Travel Tuesday: National Poo Museum Opens in England

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like. It's a fox turd preserved in a resin sphere. I'm not a big fan of fox poo. It's sticky and smelly and is all over my son's skate park every morning. You see, the older kids who skate there at night leave food wrappers all over the place and the foxes nibble at whatever is left inside. Then the foxes dump right where they found the food, often pinning the wrapper to the pavement.

Perhaps this odd behavior will be explored in the new National Poo Museum at the Isle of Wight Zoo in England. This museum is a work in progress. Right now it's a "Poo at the Zoo" exhibition that will go on national tour in the fall. The focus is on crap, both human and animal, encapsulated in resin spheres in order to make them more visitor friendly. There's human poo, a tawny owl pellet containing the bones and teeth of its prey, 140 million year old fossil poo (called a coprolite by paleontologists) and a child’s shoe with a cat poo inside it.

The exhibition is lined with retro toilets. Visitors can lift the lids to discover amazing poo facts such as:

Probiotic foods are produced using healthy bacteria originally isolated from human feces.
If you take a dump on a train in Britain, there’s a 25% chance it will drop directly onto the tracks, because many carriages have never been fitted with sewage holding tanks.
Wombats are the only animal known to produce cubic poos, probably to prevent their territory-marking poos from rolling off the rocks where they are deposited.

There's also some more serious information about the need for proper waste treatment in developing countries. Poor sanitation leads to disease and is a major killer in some regions.

To read more about my personal experiences crapping around the world, see my guide to squat toilets post I did for blogger buddy Alex Cavanaugh a while back. And go visit the National Poo Museum!

Photo courtesy National Poo Museum.

Back from Eastercon!

I've been a bit silent of late, and that's because I was up in Oxford for my usual research/relaxation trip over Easter. In addition to seeing friends and burying myself in the Bodleian Library like I always do, I also attended Eastercon.

This is an annual science fiction convention in the UK. There were heaps of events and signings, plus lots of panels. I was on a panel about asymmetric warfare that was well attended, although not as well attended as the Real Ale bar! You can read my con report here.

Anyway, I'm back and excited to be finishing up We Had Flags, book three of my Toxic World series. There will be more posts up here too.

Military History Photo Friday: The Valentine Tank

Happy Valentine's Day! To celebrate the day where lovers are supposed to swoon over one another while gorging on chocolate, I'm giving you a photo of a tank. But not just any tank, the Valentine tank! Aren't I romantic?

The Valentine tank was produced in the United Kingdom at the start of World War Two. The story is that it got its name because the plans were submitted on Valentine's Day. There are several more prosaic explanations, such as the fact that a leading tank designer was named Valentine.

Anyway, these tanks were hugely popular, accounting for about a quarter of all tanks produced during the war in the UK. They were also the first tanks produced in Canada and saw service in the Soviet Red Army thanks to the Lend Lease program.

The Valentine tank owed its popularity to its good armor and durability and performed especially well in the North Africa campaign. Early models were armed with an underpowered 2-pounder cannon and the turret was cramped. The cannon was later replaced with a better six-pounder but by 1944 the Valentine was getting outclassed in the tank arms race. Heavier, tougher models became necessary, but the Valentine was still used as a backup.


Photo of Valentine Mark III with Scottish infantry in North Africa courtesy Wikimedia Commons.