Nobody had
heard of Chelyabinsk,
a provincial Russian town in the Urals until a meteorite fell there last
winter...... Unless your holiday reading happens to be ‘The Diamond Chariot’ by
bestselling Russian author Boris Akunin, in which his hero Erast Fandorin foils
fiendish Japanese ninja infiltrators attempting to disrupt Russian
communications and thwart their military efforts in the Siberian Pacific. Among
their dastardly machinations was a plan to blow up the Alexander
Bridge in Syzra, the largest bridge in
Europe at the time’ by planting a bomb on a goods train to Chelyabinsk!!
And did you
know that in ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ‘, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing account of life
in a 1950s labour camp the term ‘Ichthyosaur’ is used as friendly banter to
denote stupid old fool. Thereby showing what an educated lot the political
prisoners in the Gulag were.
Aepyornis,
the ‘Giant Elephant Bird’ has been extinct for at least 300 years. It was 3
metres tall, weighed up to 400Kgs and laid one of the largest eggs known in the
natural world. Recently the eggs have
caused much excitement and frenzy at auction.
H.G. Wells’ collection of short stories ‘Tales of Wonder’ contains a ripping
yarn entitled Aepyornis
Island in which a
castaway hatches an Aepyornis egg and cohabits a desert island with the bird as
it grows to massive adulthood, shades of recent film The Life of Pi. Of course
the story ends badly!