Its like its said, the world is a stage Each person’s just an actor with a part to play Like the middle class kids, kids of the rich Have everything, but yet still they pissed On coke and ketamine, strung out on heroin I ain’t generalizing, look at the evidence
Go to Glastonbury any year you will see Unlike Carnival it won’t be crawling with police This is London, the kids on the very next street Had a very different life experience than me In my experience they can’t help but be smug After a lifetime of what they think’s just good luck
They’re still more anxious and more thankless Unearned privilege weighs like an anchor That’s why they copy what we do, tryna’ be what they not They will grow up though and get better jobs They will maintain the system they claim that they hated But they can’t burn it down they got a stake in this matrix
I am not going to check the source now but I believe this is an urban myth. For one thing, they’re wings which means they have a lot of air resistance. For another, the bones in a swan’s wing are much lighter than human leg bones.
Incidentally years ago there was a swan at the White Harp reservoir in N London which stood around 1.7M at its head. It threatened with its beak but I never saw it actually attack a person or a dog. I was told the way to deal with an attacking swan, if you can’t run, is to remove a jumper or coat and get it over the swan’s head. This struck me at the time as a “all very well but how do you get the necessary training to do this?”
I can see someone now with a frantic, hissing swan with a jersey over its head under their arm trying to look this up on their phone.
Yep. I reckon the swan’s wing breaking a man’s arm is unlikely, given the compromises in bird’s bones that allow them to fly. De Maupassant reckoned that a swan’s neck was the perfect thing for wiping your arse, but I bet he never tried that either.
My stepmother had a pair of black swans. They seemed friendlier than the white styles. A fox attacked them and killed the lady swan, which made the gentleman swan sad, and then somehow my stepmother got in touch with someone with the opposite deal (i.e. the lady swan survived), and they married them off, which was on the local news. A few days after that another fox killed them both.
De Maupassant? I thought it was Francois Rabelais, and he says (in the Urquhart/Motteux translation*) “there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed.” The goose appears, from context, to be alive. Rabelais does not say how you dispose of the goose afterwards.
*I doubt anybody wants the original.
Edit - oh why not? Mais, concluent, je dys et mantiens qu’il n’y a tel torchecul que d’un oyzon bien dumeté, pourveu qu’on luy tienne la teste entre les jambes.
Of course. It even sounds like Rabelais, now. There is another De Maupassant quote about bottoms, but this isn’t it. That’s why I could not find it (I did try to check, a bit).
Swans, geese, ducks, they are all dinosaurs. I look at every one of them as they look at me–they have a 65 million year bone to pick.
The three scariest animal encounters I’ve had:
Camping on the rogue River with a dog, and at least two adolescent black bears paced around the campsite, all night. The dog turned like a compass the entire night.
3am in Scottsdale, I was walking the dog. We encountered 12 wild pigs. The dog and I quietly, slowly walked backwards.
Mushroom hunting in Kentucky falls. Two black bear Cubs run at us. “Get in the car now!!!”. Mama was right behind.
Its like its said, the world is a stage
