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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| For some reason, this important site wasn't included in my Paris tour guide. Oh, well, I guess that's what Atlas Obscura is for. The Last Public Urinal In Paris  The only remaining vespasienne in Paris is a (stinky) relic of Resistance. What does a urinal have to do with La Résistance? Other than the French being pissed off, that is. Just outside the notorious La Santé prison in Paris's 14th arrondissement lies the city's last public urinal, or "la dernière vespasienne de Paris", as its accompanying plaque declares. One amusing thing is that the plaque, a picture of which accompanies the article, refuses to translate "vespasienne" in the English description. It is possible that it is described somewhere in the plaque's text, but it was too small for me to read in the pic. In the early 19th century, public urinals began to be installed all across Paris to fight the city's unsanitary conditions, which had led to various epidemics... What's remarkable is that, at that early date, they made the connection between unsanitary conditions and disease. Not everyone figured that out. London didn't, not until the middle of that century....(public toilets for women were not installed, as they were deemed to take up too much room on public thoroughfares). So much for egalité. They were named vespasiennes after the Roman emperor Vespasian, who famously placed a "urine tax" on the purchase of urine collected from public toilets which was commonly used by laundries and leather tanneries for its ammonia. I know you were wondering. And yes, I have heard that this was absolutely a thing. These public urinals unintentionally created a public place for secretive activity, leading to their use by clandestine homosexual men as early as 1862, and as place to exchange information for those in the Resistance during WWII. Possibly even both at the same time. In 1876, right-wing Catholic politician Eugène de Germiny was arrested in what became a political scandal for engaging in what was termed indecent exposure with an 18 year-old man... Gosh, that sounds familiar. Even stranger subcultures, such as 'soupeurs', who enjoyed dipping stale bread in others' urine evolved around these odd pillars of Parisian society. You know I hardly ever use emoticons in blog entries. I prefer to let my writing do the emoting. I have nothing against them, of course; just, you know, time and place and all that. That said...  Most vespasiennes were dismantled from the 1960's onwards, and today the only one remaining is the one outside La Santé prison. You don't need to know much French to know that "santé" translates to "health." What that has to do with a prison is not clear to me, even when I looked at the Wiki entry for the institution. Was the prison named after an adjacent street, or vice-versa? I'm not going on a research journey today, though. I need to do something else to distract me from that last mental image. |
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