I joined Nature in 1987, when Mrs Thatcher was the Editor Prime Minister. There was still a country called Yugoslavia; the Soviet Union still existed; Nelson Mandela was still in prison. Windows™, iPods, the Measles-Mumps-Rubella jab, Twitter, Friendfeed, Gee Minor, Gee Minima, Heidi the Dog, the phenomenon that is Bora Zivkovic and email access to the Nature office were but twinkles in the eye of Brahma. Feathered dinosaurs still lay undisturbed beneath the rich soils of the Middle Kingdom.
Nature published just one journal – itself.
Twenty-one years later, how much has changed. Today I received a very pleasant internal email welcoming me to the staff Over-21 Club, which I reckon differs in key details from Club 18-30, and informing me that I’m entitled to a gift of my choice from the company to the value of £200.
This isn’t a fortune – but it’s not a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, either. The problem is that for the life of me I can’t think what I should do with it. I guess it should be something vaguely work related. I’m tempted to blow the lot on my Amazon Wish List. On the other hand, I should really ask Mrs Gee, too… but then I remembered the NN community. All y’all might have a few ideas, too.
You could get a rather nice pocket-sized digital camera for 200 quid, no? If not, I think your Amazon idea is a good one. Maybe Nature will come out with a History of the Nature Publishing Group coffee-table book that you could buy.
Full of good ideas, me.
Does Amazon have a map of UK bus routes?
Or, following on from Richard, how about buying a coffee table? And, if you have any spare change, some coffee.
I don’t have any serious ideas, except to suggest you get something special, that you wouldn’t otherwise do. Commission a piece of art, perhaps? There are a couple of good artists who are (or were) part of the scientific blogosphere.
You should buy cash-strapped philosophers and historians of biology who live in Sydney Australia a lot of books of their choosing.
I understood from a colleague experienced in these matters that most people buy a fridge.
Upgrade for the wearable office? Heated toilet seat?
I suppose you have to wait until retirement for the clock…
You should keep it in your croc fund. Those shoes aren’t paying for themselves!
18 months’ subscription to New Scientist?
One historical inaccuracy Henry – I had my first (admittedly pre-release) version of Windows in 1985!
Does Amazon have a map of UK bus routes?
I’d be more interested in a map of Amazon bus routes.
This book might help you find your way around.
A custom-designed tattoo
Got it!
Personalized DNA art. What every successful editor of The World’s Premiere Science Journal Beginning With The Letter N™ needs.*
*possibly not
Meh. Any grad student could knock one of those out for you in one day, for about 20 bucks.
After a discussion over skype1, we decided that a tattoo of a fossilised cow would be just the thing for Henry’s arm.
1 Henry – don’t you want to join in? You’re still a questionmark on my list of skypees.
Of course, you could easily take your favourite colleagues out to the pub and blow the 200 quid in about half an hour or so (depending on number of colleagues and constitution)…
Congratulations, Henry. Ten times longer service than I managed.
£200 goes a long way these days. How about a 90% stake in RBS?
But Cath, their website looks so professional.
And yes, that’s a good point. Henry, send me the 200 squid and I’ll send you some personalized DNA art, 100% guaranteed. No biological specimens required.
Gift it to your favourite Memphian Project Manager?
Dr Gee – I think you should put the £200 towards one of these (see link below) to reward our lovely bantam ladies for their service to the Gee breakfast table and afternoon teas (heavenly scrambled eggs and wonderful cakes (as Cromer Is So Bracing friends will agree I’m sure!)
http://www.omlet.co.uk/products_services/products_services.php?view=Eglu%20Cube
Henry – I believe your problem has been solved for you.
As a ‘Cromer Is So Bracing friend’, I feel somewhat compelled to agree with Penny on this occasion.
CharityChickens start at home and ’em bantam ladies could do with a new one, so I vote for the Eglu Cube TM Prices hereBlimey, these products are not cheap. The Super Deluxe one looks fab, but £681??
Cool! I wonder if the fox-proof fence is also raccoon-proof. (Vancouver just changed its bylaws to allow back-yard chickens, and I know a few people who are thinking about it).
Thanks for all your suggestions, you lovely people. I think an Eglu Cube it is, then – all our six bantams are laying fit to bust, and squabbles break out as a chook desperate to lay is delayed while another is on the single nestbox space – just like teenagers queueing for the bathroom. We’ve had to install an emergency temporary nestbox, a bit like a portaloo for chickens. Clearly our indomitable ladies need more space. As the entire garden is effectivelly the chicken run we can get a cube without the attendant run, a snip at just £416.
