As a graduate of Oregon State University, I can only wistfully wish we’d had these fellas on our football team.

You probably don’t want to follow that link if you have anything important you need to do in the next few days.

BTW, information about the schoolteacher I mentioned can be found at http://mfarrell.typepad.com/ukrainestudytour2006/2006/10/about_me_john_l.html, which shows what a small world it is.

“To set the seal on his fame, our author even has his own lightbulb joke … paying loving homage to the thesaurus-bashing which helped him through those mindboggling feats of dictation against time. ‘How many Fanthorpe pseudonyms does it take to change a lightbulb, to replace it, to reinstate it, to substitute for it, to swap it, to exchange it, to renew it, to supersede or supplant it, to provide a proxy, to put another in its stead, to …?’ There is no recorded case of an audience having stayed around long enough for the answer.”

Of course they’re mute. They’re telepathic.

You are so right about the hilariously over-long, irrelevant barge and other river-craft-related infodump by the barge folk, concluding with them all dying.

this entire book was a vicious blow against the rodents, dreamed up by the mustelids.

there it is, up in the left corner: “badger books”, with a picture of a giant mustelid mammal gazing down on the defamatory spectacle it has published.

there are no giant beavers, john. this is just anti-rodent propaganda spread by the mustelidae to stick it to the rodentia, to denigrate them, belittle them, disadvantage them, and lower them in the eyes of their fellow mammals. it’s a weasely thing for them to do, and they otter be ashamed of themselves for being such skunks, but then again their opponents are rats, and pretty squirrely ones at that.

Is there somewhere on these interwabs a compendium of these figures? I saw the evil revolutionary one (“look at how the ideals I speak of are dicredited, because of me being an asshole”) on Battlestar Galactica. There are quite a few of them, and they’re lots of fun.

On the wider subject of beaver jokes, there is a series of children’s picture books about “Little Beaver” – the author has also written “Rachel Fister’s Blister”, which makes me suspect she’s on a mission.

On the other hand, Karen Wallace and Mick Manning’s “Think of a Beaver” – a title apparently designed to invite a smirking response – is a seriously lovely book, a poetic description of a beaver’s life in Hiawatha-style trochaic tetrameter, with drawings in gorgeous subdued colours.

That is one of my favourite books, ever. I have been looking for an affordable copy for years.

And here is a true story: in 1982, I went for interview at one of Britain’s more august institutions of higher education. I was confronted by a trio of dons, who took me through some of the answers I’d written in my exam papers, then asked me what I had been reading lately. Rodent Mutations, I told them (I’d been lent a copy by a friend). Ah, they said, looking intrigued, is that some sort of scientific treatise (I was an arts candidate)? Not exactly, I said: it is about giant radioactive beavers who teleport themselves about the country and smash things with their huge flat tails. Ah, they said, and passed on to other subjects.

They sent a report to my school saying – so I was told by a teacher – “This candidate was rather strange.” But they gave me a place anyway.

The best part – if a 26-year-old memory isn’t playing me false – is the long monologue in which a canal boatman explains the etymology of the word “lighter”, just in time for a beaver-tail to punch his ticket.

The giant beaver of Pleistocene North America seems
to have weighed up to 200 pounds, maybe more.
As to whether it was telepathic, the fossils are mute.

There’s a scene fairly early-on in H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods
in which the scientist’s assistant bends over a pond at the end of the garden
into which the lab sink drainpipe has long since introduced the Food.
A giant dragonfly larva lunges out of the water to impale him on pincer jaws.

That, I can imagine.
Have you ever seen a live dragonfly larva up close?
Enough to give a man nightmares
even at a centimetre length. Voracious predators.
We’re lucky they don’t scale up to metres
(althought there were giant dragonflies back in the Permian, I think).