhelming need to direct traffic", and contemporary with Goya's "Cada loco con su tema".  

erithacus' saga: a shed called Hurricane Hattie

I should have known before rummaging for an hour and a half that I would never get the lamp to work. Fortunately, there was enough light coming from the upstairs window of a nearby house to turn pitch black darkness into ordinary blackness. A Boer War standard army issue camp bed lay under some musty, rotten damp things that included a pick axe, fork handles a manual lawn mower, a pile of hose pipe and an old oil painting (mmmm, Rubens perhaps?), some rusty tools and a few geraniums with cobwebs on them. I threw everything out and strained to unstick the canvas of the camp bed from the floor.

The bed had obviously not been put up since Rorke's Drift. Even in those days the time taken to set up standard army issue camp beds had probably decided the outcome of many a campaign, if not wars themselves. Luckily, there were enough crowbars and pickaxe tops for me to devise quite an efficient lever system to open up the rusty metal hinges. It was one of those occasions when I considered that not being a chimpanzee was a great stroke of luck. I prised the legs open. Unfortunately, the system of purchase was too efficient and one of the bed’s woodworm-eaten slats crumbled. Vorsprung durch Technik. However, the slat could be fixed with some of the hose pipe I had just thrown out.

erithacus' saga: exclusive, luxury accommodation

I went through a battered door at the side of the house and wandered down the path, trying to see the shed in which I was to sleep. Eventually, I stumbled across what I thought was a wooden structure, hidden by the undergrowth. I slipped on the mud outside, swore and creaked the door open. I walked in, or tried to. Something metal hit my nose. The shed was full of junk so I decided to make some space by chucking things out; a children’s bicycle from the 1950s, a bellows with a hole in it, an old deckchair and several other objects I couldn’t identify.

There seemed to be little difference between the outside and inside temperatures. The only difference was the rain. If I slept outside I was sure to get wet in the rain. If I slept inside, and was somniferously agile enough, I would be able to dodge the drops of water coming in through the roof. There might be something among the junk in the shed to patch up some of the holes. After a great deal of fumbling and rummaging around, I managed to find an old kerosene lamp, having first cut my finger on a rusty scythe.

A big hand for our old sausage-like bacterium friend, the one and only Helicobacter pylori, the only known organism able to thrive in the highly acidic environment of the human stomach. To prove that most stomach ulcers and gastritis were caused by colonisation with this bacterium and not by stress or spicy food, Australian scientist/ restaurateur Barry Marshall drank a test tube of H. pylori, developed gastritis, and treated himself with antibiotics. The proof of the pudding ... 

Bear necessities

That’s not something that nomads can do very easily. Moving from place to place with a collection of LPs or antique teapots is tricky on the back of camel. Not to mention electronic gadgets, mortgages and insurance policies, in-company training, scratch and sniff cards, brainstorming, road rage, “that” Monday morning feeling, shiny brochures, e-tailing, ISO 9001/2 quality certification, pension plans, raspberry ripple ice cream, body building machines, Jacuzzis, quality time, time share houses, the News, cheerleaders, football leagues, Disney, crosswords, TV magicians, out of town do-it-yourself centres, professors of Product Merchandising, commuting to work, January sales, 'adventure' sports, virtual life, leisure time, 24-packs of canned beer, Investment Funds, holiday 'destinations', lotteries and supermarket own brands, the words package and product meaning things that are not wrapped in paper and tied with string and cannot be touched, board games and left shoes displayed outside shoe shops, plastic dinosaurs in cereals packets, video-conferencing, name tags, courtesy buses, theme parks, motorway service stations, management theory, and PIN numbers

One of these balconies looks into the flat where I live and gather useless junk.  

The Gecko's "Biblical superhero gives Mary a few ideas About what to say to Jo" 

There are over ten thousand words in Flemish to express wings made of wax being melted by the sun

Plummeting wax-winged mythical characters were obviously so commonplace that the fellow in the middle doesn't bat an eyelid

Breugel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" or "Landscape with incidental trainee synchronised swimmer doing a ma-gi at a moment in the day when the sun is obviously not at its hottest" 

Giuseppe Fiorelli was the Dearing of the Pompeii excavation from 1863 to 1875. He introduced the use of plaster casts to recreate the forms of the human bodies that had been covered by volcanic ash in which a hole had been left (shaped in the form of the plant or person) after the body had rotted. These casts show people in the position they were in at the moment of death. None were Ctrl-Alt-Del-ing at the time the lava flow reached Pompeii. 

