Tetherd Cow Ahead

Brushes With Fame #2: Laura Huxley

It was 1987 as I recall, and I was on a British Airways flight from Los Angeles to London. I don’t much like flying, and I was really pleased to find myself in one of those great seats you sometimes get in a 747: Economy Class, but upstairs in the ‘bubble’ where First Class usually is. Because of the curve of the roof up there, they can only fit two seats in on each side, which means extra space and even a little shelf area next to the window seat. Quite comfortable. It’s a pretty long flight and I was hoping I wouldn’t get some really boring or obnoxious person sitting next to me.

The elderly lady who sat down was very elegant and well-spoken. We exchanged pleasantries as you do, and I settled myself down with my new portable CD player.

After the plane had taken off, I must have dozed, and when I opened my eyes, I noticed that the woman was looking at a film script. Being the nosey kind of person I am, I couldn’t help but notice words like ‘mescaline’, ‘LSD’, and ‘Timothy Leary’ on the page she was reading.

“Are you a film producer?” I asked, by way of conversation.

“Oh, no,” she laughed. “I’m just reading a script for a movie that people want to make about my late husband.”

“Oh,” said I. “Who was your husband, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“His name was Aldous Huxley”

I had only just finished reading Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven one of the most informative and absorbing accounts of the influence of psychedelic drugs on the culture of the 1950s & ’60s. My mind leapt to his moving description of Aldous Huxley’s death from cancer, and how, on his deathbed he had asked his wife Laura to administer to him one final dose of LSD. And how she sat there and held his hand as he died.

The gracious woman sitting next to me was Laura Huxley.

I chatted to her in awe. I let her listen to my portable CD player – she had never seen one (they were relatively new then). She wrote her number in my diary, and urged me to look her up next time I was in Los Angeles.

I never did.

But I still have that diary page with her telephone number.

OK, so I was watching the DVD of the Jacques Perrin/Jacques Cluzaud documentary Travelling Birds (Le Peuple Migrateur) last night, and what should I see at about 8 minutes in, but the following sequence:

~Migratory ducks arrive in snowy landscape.

~Ducks settle down to weather out the cold and blustery night.

~Ducks awake in the morning. The blizzard has subsided.

~Ducks make many and sundry quacking noises.

~An avalanche begins and ducks fly away.

There you have it: a filmic record of a duck’s quack starting an avalanche! (Sure, the film-makers try and make it look like the avalanche startles the ducks and causes them to take flight, but I believe the footage speaks for itself. Go rent the DVD. Tell me I’m wrong.)

In further news, this site reveals that scientists at Sanford University have carried out a comprehensive Duck Quack and Echo experiment, so those nitpickers who scoffed at my own exposé (no names except to say Universal Head) can now go view a (sniff) proper experiment.

I clipped this article from a newspaper a little while ago. It reads:

London: Divers undertaking routine maintenance work in a British harbour discovered a giant lobster standing guard over a barnacle-encrusted watch. The 60 centimetre lobster, which is thought to be more than 30 years old, was spotted by members of a diving club in Blyth Harbour, Northumberland.

On closer inspection they were amazed to find that the ancient crustacean appeared to be guarding a wristwatch. On their return to the surface the divers discovered that the watch – a Citizen Pulsar believed to have been underwater for at least three years – was still telling the time accurately to within a few seconds.

Moral: It doesn’t matter how carefully you look after the thing you love most, you probably won’t be able to stop some bastard from taking it away from you. And time still marches on.

Cow-o-philes all: Sorry for the lack of pictures on The Cow if you’ve tuned in this morning. The Los Angeles area has apparently had a huge electrical disaster affecting the Dreamhost servers where my sites are hosted. Service is slowly being restored.

One of the most common things I hear people say about the Australian bush is how drab it looks. European preconceptions make us think that the emerald green lushness of the Northern Hemisphere is somehow the ‘correct’ way for the countryside to appear, and that there is something wrong with the blue-greens and olive hues of the eucalypts and acacias and melaleucas and all the other plants that make up Australia’s forests.

But this is the ill-considered view of the person who hasn’t spent time among eucalypts. These beautiful trees are subtle and complex, and like all worthwhile things, patience is required to fully appreciate them.

Some interesting snippets about eucalypts:

★When the early ships of explorers and white settlers came to Australia they knew they were approaching land well before they could see it; the eucalyptus forests were so dense they could smell them miles from shore. (Gum – Ashley Hay)

★Eucalypts grow prolifically on the west coast of the US but they do not belong there. I once had an animated discussion with a producer of a well-known classical music group in which she insisted that eucalypts were native to the US. They are not. The 600+ known species are endemic to Australia, with about 12 further species known in far southern Asia. The reason that eucalypts grow in California is because they were taken there in the 1870s, perhaps by miners returning from the Australian gold rush. They had optimistically thought that this hardy tree would be a useful source of hardwood timber. Indeed, the trees thrived in their new home. They grew fast, as much as twenty feet a year. Too fast. In Australia, the growth rate is checked by insects and drought, to produce a very fine-grained hard timber. In North America, there was nothing to slow them down. The transplanted trees were big and impressive, but their timber was fibrous and brittle. It was a disaster. Now the eucalypts in the US can’t be considered much more than weeds.

★Koala bears are not bears, and do not spend their days stoned out of their minds on the oil from eucalyptus leaves, as many people believe. Koalas are just very relaxed kinds of guys.

★Only one tenth of Australia’s original forest remains. And this is being cleared with little thought. It is a travesty of the highest magnitude. We humans don’t deserve this place.

The Further Misfortunes of Simple Graphics Man ~

#6: The Bolt from the Blue (in which SGM is once again struck down by forces of an electrical nature)

[thanks Bronni – The Cow spreads its beneficence upon you]