Kitmir
Kitmir (or Qatmir) is one of the two doggies mentioned in the Quran (the other time a doggie is mentioned it’s not a specific doggie).
Kitmir was with the youths hiding from religious persecution in Sura 18, the story about The People of the Cave (“The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” in Christian tradition), and they all slept inside the cave for maybe 300 or 309 years.
[18:18] You would think that they were awake, when they were in fact asleep. We turned them to the right side and the left side, while their dog stretched his legs in their midst.
A more detailed version of the story was told by Ali, where he mentions that Kitmir belonged to a shepherd who joined the youths, and that “the dog was black and white though black was prevailing”.
My funny and cute slug neighbours
“A horse was tied outside a shop in a narrow Chinese village street. Whenever anyone would try to walk by, the horse would kick him. Before long, a small crowd of villagers had gathered near the shop, arguing about how best to get past the dangerous horse. Suddenly, someone came running. “The Old Master is coming!” he shouted. “He’ll know what to do!”
The crowd watched eagerly as the Old Master came around the corner, saw the horse, turned, and walked down another street.”
(From “The Te of Piglet” by Benjamin Hoff – but disregard his epic fail rant about feminists if you read it.)
Slugs are considered a huge problem for gardeners in many areas. Spanish slugs are an invasive species that probably came to other parts of Europe together with imported vegetables. They thrive in the cooler and more humid climate here, and like to eat many of the same things as humans, and also some ornamental plants that humans like to grow. People often go to great, frustrated lengths trying to kill slugs in traps or even one by one.
My garden is in a kind of boggy area, and I have lots of slugs in my neighbourhood – the stout Spanish slugs dominate, and there are also some pretty and delicate Leopard slugs. Over the three years that I’ve had this place, I’ve figured out through trial and error what vegetables to grow so the slugs don’t eat all of my food. Sometimes they change their mind a bit, and there are lots of things I haven’t tried because I wasn’t interested in eating it, but basically this is the list:
They don’t eat:
– Peas (garden snails like the pods, though, but they aren’t such a big problem as Spanish slugs can be)
– Fava beans (but slugs may nibble the plants a bit when they are about 50 cm high)
– Nasturtium
– Chives
– Oregano
– Garlic
– Borage
– Many delicious wild plants like nettles, goutweed, wild mint, sorrel and wood sorrel
They don’t eat enough to destroy:
– Potatoes (they often eat the plants, but there are ways to distract them, and potato plants grow very quickly and can recuperate even from quite bad slug nibbling attacks if they get some respite)
– Radishes (they only nibble them a little :3 )
The things that both the slugs and I like (such as tomatoes, cucumbers, chard and pole/runner/bush beans) I grow slightly elevated in the greenhouse, and in boxes on my wall and other elevated places.
How to distract slugs:
This may not work with plants that the slugs like way too much to let themselves be distracted, but for me it works with potatoes.
One way is to feed them dry cat food every evening (also great for fertilizing the potatoes if you put it right in the potato land). I haven’t tried if they also prefer vegan cat food over potato plants. Because since I became seriously vegan I discovered that you can also distract them with goutweed cuttings!
This is an amazing thing. My garden produces plenty of goutweed cuttings – I can’t eat it fast enough, and a lot of it quickly grows too big and tough to eat. And the slugs don’t eat goutweed when it’s alive, not even when it’s small and tender, but they do eat decomposing cuttings of it.
They like them the most when the cuttings are about one day old. Garden snails also like them.
And that’s how I’ve become friends with the slugs.
They are really interesting and funny and cute, too, when you watch them …
There was a huge storm, and the morning after the slugs were ravenous with hunger and/or disoriented, and climbed all over the place. Poor things!
For a few weeks last summer was quite hot and dry, and I discovered that the slugs were floating around on the vegetation in one of the ponds. At first I was concerned and tried to rescue them, but then I realised that they knew perfectly well what they were doing. They did it on purpose to stay cool and maybe nibble the vegetation a bit …
Chilling by the poolside after a refreshing swim/float.
Plutonium 10
I förordet till mitt fanzin Tunguska #11 funderade jag på ifall det finns svenska seriefanzin som har getts ut under längre tid än Tunguska, och nu vet jag att det mycket riktigt finns sådana, och jag har till och med medverkat i ett av dem!