The current Eglu plus run will be converted into housing plus EcoMo™ for some of the G-pigs (you can get a kit to convert an Eglu for G-pig use), which means we can bin one of the unsanitary wooden hutches. Hooray!
@ Cath: tell your friends you can get eglus in North America . The Omlet newsfeed, The Daily Egg, links to this story about keeping chickens in defiance of Vancouver’s bylaws. Have these now been changed then? Have these birds flown? Are they now uncooped?
The laws will likely be changing in the next couple of months (sorry, I jumped the gun a bit earlier by saying they’d already changed). I’ll definitely pass on the Eglu link to my friends – thanks!
The person interviewed in the article you linked to must live really close to me. I’ve never noticed any chickeny smells or sounds on my travels around the neighbourhood though!
p.s. does anyone know anything about keeping bees?
Who started this post? Oh, it’s Henry. I shall continue.
I’ve started so I’ll Finnish.
Whilst OT (who me?) cue “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” Loved this song for some reason from the moment I got my hands on a Louis Jordan LP.
This song was first recorded in 1946 but it lives on.
The best mash-up/remix I could find was this (orig. lyrics remain the same):-
One night farmer Brown,
Was takin’ the air,
Locked up the barnyard
With the greatest of care
Down in the henhouse
Somethin’ stirred
When he shouted “Who’s there?”
This is what he heard:
There ain’t nobody here but us chickens
There ain’t nobody here at all
So calm yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain’t nobody here but us
We chickens tryin’ to sleep,
And you butt in
And hobble, hobble hobble hobble
With your chin
There ain’t nobody here but us chickens
There ain’t nobody here at all
You’re stompin’ around
And shakin’ the ground,
You’re kickin’ up an awful dust
We chicken’s tryin’ to sleep
And you butt in
And hobble, hobble hobble hobble
It’s a sin
Tomorrow
Is a busy day
We got things to do
We got eggs to lay
We got ground to dig
And worms to scratch
It takes a lot of settin’
Gettin’ chicks to hatch
There ain’t nobody here but us chickens
There ain’t nobody here at all
So quiet yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain’t nobody here but us
Kindly point that gun,
The other way
And hobble, hobble hobble off and
Hit the hay
Tomorrow
Is a busy day
We got things to do
We got eggs to lay
We got ground to dig
And worms to scratch
It takes a lot of settin’
Gettin’ chicks to hatch
There ain’t nobody here but us chickens
There ain’t nobody here at all
So quiet yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain’t nobody here but us
Kindly point that gun,
The other way
And hobble, hobble hobble of and
Hit the hay
“Hey boss man
What do ya say?”
It’s easy pickens,
Ain’t nobody here but us chickens
I grew up next door to an apiarist (bee-keeper) and used to spend hours after school helping out making hives, learning about bees and collecting honey etc, I strongly suspect it’s one of the reasons I ended up a biologist!
Cath> Vancouver just changed its bylaws to allow back-yard chickens, and I know a few people who are thinking about it). It is interesting from a bird flu (avian influenza) point of view though. Guess they ran in through the animal department and CDC?
Henry> Maybe a little N logo on the outside to show that it was a gift from your precious employer?!
Sounds delish though, fresh eggs in the morning. Have you thought about buying those hens that give greensih/bluish tints on their egg shells? I saw some of them a while back and it would fun to be able to have Easter eggs without coloring them artificially.
Lots of US cities allow suburban smallholders to keep a few chickens, with certain restrictions. I can keep up to three hens (no roosters), as long as their pen is approximately 50 yards away from the neighbors’ houses (possible in my yard, but not in all). I also have to pay a yearly livestock fee … if I lived outside city limits, I’d pay no fees, and instead receive a tax exemption for keeping the exact same livestock on my property. A number of people in my neighborhood keep chickens in the backyard, and ignore the 50 yard rule (and the livestock fee as well, most likely).
The Eglu is one of the few chook housing options that would work in this climate. The fenced run is necessary, as we have raccoons, ringtails, possums, skunks, and a variety of large hawks locally. There’s a website called My Pet Chicken that sells an Eglu, a fenced run, and two Gingernut Ranger hens for a fairly reasonable package price. Haven’t seen the Eglu cubes here yet, though.
