Article for 2008 Jan 18

2008

2008 Jan

Jan 18 Fri

In Games, the pitch was so water-logged you’d need to be a fish if you wanted to play any sport (except swimming, kayaking, sailing, or water polo et cetera) on it. As we were not fish, we got to use the library computers instead. There’s a public-domain picture of a wolf on Wikimedia Commons (like Wikipedia but with pictures instead of encyclopedia entries), and this single image has nearly twenty million pixels in it! Just my luck that in Latin we’re translating a story about a wolf (lupus in Latin) on the computer!

Note: the wolf-picture is captioned “Canis lupus laying”. This does not mean that wolves lay eggs. The caption should really be “Canis lupus lying” because “lying” means “being in a horizontal position” whilst “laying” means “putting something else in a horizontal position”. If a bird lays an egg, the egg lies in the nest.