A lion tamer worried. 1894.

This is a job that is not as popular as it used to be, isn’t it. Lion tamer. People these days want to see happy lions on the telly, eating a less than happy antelope, not a whip brandishing lion tamer with a group of cowed big cats.

Launceston Examiner 17 Feb 1894 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article39499710

I wonder how long the lions in this article were plotting the demise of their tamer, Thieman? They obviously jumped at the chance to have a go at him when the lights went out.

Being stuck in the dark on the wrong side of the bars with a group of excited predators you had recently forced to do tricks would probably be a lion tamers worst nightmare.

I love the way they have used the term ‘worried’ in this article. We know what it means when a dog worries at something but when we hear that word the idea of concern or anxiety springs immediately to mind. The title of this article ‘A Lion Tamer Worried’ is probably exactly what he felt in those first seconds, just before the real worrying began….

Don’t stop to smell the flowers. 1894.

This is an interesting story. A sneezy New Zealand girl in 1894 spent several days ejecting worms through her nose. Ick.

Warwick Examiner and Times 19 Dec 1894 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article82229262

These worms were identified as common earthworms and it was suggested that their eggs had entered her nose when she was smelling some flowers. Hmm..

I usually love the explanations people come up with when faced with the unexpected but this one suggesting she sniffed worm babies off flowers… Really? Surely that would stretch the credulity of anyone who had ever looked at a flower before!

I have sniffed lots of flowers and seen a lot of worms, they are never in the same place at the same time. Generally the worms are not found at the flowery end of a plant, are they? It would make things easier for the birds if they were though!

I suspect that they were actually a kind of parasitic worm that looked like a garden variety worm. I had a quick google and found a few that you could mistake for earthworms if you wanted to, none of them were coming out of someones head though.

I could post a link but then I would be denying you the joy of finding them for yourself, so, off you go. What? You’re going to take my word for it? Don’t blame you 🙂

A new house with a terrible surprise. 1894.

The last thing most people want on their honeymoon is uninvited guests in the middle of the night.

The newly married Mr. and Mrs. Schrader of Shoal Creek got the worst kinds of guests imaginable on their honeymoon in 1894, a room full of annoyed snakes. Perhaps the only thing less welcome would be a knife-wielding maniac.

I wonder who decided that cosy little spot by the bluff would be a good place for their marital home? Clearly it was a nice place to live, the only problem was that others had already earmarked it as home.

I have heard of large amounts of snakes hibernating together, I even heard of a person who bought a country property only to find the walls of the house were packed with sleepy reptiles… eeek! Not sure if different species of snakes usually choose to hibernate together as suggested in this story though.

Either way, the reptiles tolerance of other species obviously didn’t spread to creatures with legs, with the dog and the newly-wed humans in this story all succumbing to the venom of their unwanted visitors.

The rest of the humans showed just as little tolerance. The day after the funeral they blew the side off the bluff to reveal the den, then killed all the snakes inside.

The Mercury 10 Feb 1894 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13269199

French-Polished Hives and Police Court Bees. 1894.

Mornington Standard 1 Nov 1894 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65812224

Bees seem to have quite varied taste as to where they will settle, sometimes defying logic. The start of this article is a great example of that. I wonder how the posties horse felt about going back to that shop for the next delivery? I expect that it was a little nervous about it!

I would have loved to see the seven french polished hives owned by the man in Melbourne. He is wonderfully described, not as eccentric, but as a ‘person having no wife to bother his life, but paddled his own canoe’.

He would never have felt as though he was sleeping alone with the resident hives in his bedroom. Do hives hum at night? Maybe he was scared of the dark…

Obviously this man was ahead of his times as these days keeping hives in the city is becoming more popular. Organizations like Melbourne City Rooftop Honey encourage the establishment of hives in the city and suburbs but I don’t expect there are any such polished and pampered indoor hives around today!

The rest of the article clearly shows that the author of this piece was not very sympathetic to the courts, he was pretty happy to see them inconvenienced by the arrival of the bees. I am sure he wasn’t the only one cheering on the bees in the police-court that day!