An account of these events appears in Reminiscences of Old Sheffield, Its Streets & Its People by R.E.Leader, published 1896, where a group of men who had lived in the town in the 1840s are recorded in conversation during the 1870s.One, named as Johnson, says: “On the 12th September, 1839, the Chartists held a ” silent” meeting in Paradise square, which was dispersed by the soldiers and police. The Chartists reassembled in ‘Doctor’s field’, at the bottom of Duke street, Sheffield moor, where they were followed by the soldiers and police, and 36 prisoners taken. At the Town Hall, next day, which was guarded by the dragoons, and the doors kept by policemen armed with cutlasses, I saw several anxious mothers inquiring for their missing ones. Amongst the rest was the mother of a young man who has since been an influential citizen in St. George’s ward. He was tried at the assizes and acquitted. A night or two after the Doctor’s field meeting, hearing there was to be a Chartist meeting at Skye edge in the Park, my brother and I tried to find Skye edge, but not succeeding, met the Chartists coming away. They marched down Duke street, singing lustily a Chartist melody:”Press forward, press forward, There’s nothing to fear, We will have the Charter, be it ever so dear.–

Pigeons are provisional creatures. From their adopted urban habitats to their ever-changing ‘home-from-home’ but perhaps most provisional of all – their flocking. When flying, the flock is assembled (provisionally) based on a series of rules. These rules are not hierarchical but instead hold the flock in a self-organised criticality, a fragile interdependence which is vulnerable to change and collapse.(image: terraswarm, Brooklyn Pigeon Project) The flock is constantly reconfigured by the  movement of the birds at its fringes, who in a process known as peeling, become detached from the main body. These detachments provide and new and changing focus and gravitational centre for the flock; a community reassembled by a fluctuating set of circumstances.

Bill Oddie is writing his autobiography. The bird world waits with baited beaks…However the downside is the fact that he won’t be making a much anticipated contribution to the next issue of Fancy That. Meanwhile in place of Bill; Jacques de Vaucanson. The Canard Digerateur (Digesting Duck)   ”Most impressively, the Duck ate bits of corn and grain and, after a moment, excreted them in an altered form (fig. 6). Vaucanson said these processes were “copied from Nature,” the food digested “as in real Animals, by Dissolution. . . . But this,” he added, “I shall…shew…[on] another Occasion” (“L,” p. 21). By claiming that his Duck digested by dissolution, Vaucanson entered a debate among physiologists over whether digestion was a chemical or a mechanical process. Unfortunately his postponement of further explanations to “another occasion” aroused suspicions. Already in 1755 a critic accused the Duck of being “nothing more than a coffee-grinder” (JV, p. 479). Then in 1783, a close observer of the Duck’s swallowing mechanism uncovered an even greater deceit: the food did not continue down the neck and into the stomach but rather stayed at the base of the mouth tube. Reasoning that digesting the food by dissolution would take longer than the brief pause the Duck took between swallowing and expulsion, this observer concluded that the grain input and excrement output were entirely unrelated and that the tail end of the Duck must be loaded before each act with fake excrement.¹⁸ The Duck that pioneered physiological simulation was, at its core, fraudulent. On the other hand, this central fraud was surrounded by plenty of genuine imitation. Vaucanson was intent on making his Duck strictly simulative, except where it was not. Each wing contained over four hundred articulated pieces, imitating every bump on every bone of a natural wing. All the Duck’s movements (except the one just mentioned) were modeled upon exhaustive studies of natural ducks.” (http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v29/v29n4.riskin.html)   Perhaps this exposé is not as heartbreaking as it first seems. Maybe their beauty lies is the guarded disclosure of some but not all of their mystery. Perhaps we feel we know better than to believe that automata could think and remember and act independentlybut maybe we might take “unsettling delight…in knowing full well that [we are] being deceived.”                          Afterall,    ”nobody dreams of absolutes, like unbeatable automatic chess players, any more”  Dream on.  

 fancy-that1a.pdf             fancy-that-folding-instructions.pdf 

…Provisional construction consists in memories, in dreams, in stories. Memories, dreams and stories that will surely live and evolve long after the physical is gone…does that make them physical after all?

“Our culture is so naked, we don’t have events to fall back on. So many times, I fall into things, and I feel like I wish I had somebody — or a story — to fall back on that would get me through this, that would explain this. I wonder what we will leave behind. It’s just the blink of an eye and we’re gone. What will people dig up?” Ray LaMontagne

[go to Harry's Loft] 

1. any bird of the family Columbidae, having a compact body and short legs, esp. the larger species with square or rounded tails.

2. a domesticated member of this family, as one of the varieties of the rock dove.

3.Slang. a. a young, usually attractive, girl.

b. a person who is easily fooled or cheated; dupe.

4. Poker Slang. a card, acquired in the draw, that greatly improves a hand or makes it a winner.

5. archaic spelling of Pidgin.

6. Military Slang. An aircraft from one’s own side.

7. Slang One who is easily swindled; a dupe

8. An object of special concern; an affair or matter.

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