TRACKS AND TICKS
Mysterious tracks in the snow and a fake African currency on X
ENIGMATIC TRACKS
In an event reminiscent of the famous “Devil’s hoofprints” mystery of 1855 (see FT70:65), Janice Heidt-Dubray was visiting a friend’s house in Prince Albert, Canada, shortly after a light snow fall, when she noticed a set of bizarre tracks crossing the lawn. “When I first got out of the car I noticed them there,” she said. “I thought this is so unusual. They come from her driveway to a point at the sidewalk and then off toward the pathway.” Knowing a heavy snowfall was due, she photographed the strange patterns to show her husband. “We looked for similar images online, and we saw some that definitely resembled a bird, but they weren’t as intricate as these were.” Heidt-Dubray concluded that the tracks were probably made by a magpie because “Just a week or two prior my husband was visiting his mother, and they were looking out the window and they saw a magpie… he said it looked like it was burying something in the snow and it kept going around and around and you could see the wing marks in the snow, so that’s what he suspected.” However, after seeing the photos, ornithologist Karen Wiebe from the University of Saskatchewan doubted the tracks were created by any kind of bird. “There’s no sign of any ‘bird footprint tracks’, and the snow is quite shallow, so one would expect to see some tracks with this large number of imprints,” Wiebe said. “And the round circles with feather-like projections in a long line appear to be too regular to be made by a bird... Also there is a deep divot/bare patch in the middle of the feather circles where the bird’s body and feet would have broken through the snow when it lifted off from the ground again… something not apparent in the photos.” Commenting that one of her husband’s co-workers suggested “homeless aliens”, Heidt-Dubray concluded, “Nobody seems to know what caused these.” panow. com, 8 Mar 2024.
She photographed the strange patterns to show her husband
FUNNY MONEY
Social media across Africa were enthused by an announcement on X (Twitter) from a grey tick account claiming to belong to the ‘Government of East Africa’. A grey tick is supposed to indicate an official account of a government or multilateral organisation and is bestowed by X as a sign of legitimacy. The post showed a specimen of what was said to be the new five sheafra banknote, complete with a coat of arms and a space for a signature from a central bank governor. The name sheafra was a combination of “shilling of East Africa” and “franc”, two currencies in use in East Africa, and was supposed to herald the introduction of the long-discussed common currency, like Europe’s Euro, for the eight country East African Community (EAC). The post swiftly went viral, being viewed more than a million times; major blogs picked it up, and it made headlines on one of Kenya’s most popular online media outlets, where it was reported as the launch of a new currency. However, the eight EAC countries – Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda – were quick to dismiss this claim, issuing a statement saying that “the Partner States’ journey to a single currency is still a work in progress”.
It turns out that “the sheafra” is the brainchild of a Ugandan named Moses Haabwa, the self-styled overseer of the nonexistent “Federal Republic of East Africa Government”. Haabwa describes himself as a private investigator who has worked in intelligence and says that he has also been appointed ambassador for an unnamed European dukedom. He claims to be leading a group that has been releasing “specimens” of different denominations of the sheafra on social media for three months, although there is no evidence of anyone apart from Haabwa being involved. “The one we released [last Sunday] was the last one we were to post. I didn’t tell anyone to tweet that we had ‘launched’, but how the media picked it [up] we don’t know”, he said, and explained that part of the reason behind the posts was to offer hope to East Africans that “things can be done.” He added that the EAC Secretariat “can’t run away from the truth, East Africans want unity.” Pressed on whether his actions were legal, Haabwa said, “We are in the process of making these things legal, step by step. Starting from the country we are in.” BBC News, 10 Mar 2024.
Although a devout republican, I feel sorry for Kate. Not only, of course, for her illness but for the ridiculous hysteria that greeted her family photograph. Photographers amateur and professional regularly edit their snaps. Why the devil not?
All this nonsense about conspiracies, based on a child’s misaligned hands, puts me in mind of this epigram by Thomas Babington Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” And editing photos evokes Jane Austen remarking that she “lop’t and crop’t” Pride and Prejudice.
The ancients, of course, had no photos to edit. Their version was in Roman terms known as Damnatio Memoriiae, meaning the chiselling out of a predecessor’s name from inscriptions, thus appropriating his/ her achievements, along with the fullscale demolition of statues. Although most associated with Roman emperors, this process goes back to Pharaonic Egypt; cf. Richard Wilkinson, ‘Damnatio Memoriae in the Valley of the Kings’ – abstract online from the Oxford Handbook (2014) of the same name, pp.335-46.
