The carcinization of my mind
Hello and welcome to Adam's Notes for August 31, 2023. I'm Adam.
Lately I’ve been thinking about crabs.
It’s mostly because of the hubbub over on Bluesky about Crab Tales Magazine, a microfiction journal about crabs that seems to have popped up overnight, almost on a whim.
I’ve been interested for a while now in the Batrachomyomachia, a Greek mock-epic sometimes attributed to Homer about a brief battle between frogs and mice, and crabs happen to play a pivotal role. So I wrote a jokey little piece on that theme and sent it in. I figure it won’t get published but there’s no harm in trying.
But then as soon as I sent it in I remembered this fascinating story I read recently about a new species of crab that lives only in the sewers beneath the Roman Forum. From Scientific American:
The crabs were not everywhere under the city. They appeared (and appear) to live in only one place, in the center of Rome near the Roman Forum. A small river once flowed through Rome to the larger Tiber River, but in 20 BC the Romans altered this river, turning it into an underground canal of sorts, which continues to run through clay pipes beneath the city. This river, now called the “Cloaca Maxima,” is mostly but not totally underground. It is exposed for roughly three hundred feet, through the course of which it is just a few feet wide and inches to feet deep, depending on the rain.
If you look closely as it passes through that space, you can get a glimpse of an underworld—the realm of the crabs. It is perhaps merely a quirk of history that the crabs like to live in the sewers of ancient Romans more than they like to live in the rivers of modern Rome. Either that or the Romans were so much more clever and organized than we are that their sewers are cleaner than our rivers.
The crabs in the Cloaca Maxima appear isolated from other similar crabs, the nearest of which live twenty or thirty miles away.
The Roman sewer crabs grow slower but live longer and become fatter than other crabs. It’s possible that these crabs have lived in the Cloaca Maxima since it was built 2000 years ago.
In racking my brain in trying to figure out where I’d first read about the Roman sewer crabs, I stumbled on this other story reminding me that horseshoe crabs are milked for a medically special chemical produced by their blood, and then released back into the sea. But apparently this system isn’t working, and more needs to be done to protect them.
I couldn’t help but kick myself, thinking that either of these stories might’ve inspired something more original from me.
And then of course back home in Cape Breton a lot of my friends’ parents were in the snow crab fishery when I was growing up. Fishing was strange, because it was all around you and yet you never really heard about it except when some conflict blew up, between the government and fishermen, between settler and Indigenous fishermen, or between fishermen themselves. I don’t think I could bring myself to write fiction about it directly, but it something that’s always there lurking in the back of my brain.
So: crabs.
Pepys Show
On Tuesday, August 28, 1660, Samuel Pepys starts to worry that one of his servants, Will (surname unknown), has been stealing money from him.
On Wednesday, August 29, Will denies any theft with “the greatest subtlety and confidence in the world”, but Pepys’s wife discovers the theft is worse than they thought. Pepys talks to the boy’s father, intending to send him home. That night, “after we were all a-bed, the wench* (which lies in our chamber) called us to listen of a sudden, which put my wife into such a fright that she shook every joint of her, and a long time that I could not get her out of it. The noise was the boy, we did believe, got in a desperate mood out of his bed to do himself or William [Hewer] some mischief. But the wench went down and got a candle lighted, and finding the boy in bed, and locking the doors fast, with a candle burning all night, we slept well, but with a great deal of fear.”
*Jane Birch, the Pepys’ maid and Sam’s future mistress
On Thursday, August 30, Pepys writes, “We found all well in the morning below stairs, but the boy in a sad plight of seeming sorrow; but he is the most cunning rogue that ever I met with of his age.”
On Wednesday, September 5, he ends Will’s indenture and has a word with the boy’s father. In the evening, Pepys and his wife sup late on lobster and rabbit. Yum. At some point after that, Jane Birch talks Sam into hiring her brother Wayneman, then ten or twelve years old.
Things didn’t go much better for Wayneman.
Claire Tomalin, in her excellent biography Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, reports that Wayneman ran away from the Pepys household in 1663 after being beaten for playing with gunpowder on Guy Fawkes’ Night and then doing something ‘unfit to name’ at Sam’s respectable cousin Robert Pepys’ house in Brampton. Tomalin reports, “Pepys saw him playing on Tower Hill several days later; he must have been living in the streets, and in his best suit too. Pepys sent the Seething Lane porter to fetch him, made him change into his old suit and sacked him on the spot.”
Wayneman’s final appearance in the diary will come in November 1663, when Pepys makes an offhand remark that he’s heard Wayneman’s new employer is preparing to ship him off to the plantations of Barbados as an indentured servant. Pepys refuses to intervene “out of love for the boy,” because in London Wayneman’s bad behaviour will likely lead him to the gallows.
Links
#HeistWatch: High-altitude heist shocks Switzerland. Thieves “ascended to an altitude of 2,350m and traversed gorges on narrow steel cables - all to rob a collection box.” The article goes on to to mention that there’s been a spate of Swiss ATM robberies lately, which led me to a couple of short articles about Swiss ATM robberies. Apparently the Swiss are a regional holdout, in that they prefer to use cash while their neighbours are closer to being cashless. Also the highway system allows people to hit ATMs in remote towns and then quickly flee the country. Switzerland averaged one ATM robbery a week last year.
Live worm found in Australian woman’s brain. No, it wasn’t Aimee Terese. The roundworm was 8cm long and of a species that until now has only been known to inhabit pythons.
From the archives: apparently the IRA once attempted a kidnapping of Canadian bread-price fixer Galen Weston.
Roman portable sundial in the shape of a cured ham. “Vertical lines on the grid represent the months of the year, while the horizontal lines indicate the number of hours past sunrise or before sunset.” Said to be accurate to within a quarter of an hour.
The Strange Secretive World of North Korean Science Fiction. “When you experience familiar plot structures and tropes but with the protagonists and antagonists reversed, there's a distancing effect that makes you question why only certain configurations of good and bad roles feel uncontroversial.”
Gold bar puzzle: This one’s tricky. Police in Zambia are investigating a private plane found filled with guns and what seemed like millions in cash and gold, except that the gold was counterfeit. It seems someone sold the gold, which was mostly zinc and copper, directly on the tarmac to the Egyptian crew of the plane. An Egyptian journalist was arrested for reporting on the case, but let go after a social media outcry and a leak from the Zambian police implicating three Egyptian military officers and a senior police officer. BBC ends the story suggesting Egyptian military officers and businessmen are desperate to get money out of the country, fearing that Sisi’s regime is about to fall. An Egyptian site reports that Zambia has arrested a Dutch, a Spaniard, and a Latvian in connection with the case (if google translate can be trusted) and also that the supposed Zambian ringleader was caught trying to flee to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Meanwhile a facebook account called Zambian Whistleblower has more details on the Zambian suspects, who are facing espionage charges. There are a lot of interesting news stories from Africa, but it’s hard to follow at the best of times and getting even harder with the ongoing collapse of twitter.
Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, especially if you’ve made it this far. I have a couple of Bluesky invites if anyone wants one, just message me on one of the apps. This has been Adam’s Notes for August 31, 2023. My name is Adam, and you can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, Letterboxd, and Goodreads.