The Doctrine of ‘Queer’ Signatures I’m not in the habit of reading Pink News, the website which is neither pink nor news. I was drawn to it by yet another widely reported post by paedophile apologist Peter Tatchell. The first post of his I engaged with here was this: Gay Times introduces: Tranimals! His latest crime against science, reason, fact and logic concerns sex-changing Pheasants: “Female pheasants can change sex characteristics & become ‘drag kings’, says museum. When female pheasants stop laying eggs, their brown feathers turn into the brightly coloured feathering typical of ma ..read more

I was immediately drawn to this arrangement of fossil shells in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia. Glorious, isn’t it? I think nature makes the best art. In many cases I’ve enjoyed going to natural history museums more than art galleries because the art is better ..read more

Each of these seats is a carefully laid trap. It’s a system which has evolved to take €18 off each tourist who is tempted by them in exchange for a small cup of coffee. To be fair, you do get a view of Piazza San Marco in Venice while you drink it, so maybe you’re renting the space rather than buying a drink. More from Venice Rettile ittiosauro There's an Ichthyosaur fossil displayed at the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia. They evolved around 250 million years ago and… read more It’s a carefully laid trap Each of these seats is a carefully laid trap. It's a system which has evolve ..read more

As a child I never understood why people said an octopus had tentacles. Surely they’re octacles? An octopus’s tentacles are multi-function. Just imagine having something you can eat, move, hunt, taste and mate with. No, perhaps best not to imagine it. The fish market in Venice has a fabulous array of fresh produce. This octopus caught my eye, with its large suckers and central beak. Octopus have copper in their blood rather than iron, so their blood is blue rather than red. Copper isn’t quite as efficient as carrying oxygen as iron, so octopus have to keep their blood pressure high, helped by ..read more

‘Trilobite con pista’, it says. No, it’s not an item on the Italian menu in the restaurant at lunch time, but the label on a fossil in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia. The Italian for Trilobite is clearly Trilobite, but what does ‘con pista’ mean? ‘Con’ must mean ‘with’ and ‘pista’ must mean ‘track’, like piste is a skiing track. It’s a Trilobite with its tracks. Sometime in the distant past, in the Cambrian era (it’s the Cambriano in Italiano), a Trilobite scurried across the muddy sea bed, leaving its tracks and then met a catastrophic death which preserved every outline of its body ..read more

You may know Peter Tatchell best for his views on reducing the age of consent and on sexual relationships with children. He’s more frequently referred to as a ‘veteran LGBTQ campaigner’. His views on inter-generational sex mean I don’t think he should be on the mainstream media so frequently. His latest post on X (formerly Twitter) shows his new-found but profoundly misguided interest in basic biology: The article he links to from Gay Times by Fran Tirado is deeply embarrassing to anyone who isn’t a religious convert to Gender Identity Theology. So is Peter Tatchell’s understanding of it. Try ..read more

Six floors, eighty steps, 28 metres and €9. That’s the spiral staircase named after snails, ‘del Bovolo’, in Venice. The Palazzo was built in the 15th Century and clearly wasn’t dramatic enough, so they added the external spiral staircase in 1499. Lord Byron and John Ruskin visited, so that’s good enough for us. We spent well over an hour looking over the city of Venice from the top, and then climbed down again, like snails ..read more

Gondoliers in Venice appear to earn a top salary of €100,000. For that I’d expect some adherence to uniform standards. We saw several who clearly weren’t taking their status seriously, and wearing white trainers or baseball caps. If you’re going to pay them €80 for a brief trip out, it’s the least they can do to wear black shoes and a proper boating hat with a flowing ribbon. Wandering around the maze of tiny canals, we see a beautiful scene, as a couple has hired a singer and a guitarist and are being serenaded from the back of their gondola. It sounds so beautiful echoing around the high wa ..read more

I’m astonished every time I see detail in fossils. Their age, the heat and the pressure they have been subjected to, and the often random nature of their discovery make it extraordinary that we can see exactly what they were when they were living. Here’s a great example from Venice’s Natural History Museum: On the left is a fern and on the right is a horsetail. Or, as the Italians have it, ‘Fronde di felci e equiseti’. Ferns: Ferns, mosses and liverworts Horsetails: Horsetails from the Palaeozoic ..read more

A visit to the natural history museum in Venice can be a bit of a shock for those unprepared for a full-on trophy room. These are the trophies of Count Giuseppe de Reali, a passionate ‘big game’ hunter. He lived from 1877-1937. His ‘trophies’ didn’t ..read more