Another Kind Of Advent Calendar 2020: December 3rd

Welcome to the Another Kind Of Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting a little something unexpectedly Christmassy for you in honour of the festive season. It’s been the weirdest year, so let’s have a bit of fun…

Meet Jimmy the Raven. He’s a handsome chap, isn’t he?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Ravens aren’t very Christmassy!”. I beg to differ – this one was. The unsung co-star of one of the most beloved festive movies of all time, Jimmy is a minor Christmas legend…

Like so many movie stars of the era, Jimmy’s true origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery. The story goes that he was born some time in 1934, and his nest was found in the wilds of the Mojave Desert by Hollywood animal trainer Curly Twiford, who took him in. His first film role was in Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning You Can’t Take It With You (1938), where he acted alongside the likes of Lionel Barrymore and Ann Miller.

Ravens are intelligent birds, so it hadn’t taken long for Jimmy to learn some useful acting skills. He could type, open letters, understand a certain amount of human language – and even apparently ride a little motorbike! Indeed, James Stewart, the star of It’s A Wonderful Life, described Jimmy as “the smartest actor on the set”, and director Capra clearly agreed, casting the raven in many of his films.

From the late 1930s until his death sometime in the 1950s, Jimmy appeared in hundreds of Hollywood movies (including a brief cameo in another festive favourite, 1939’s The Wizard of Oz), and was considered important enough to be insured for $10,000 by the studio. Quite a sum for a raven!

Despite the fact that he was uncredited in many of his film roles, Jimmy was a proper movie star, with multiple stand-ins on set – and was so well known for entertaining the troops during and after the war that the American Red Cross presented him with a medal.

His last known film was Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s 3 Ring Circus (1954), after which he seems to have gone into retirement. Little information is available about his later years, but his performance in It’s A Wonderful Life remains an indelible part of our Christmas celebrations more than eighty years after his discovery out in the desert…

If you’re feeling festive, you can find lots more Christmas reading and watching from me here – there are now over a decade’s worth of seasonal posts to explore…

Another Kind Of Advent Calendar 2020: December 2nd

“Honestly, Tabby. I told you we should have taken the bus…”

Welcome to the Another Kind Of Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting a little something unexpectedly Christmassy for you in honour of the festive season. It’s been the weirdest year, so let’s have a bit of fun…

After yesterday’s aquatic Christmas tree, hiding behind the second door of the Another Kind Of Advent Calendar is an old festive favourite round these parts…

Yes! The Grumpy Victorian Kittens are back! And this year they’ve been Christmas shopping – although this particular kitty looks quite seriously grumpy about it.

I can relate.

Actually, this one isn’t technically Victorian since this photo was taken in 1914, and she comes from the collection of the New York Public Library, which probably explains a lot – she’s definitely got that New York [c]attitude!

In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen such an exasperated and fed up kitty in a long time (and I once had to give a cat a bath). She quite rightly looks like she wants to escape from this weird human who has put her in these stupid clothes to take stupid photos of her and go home to curl up in front of the fire. I don’t blame her…

If you’re feeling festive, you can find lots more Christmas reading and watching from me here – there are now over a decade’s worth of seasonal posts to explore…

Quote of the Day: On Peter, the Lord’s Cat

Sadly, there are no photos of the real Peter… so this beautiful boy will have to do!

Since it’s the cricket season and we’re in the middle of the Ashes Series, I wanted to share this lovely quote from the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. Peter the Cat was the much-beloved feline resident at Lord’s Cricket Ground in North London during the 1950s and 1960s, and it’s clear he was quite a fan of the sport.

When his “ninth life ended” in 1964, Peter was given a singular tribute, becoming the first and only animal to receive an obituary in the cricketing bible Wisden – a real honour, and testament to his reputation at Lord’s:

Cat, Peter, whose ninth life ended on November 5, 1964, was a well-known cricket-watcher at Lord’s, where he spent 12 of his 14 years. He preferred a close-up view of the proceedings, and his sleek brown form could often be seen prowling on the field of play when crowds were biggest. He frequently appeared on the television screen. Mr SC Griffith, Secretary of MCC, said of him: “He was a cat of great character and loved publicity.”

I reckon he would be great friends with the modern-day Barmy Army…

Sadly, it appears there are no actual photos of Peter himself in existence, despite his many television appearances, so you’ll have to make do with a picture of a rather handsome model cat instead!

Vintage Animal Magic: ‘Dog Fashions’ (1958)

The world is a thoroughly horrible place at the moment. Every day it seems to get worse and worse. I don’t know about you, but I’m spending a lot of time looking at pictures of cute animals in an attempt to bleach my brain of the terrible things that appear on the news daily. It works – for a while, anyway. So here’s a newsreel snippet of some very trendy 1950s doggos in their designer outfits for you. I hope it makes you smile!

For more from British Pathé (including some fascinating film on vintage fashion for humans), follow their YouTube channels here and here.

Playlisting: Sporting Animals

Usually, my Playlisting posts involve music, but this one is a little different. Today, we’ll be overrun by pine martens on the pitch, alligators and capybaras on the golf course (not at the same time, obviously), and sheep on the football field – plus a demonstration of the need for goat line technology, an invasion of plastic pigs, psychic octopi, the penguin cup final, various avian pitch invaders, cats with a fascination for ball games, and lots and lots and lots of dogs. Dogs love football. And we all love a dog on the pitch.