Describing the sudden fall of Tiberius’s all-powerful praetorian prefect Sejanus in AD 31, Juvenal (Satire 10, vv61-4) exults thus (Peter Green’s Penguin translation):
The head of the people’s darling glows redhot, great Sejanus,
Crackles and melts. That face, only yesterday, ranked
Second in all the world. Now it’s so much scrap metal,
To be turned into jugs and basins, frying pans, chamber pots.
Obvious modern comparison is the sudden arrest and liquidation of Stalin’s Secret Police boss Lavrenti Beria, and ensuing (as in the case of his many predecessors) toppling of his statues and erasure of him from official photographs, as down the ‘Memory Holes’ of 1984.
Princesses do not fare well in Greek literature. Agamemnon was quite prepared to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to obtain favourable winds for Troy. Andromeda was chained naked to a rock to be ravaged by a sea serpent (shades of Honeychile Rider in the film version of Dr No) to expiate some religious offence – she was rescued by the cavalry in the shape of Perseus on his winged horse Pegasus (once the name of a famous English amateur soccer team). Lower down this lurid chain comes Nausiceia in the Odyssey, charged with supervising the slave girls doing the palace laundry – can’t see any of our lot wrestling with a box of Tide… Read Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daughter for a delicious re-creation of her, echoing Samuel Butler’s idea that the Odyssey was composed by a woman – the poem has recently been translated into English for the first time by a woman – Emily Wilson.
Flashback to Andromeda, who has been an erotic touchstone from ancient to modern times. In Aristophanes’s Frogs the god Dionysus recalls wanking whilst reading Euripides’s eponymous play, since when her chained-to-a-rock image has been appropriated by the songstress Madonna.
From Macedonian real life I single out Thessalonike, sister of Alexander the Great. After his death in 323 BC, so the story went, she jumped grief-stricken into the sea and was transmogrified into a mermaid. Her occupation over the centuries was to ask sailors if Alexander was still alive. If they affirmed this, she granted them safe passage on. If not, she became a raging gorgon who, Godzilla-like, sent them to the bottom of the sea. For more on this rigmarole, see Gwendolyn MacEwen, Mermaids and Icons: a Greek Summer (1978), p73.
Kate is for her part no mermaid. Despite all her charms, she remains a Mere-Maid.
A couple of ill-fated Roman princesses. Julia, daughter of Augustus, was exiled by her imperial father to the small desert island of Pandateria for her lurid erotic life. Given his own sexual record, this was a strikingly hypocritical act. Centuries later, Julia was still remembered for her jokes, inventoried by Macrobius,
Saturnalia, bk 2 ch5, paras1-10. Truth to tell, they are not all that funny – much better ones in the
Philogelos (Laughter Lover – see my 1983 translation, plus various websites for modern comedians’ use of them). Two examples will do – they are all translated in ‘Julia’s Wit’ on the Diotima site. When a friend advised her to copy her father’s frugal ways and abandon her licentious public behaviour, she riposted, “He forgets he is Caesar, but I remember that I am Caesar’s daughter” – this starchy reply is somewhat reminiscent of Princess Anne who, when the Australian Prime Minister enquired after her mother, replied, “She is Not my mother; she is Her Majesty the Queen”
– to be fair to Anne, she is also widely credited with coining the word Naff.
The second one came when people wondered how, given her promiscuity, all her sons resembled her husband, she quipped, “I never take cargo on board unless the ship is full.”
After Julia came Livilla, who conducted an intrigue with the aforementioned Sejanus. When he fell, so did she. According to Dio Cassius, Roman History,
bk58 ch11, para7, Emperor Tiberius handed her over to her mother, who locked her up in a bedroom and starved her to death – clearly a Roman ‘Tiger Mother’…
Space for one Byzantine princess. Step forward Anna Komnena (AD 1083-1153), most famous for writing the Alexiad,
a biography of her royal father – such literary activity has never been common in the House of Windsor. But she was also famous for punishing her detested husband by a sexual trick which caused him great pain during intercourse – reverse of Mrs Simpson’s famous method of delighting Edward VIII.
We shall not further explore this delicate subject…
Kate spero recuperare faciet – ungrammatical Internet Latin (Look It Up) but my sincere wishes to Kate for a complete recovery…