2 bits

A delightful little story at the Guardian about an Italian snail that stowed away on imported Victorian stonework (via paperpools):

The snail, Papillifera bidens, was thought to have arrived on a balustrade from the Villa Borghese in Rome in 1896, and with suitably snail-paced progress seems to have taken more than a hundred years to reach stonework 60 yards away.

And courtesy of Julia Hoban, Jilian Mincer at the WSJ on "butter heads"...

The sow of feeling

At the Guardian, Andrew O'Hagan on stories of talking animals.

(Annoyingly his new novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, which sounds utterly delightful, is not published in the US until December. Another new book I very much covet is Barbara Trapido's Sex and Stravinsky, which doesn't seem to have a US edition at all - hmmm, might have to order some books from England, Trapido I think I cannot wait for...)