Åsa, I guess they don’t think the birds will reach sufficient density to provide a threat over and above the city’s existing bird life?
Kristi, I don’t know anyone in Vancouver with a property big enough to keep chickens 50 yards away from any neighbours! I’m sure they exist, but I’m not sure if the posh folk are into keeping chickens.
@ Cath: Suburban Texans tend to have large yards, even in the cities. That’s the sprawl, y’all. My yard isn’t large by Texas standards, but the backyard abuts a boulevard, so if I put the chooks in the middle, against the back fence, they’re 50 yards away from the two next-door neighbors. Though I think it’s oppressive to use such laws to (try to) exclude people who might benefit most from keeping backyard chickens. Apparently guinea fowl are the best poultry to keep in the yard to control the multitudinous arthropod pests here.
@ Graham – that’s a great song. Many moons since I was in a band called Hippies With Mortgages, and we covered it.
@ Åsa
Maybe a little N logo on the outside to show that it was a gift from your precious employer?!Great idea. I must have some NN stickers left over from Cromer Is SO Bracing ’09 hanging around.
@ Kristi and @ Cath – the bye-laws round here allow you to keeep livestock in your garden provided you can justify them as ‘pets’ and aren’t actually running a farm. Pigs, however, are specifically excluded … which is why ours are fiber-glass.
Yeah, not much sprawl around here.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the rightUS border just to the South, ocean to the West, mountains to the North, everyone goes either East or up.I have just noticed that this is your 400th post Henry – so congratulations also on reaching that impressive milestone! Got to be worth another £200 from Nature, no?
If I had £200 I’d probably spend it on a second-hand musical instrument.
Pigs, however, are specifically excluded … which is why ours are fiber-glass
What about those pot-bellied pigs that some people keep as pets … are they excluded?
Some friends of mine had neighbors with a pet pot-bellied pig, when they lived in Seattle. The owners would put a harness and leash on the pig, and take it for walks. My friends’ Rottweiler would watch the pig promenade from their front window, and whine, drool, and lick his chops.
Horses, as a rule, cannot stand pigs. No one can give me an explanation for this, but almost every horse person has a story about a pig-induced equine meltdown. My own horses have had meltdowns over both pot-bellied pigs and wild pigs (javelinas).
What about those pot-bellied pigs that some people keep as pets … are they excluded?I think the ukase applies to all pigs. Nice word, ukase. I think it must mean an enzyme with republican tendencies.
I have just noticed that this is your 400th post Henry – so congratulations also on reaching that impressive milestone! Got to be worth another £200 from Nature, no?400 posts, eh? High time I stopped, then!
@Åsa – the CDC is an American thing. We don’t pay attention to them here. I imagine that British Columbia has some inelegantly-named, overly bureaucratic organization that deals with these things instead. Or maybe it’s just Health Canada. It would probably take weeks to find out.
@Henry – we will, of course, be expecting photos of the Eglu Cube once properly installed (over at your other blog I guess).
Kristi, is it also true that horses dislike, and even bully, white horses?
@ Cath – I’ve never witnessed a bias against white horses, and I can think of several examples in which a white or pale gray horse is the dominant animal in a group. There are a couple of excellent films by Ginger Kathrens about a white wild mustang, Cloud, who was initially captured as part of a US BLM program, and then released because of his unusual color. Cloud didn’t seem to be bullied because of his color, and as a stallion, he managed to have his own band of mares and foals.
All that being said, just about anything can cause my Thoroughbreds to have a meltdown. Once it was a llama in a nearby field, another time it was a herd of deer, another time a plastic bag caught in a prickly pear cactus, another time a bobwhite, an ancient donkey in a patch of fog, and then a horse pulling a roping dummy, etc. etc. etc.
Richard> I meant the “Canadian equivalent of American CDC” – probably the Health Department or something like that. Reason I brought it up is that “backyard birds” are one of the things everyone has in the countries where you have so far found H5N1 and it makes it harder to control epedemics as well as monitor the infection rate… and Canada has been in the font of things regarding SARS and other infectious viruses.
Ah well, I like backyard birds. Although I do see the potential problem with migrating birds and the house kept birds.
I do understand the weeks comment though. Probably like everywhere else…. messy… coloss on clay feet or how that would be translated.