When [Sir Richard Francis Burton] was in India he at one time got rather tired of the daily Mess, and living with men, and he thought he should like to learn the manners, customs, and habits of monkeys, so he collected forty monkeys of all kinds of ages, races, species, and he lived with them, and he used to call them by different offices. He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, a very pretty, small, silky-looking monkey, he used to call his wife, and put pearls in her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them, where they all sat down on chairs at meals, and the servants waited on them, and each had its bowl and plate, with the food and drinks proper for them. He sat at the head of the table, and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a high baby’s chair, with a little bar before it. He had a little whip on the table, with which he used to keep them in order when they had bad manners, which did sometimes occur, as they frequently used to get jealous of the little monkey, and try to claw her.

That’s from Isabel Burton’s Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 1898. In her own biography of Burton, A Rage to Live, Mary S. Lovell says that Burton learned to imitate the monkeys’ sounds and believed that they understood some of them. He compiled a list of 60 words, but it was lost an 1860 fire that destroyed nearly all his papers.

Two perplexing roofs, by Kokichi Sugihara of Japan’s Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences.

I suppose these could be designed at scale!

High Wycombe, a town of furniture makers, historically celebrated important visitors with arches of chairs. The most famous marked the arrival of Prince Edward in 1880; three years earlier a similar arch had arrested Queen Victoria on her way from Windsor Castle to Hughenden to visit Lord Beaconsfield.

“It was made up of chairs of all kinds, and bore the words, ‘Long Live the Queen,'” read the Annual Register. “Her Majesty’s attention was specially attracted by this curious structure, and the Royal carriage was stopped that its occupants might have a better view.”

In November 1970, a man and his daughters came upon the charred remains of a woman in the foothills near Bergen, Norway. Some personal items were nearby, and two suitcases were later found at the railway station, but all identifying marks had been removed from all of these.

An autopsy showed the woman had been incapacitated by phenobarbital and poisoned by carbon monoxide, and she’d consumed 50 to 70 sleeping pills. A notepad found in one of the suitcases suggested that she’d traveled throughout Europe using at least eight false identities. She’d last been seen alive when she’d checked out of her room at the Hotel Hordaheimen two days earlier; she’d paid in cash and requested a taxi. During her stay she’d appeared guarded and kept to her room.

The woman has never been identified. Her death was attributed to the sleeping pills, and she was interred in a Bergen graveyard. A 2017 analysis of her teeth suggested that she’d been born in Germany around 1930 and had perhaps moved to France as a child. In 2005 a resident of Bergen said he’d seen a woman hiking on a hillside outside town five days before the discovery of the body, dressed lightly and followed by two men. She’d seemed about to speak to him but had not. He’d reported the encounter to the police, but no investigation was made.

In October, Mason Zeinali bicycled 101 km through downtown Toronto to draw the shape of a moose on Google Earth.

The waterfront segment runs along Lake Shore Boulevard, and the moose’s entire back is one street, Davenport Road.

More details at Cycling Magazine.