This playlist was originally compiled as a bit of fun for the members of an online football prediction league I play in, but it seemed a little unfair not to share the hilarity with a wider audience – so it’s time to meet a selection of sporting (and not so sporting) animals…

If you know of any sporty animal videos that can be added to the playlist, post a link in the comments or tweet me!

Vintage Animal Magic: ‘The Naughty Otter’ (c.1916)

Here’s something short and sweet to begin this new series of vintage film treats from the BFI National Archive. Regular readers will be aware that I have a fondness for river creatures (you can see my most recent encounter with such wildlife here), so when I came across this hundred year old snippet of film I just couldn’t resist.

The antics of this very cheeky little otter were filmed around about a century ago by Charles Urban, an American-born film-maker and producer. Despite being born on the other side of the Atlantic, Urban had an important influence on early British cinema generally – including producing some early examples of wildlife films, a genre which remains highly popular on British TV. We are still fascinated by otters too, although it is not often that we see one in the kind of environment that Urban found here!

For more from the BFI National Archive, visit their website or their excellent YouTube channel.

Bats in the Belfry: Bats in fact and fiction

The bats have left the bell tower
The victims have been bled
Red velvet lines the black box

Bela Lugosi’s dead…

Bauhaus – ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ (1979)

Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some news for you, Bauhaus. The bats are unlikely to have left the bell tower, no matter which classic cult horror movie legend has just passed into the great beyond, because bats don’t often tend to roost in belfries. According to the Bat Conservation Trust (pdf), bats do roost in churches – it’s just they seem to find bell towers far too noisy, dusty and draughty for their purposes (and who can blame them). Sorry to ruin the illusion!

Honestly, it’s true, bats really aren’t as scary as all that, despite the continued attempts of Halloween tradition to try and convince us otherwise. I’m very fond of the little critters (they’re seriously cute – no, they really are!), and I find their lives fascinating. Which is why, this Halloween, I’ll be looking at bats in much more detail, and trying to separate the facts from the fiction.

The basic bat facts are these. Bats are the only true flying mammals. Rather weirdly, their wings are similar in structure to the bones in a human hand. Most bats eat insects, navigating and finding their prey in the dark using echolocation, which works in a similar way to sonar. Bats are found the world over, and make up about 20% of all mammals across the globe (over a quarter here in the UK).

The Ducks of Bodiam

“Don’t look now, she’s got a camera!”

I realised recently that we haven’t had any ducks round here for absolutely ages. So, when I spotted a few relatively friendly mallards on a family trip to Bodiam Castle in East Sussex not so long ago, I decided that a new duck post was definitely in the offing. And when I say I spotted a few mallards, I actually mean there were loads of them. They were absolutely everywhere. They didn’t seem that bothered by humans either (their collective look of disdain when a small boy came hurtling up the path towards them, enthusiastically yelling “OOOOH, HELLO DUCKS!” kinda said it all).

Watch out… squirrels about!

Out for a pleasant walk by the Thames in the sunshine last Sunday, I turned a corner to find this gang of cheeky rodents – in fact, this lot weren’t the only grey squirrels in sight. Tempted by the remains of picnics and ice creams (as well as the seeds and buds of the many mature trees in the area), squirrels were bounding round everywhere I looked. As I walked through the shady green grounds of York House in Twickenham with my camera in my hand, they seemed to be edging ever closer to me, circling me as I strolled – their fear of humans almost non-existent after so many years of posing for photographs and being cute for scraps of food. It almost felt as if I were in the opening scenes of some weird, squirrelly horror movie, so I quickly pocketed my camera and left, breathing a sigh of relief…

I think I’ll stick with ducks in the future!

Quote of the Day: Owen Paterson on those pesky British badgers…

To absolutely no-one’s surprise, the controversial badger cull trial is in trouble. There appears to be confusion over how many badgers there actually are in the trial area to begin with, and the government’s targets for killing these beautiful creatures have not, it seems, been met – leading to an extension to this pilot cull being requested in order to do so. The Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, who is very much in favour of the cull, was asked about this in a BBC interview today:

BBC News Interviewer: What you describe there as success, the critics will argue has been a failure on all levels. You didn’t estimate the number of badgers in the area correctly in the first place, you haven’t reached the 70% target of killing badgers that you set yourself at the beginning of this and now the trial has to be extended. You’re moving the goalposts on all fronts.

Owen Paterson: No, that’s not right at all. The badgers moved the goalposts. We’re dealing with a wild animal, subject to the vagaries of the weather and disease and breeding patterns.

BBC News Interviewer: Well, doesn’t that make the cull ridiculous in itself then?

Well, yes. Yes, it does. But the cull has always been ridiculous in itself. And Paterson is quite right when he points out that badgers are wild animals, although I’m not sure how that would make them responsible for changing the rules of football – let alone a basic human inability to count correctly or shoot straight. Indeed, I suspect the badgers are probably less on the wild side and more like absolutely livid over all this stupidity. So livid, in fact, that I like to think they’ve run away with the goalposts so poor Mr Paterson can’t play football…

Seems I wasn’t the only one amused by the possibilities of this mental image – over at usvsth3m.com, they’ve got a fun Owen Paterson’s Badger Penalty Shoot-Out game where you can try to get the ball past a group of sneaky goalpost-moving badgers. It’s not as easy as it looks – the badgers beat me every time!