Like a dying duck in a thunderstorm

Necrophiliac ducks, duck murderers, murderous ducks, and totally true facts about storms

In honour of one of my favourite figures of speech, week 2 of duck month (this is what everybody calls June now) is going to be a list of both duck and thunderstorm related stuff. The thunderstorm ‘facts’ are from an old piece of writing I did for mine and Sophies Amtrak Adventures zine, inspired by a terrifying storm¹ in Terlingua.

Next week is a piece on death and ducks and magical thinking, the week after is a piece on ducks and romance.

Duck stuff - featuring lots and lots of links

1. I went to a mediocre Medieval fair last weekend and all I got was this really beautiful book on ducks²

   

   

2. When 28,800 rubber ducks got lost at sea

3. Lesbian ducks

4. Wikipedia’s List of birds displaying homosexual behaviour - featuring lots of ducks

5. A Lorca poem that starts

   Beneath the multiplications
   is a drop of duck’s blood.
   Beneath the divisions
   is a drop of sailor’s blood.
   Beneath the additions, a river of tender blood,
   a wending river that sings

6. Martin Maurer’s Big Duck building in Flanders, New York. Originally built in 1931, as a shop to sell ducks and duck eggs.

   

7. Duck kills man

8. Men kill duck

9. Pet duck leads police to body of missing woman

10. Longboi, the “unusually tall duck” from York university who went viral in 2021.

    

11. Fun duck headlines. A 19 year old piece from The Guardian - Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers or this piece from The Register - Boffin honoured for necrophile gay duck paper.

12. A Basho haiku

    The sea darkens;
    the voices of the wild ducks
    are faintly white.

13. A lonesome duck in Oz

14. The world’s loneliest duck, who lived and died on the island of Niue. He was blown in on a storm, and he lived in a puddle.

15. An academic paper I would like to read (but I don’t have a login for JSTOR) - "Like a Dying Duck in a Thunderstorm": Complex Weather Systems through the Lens of Folk Belief and Language

    the article examines the intersection between science and the supernatural and the ways in which magical thinking can transform these observations into folklore. KEYWORDS: ducks, weather, superstitions, supernatural, science

True facts about storms

1. At any given moment there are approximately 2000 storms happening somewhere in the world. Each one is meant for one person only, you will know in your heart of hearts if the storm is yours or not.

2. If you are born during a storm you will become a successful artist but you will never know how to be faithful.

3. “The calm before the storm” is a lie. There is no calm, there is an unrelenting pressure that pushes you down into the warm dusty ground like an overbearing bully. It’s hot and humid and heavy and it sticks to your skin until you want to burst out of it. It will wrap around you until it has suffocated every bit of joy out of you.

4.  It’s a proven fact that most decisions to divorce are made in the lead up to a storm.

5. No matter how fervently a local woman on a Terlingua porch might deny it storms have a smell. If you want to make a perfume that smells like storms you needs only three notes; ozone, geosmin, and petrichor. Everything terrifying smells beautiful, everything beautiful smells terrifying.

6. There is a small village in Leeds called Calverly that has never experienced a storm. Nobody knows why, and most likely nobody ever will.

7. James Dickey once said , “A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain and hopes to get struck by lightning”. He is wrong, a person who stands outside in the rain and actively hopes to get struck by lightning is a fucking moron³. A poet is the lightning.

8. Colpo di fulmine is the Italian phrase for when love strikes like lightning. A recent survey was carried out among couples who had celebrated a fiftieth wedding anniversary, it was found that 97% had fallen in love during a thunderstorm.

9. The safest place to be during a storm is inside a small pine chest clutching onto a soft blue blanket with one hand.

1. I’m actually terrified of all storms so this means nothing, but all the storms in Texas were supersized.

2. This isn’t totally true, I got a bunch of other books too, and enjoyed an organ recital where I watched the musicians feet moving like marionette puppets for half an hour.

3. I once dated a man who told me about the time he worked as some kind of firefighter in the mountains and got caught in a storm and stuck his spade in the air hoping to get struck by lightning. In your 20s you can mistake this kind of buffoonery for poetry if you squint your eyes real hard.