Tea at Trianon: Cannibal Squid

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Cannibal Squid

From Big Think:

The jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas) is the fiercest of all the cephalopods, a group that comprises squid, octopi, and cuttlefish. When the five-foot-long predator spots its prey, it ejects a burst of water from a siphon, torpedoing itself at speeds up to 15 mph (nearly three times the speed of the fastest human swimmer). When the prey is within reach, the squid ensnares it with two long tentacles covered in up to 200 suckers, each lined with razor-sharp teeth, and pulls it back toward a parrot-like beak and tongue-like organ covered with even more teeth. (Read more.)