Plutonium Comics ges ut av Per Myrhill, och innehåller både hans egna serier och andra tecknares verk. #1 kom ut 1993. Det var några års paus mellan #8 (1996) och #9 (2013), men det har hunnit komma ut ytterligare ett nummer detta år.
#10 har ett fett snyggt omslag av Ulf Österström, och innehåller 152 sidor med mer eller mindre obskyra serier av mer eller mindre obskyra tecknare, däribland två någotsånär obskyra alster av mig: Svinhugg går igen och Vårkänslor på tunnelbanan. Det är en fin blandning av olika slags undergroundserier, från klassiska svenska vardagsrealistiska serier över återberättande av drömmar samt fantasy/superhjälte/våldspornografiska serier (mina bidrag faller förstås i den kategorin), till mer filosofiska och realistiskt tecknade serier av den typen som var vanligare på 80- och 90-talet (exempel på det är Så kan det gå av Per Demervall och Svante svarvares saga av Lars Andersson). Och så en massa helt sjuk humor.
Bland de sjukaste bidragen finns Per Löfgrens helt bisarra och uppenbart Jaime Hernandez-inspirerade Om och om igen. Den är skumt dåligt tecknad men alltså extremt påverkad av Jaime Hernandez både i teckningsstilen och storyn. Bokstavligen sjuk är Per Myrhills serie Aneurysmdimma, där han berättar om hjärnblödningen han råkade ut för, och verkligen lyckas förmedla det djupa obehaget i perioden strax innan anfallet. Priset för den bästa punchlinen i fanzinet går nog till Leo Brages Statement, där en snubbe vill lönnmörda chefen för den lokala ICA-affären. Jag uppskattar också Patrik Norrmanns Bacon & Ägg-serie – jag var inte i Sverige just de åren när serietidningen gavs ut, så jag har helt missat denna fina serie med dess grishjälte.
Plutonium 10 kan beställas från webshoppen på myrhill.se!
Sketches from Varna Archaeological Museum
Somehow we only managed to be in Sofia on Mondays, when all museums are closed, so I couldn’t visit the Archaeological Museum or the Historical Museum there. But in Varna I made sketches of piggy items and some other interesting things at the archaeological museum. The most exciting to me were the really old pieces.
There weren’t terribly many at the museum in Varna, only from local sites in the area (Varna lakes and Varna necropolis). From the 5th millennium BC there were many goddess figurines, the famous bronze goat (in the middle above), and animal heads that looked like they could be pigs or (more likely?) bulls.
Then the Thracian horsemen came, and most of the piggy items were just related to hunting scenes, like the matrice for horse trapping decorations above.
From the Roman period, there was one small clay piggy made by coroplasts in Odessos (as Varna was called back then), who manufactured small clay items for religious/cult purposes in the home. This piggy item may have been intended for good luck with pig breeding or hunting, or perhaps something more symbolically reated to pigs.
To the right above is the handle of a “ritual vessel”, a patera, with a boar’s head at the end.
Underneath it is a shard of a tray, with a wild boar to the left, and next to it the head of a man who somehow looked like a wild boar, too (pure coincidence, maybe …).
A really interesting collection of items from the Roman period are stone images of “The Thracian Horseman“. There were several of them, and they all had a victorious-looking man riding a horse, often rearing. Some Thracian Horsemen from other sites are shown slaying lions or leopards (and St. George slaying the dragon may have developed from the Thracian Horseman), but at the Varna museum almost all of them had either a boar hunting scene below the horse, or a seemingly random bull standing there, often almost “mounted” by the horse, like in the sketch above. (Photo of another similar one from the museum here.)
Maybe the boar hunting doesn’t have to mean anything more than just that. But the bulls seem almost a bit too random. Perhaps it’s a symbolical representation of how the Thracian horsemen back in the day conquered the local populations who were worshipping a bull before?
Official history writing in Bulgaria sets the “founding” of the Bulgarian state in 681, with the Danube Bulgarian Khanate. This is quite interesting considering that the earliest human remains discovered in what is today Bulgaria date from 44,000 BC! But maybe the Bulgars are considered to be the coolest ancestors …
