(Roughly) Daily

source: MASONS, via The Telegraph

From The Telegraph (UK):

Staff at the Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre in Norfolk give turtles a seasonal treat of brussel sprouts at Christmas which provide a healthy dose of vitamins, minerals and fibre.

However, the turtles, like humans, are prone to heavy bouts of flatulence after eating the vegetables.

Last year a turtle at a Sealife Centre triggered overflow alarms in the middle of the night after the splashes from gassy bubbles hit overflow sensors.

Now the Yarmouth turtle tank -12 feet in depth and width holding 250,000 litres of water along with George the 3ft long green turtle – has been partially emptied for the festive season…

Read the whole soggy story here.

As we move our food around on our plates so that it looks “used,” we might spare a thought for Victor of Aveyron (“The Wild Boy of Aveyron”), who apparently lived his entire childhood alone in the forest before being found wandering the woods near Saint Sernin sur Rance, France (near Toulouse) in 1797. He was captured, but soon escaped. He was captured again and kept in the care of a local woman for about a week before he escaped once more.  Then, on this date in 1800, he emerged from the forests on his own, perhaps habituated to humans after his second experience. His age was unknown but citizens of the village estimated that he was about twelve years old.  Despite the fact that he could hear, Victor was taken to the National Institute of the Deaf, where Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a young medical student, took him on. Itard wanted to be the first person to civilize a wild child and attempted, primarily, to teach Victor to speak (the Enlightenment’s measure of “civilization”). Though initially successful — Victor showed significant progress, at least, in understanding language and reading simple words — he eventually slowed down to the point that Itard abandoned the experiment. The only words that Victor ever actually learned to speak were “lait” (milk) and “Oh Dieu” (oh God).  (Many modern scholars now believe, partly by studying other feral children, that language acquisition must take place in a critical period of early childhood if it is to be successful.)

The Wild Boy of Aveyron died in Paris in 1828.  His life was dramatized by François Truffaut in l’Enfant Sauvage (1970; released in the UK as The Wild Boy and in the US as The Wild Child).

Victor of Aveyron