I am currently out of office and will not be able to reply to your messages until you have had your Serotonin fix

Mr Dearing is out of the office and harmony reigns.

His constant badgering, baiting, besetting, harassing, harrying, inconveniencing, persecuting, pestering, bothering, bugging, chivvying, harrying, needling, tormenting and vexing creates an extremely stressful environment in the office but, as he often says, “without me nothing would get done around here. Just look at these figures!” He is a perfectionist, a control freak and a bully. This combination is common to those who insist in doing everything and then giving others the emotional bill.

Most of the staff suffer from cervical problems, depression, anxiety or panic attacks and have been prescribed varying doses of Serotonin-based medicaments. Years of disempowerment explain why Dearing is their boss and why Dearing, the devil incarnate, is their dessert after years of disempowerment.

A slip of a click and Rogier van der Weyden's "Saint George the Environmentalist" appears instead of Van der Graaf's particle chivvier.  

Business news

After rumours of disagreement among members of the bob’sbarnablog editorial team, a spokesman for the board denied that the blog was suffering serious setbacks on account of its poor readership figures.

"We are confident that current and future projects will continue to bring us short- and long-term success", he lied.
The spokesman added that projects to boost blog readership included a major deal with multi-national religious soft drinks manufacturer and two sponsorship projects. The first involved backing a Gilbert and Sullivan-style comic opera on the inventor of the Van der Graaff generator, Van der Graaff, and the second was to provide economic support for a symposium on impatience in supermarket queues entitled Social and Psychological Aspects of Supermarket Check-out Rage. Conference papers would deal with subjects as diverse as fumbling with small change and detergent discount vouchers.

Mr Dearing

Mr Dearing slammed the report down on the table, stared angrily at a point some forty centimetres in front of his nose and then raised his head to meet the gazes of the shamefaced editorial board.
"What", he uttered theatrically, "on earth is this?"
Dearing lifted report and proceeded to read the figures out loud.

Total 0 Average Per Day 0 Average Visit Length 0
Last Hour 0 Today 0 Week 0
This Month 0

"This must be the least visited blog in the history of bloggery", he shrieked hysterically. "Well, let me tell you this! If you don’t bring me something to brighten up my life by the end of the week then you’re all fired!! Understand?"

The sheepish-looking board had been expecting a redress but had not bargained for this.

The Kunlun fault through the bus window, the remains of the paper my Christmas socks were wrapped in or a recent brain scan? 

demonstratives

According to the Tibetan phrasebook (particularly handy in the centre of Barcelona) in front of me, Tibetan has not four demonstratives like common or garden languages, but eight. As well as this, that, those and these it also has ya-gi (that up there), ma-gi (that down there), yân-tso (those up there) and mân-tso (those down there). There are perhaps more ways of distinguishing things at different heights on the mountainside (e.g. "Which yak do you mean?") in Tibetan than there are in Dutch, although I have seen stairs and shelves on my few visits to Holland and suspect that most Dutch people don’t live in bungalows.

El encargado 

AS seen on TV

The revolutionary Upside-down Pontiff Selection Device (UPSD) is fully compatible with our Industrial Papal Extrusion Units (IPEUs). These are particularly apt for the manufacture of both quality imitation pontiffs and plastic geraniums (for full operating instructions see Book of Job). The IPEU comes equipped with full a reverse pontifical discharge feature and is fully guaranteed on earth as it is in heaven. Available in Cardinal Red.

This work is entitled "Upside-down pontiff selection device", shown here in full operation.  

And here’s one of her great grandmother. Her looks must run in the family!
 

Seems that most authors use Sus scrofa to refer to wild boar while some use Sus domesticus to refer to the domesticated pig. Both are Suidae, A family of nonruminant artiodactylous mammals consisting of the wild and the domestic swine. Apparently domesticated pigs have become feral in many parts of the world. They are then referred to as Sus scrofa again. So here’s a Sus domesticus (without wimple). 

AFTER ............into sleek, elegant Gothic-Renaissance cathedrals, designed to meet the extremely demanding worshipping requirements of even the strictest devotees.
 

BEFORE ....We at React-o-Cat specialise in turning unsightly, past-their-sell-by-date pressurised water reactors ...... 

"Cain scores full marks at figure skating while Eve does yoga over Abel's body and Adam exclaims "He was like that when I got here!" 

Let's have one of the three of you together. Come on, a nice big smile now!