It’s wonderfully complex. A basilisk you still have to look at for it to kill you – it can’t kill you by just looking at you. The name comes from Greek for “little king”. Pliny thought it a snake. T.H. White (who wrote The Once and Future King and was a fan of all things medieval) once translated a medieval bestiary. I highly recommend it for many reasons, especially for his footnotes and commentaries. He suggests that the basilisk might be the King Cobra, which makes a lot of sense – “Basilisk” comes from the Greek for “king” after all. Pliny had suggested that the basilisk is incredibly venomous, as is the King Cobra. Furthermore, cobras as a class generally “spit” venom, and often try for the eyes. If you scratch it, the venom gets in your bloodstream and can kill you. So this basilisk can, indeed, kill wit the eyes if you happen to be looking at it when it “spits”. It’s a lot less tortuous argument than I’ve seen for other legends.
The basilisk was later said, by The Venerable Bede (8th century) to be born of a cockerel’s egg, and this began a confusion with the cockatrice, which was a rooster-headed dragon-like thing. In the 13th century someone traanslated “basilisk” as “cockatrice”, and in the Canterbury Tales Chacer mentions a basilicock, which seems calkculated to encourage confusion. Although the earliest cockatrices didn’t have that death stare thing, after the basilisk and the cockatrice became confused, the cockatrice got it, too.
Willy Ley, in one of his natural history essays, mentions the case of the Basilisk of Basel, Switzerland, which supposedly poisoned a well. The citizens dug into the well and found the basilisk, but it had been turned to stone. They took it out, the well became clean, and the citizens adopted the basilisk as their symbol. Ley suggests that the basilisk ruerned to stone was merely a concretion that had an odd shape, and was probably modified after its finding to make it look more like an animal. It supposedly resembled the picture by Aldrovandi that heads the Wikipedia article on basilisks.
I know it’s a different species. But I don’t think the people who concatenated the loose facts into a mythical creature knew or cared. A cobra id a cobra.
As I was looking through TikTok the other day, I saw a video where a grandpa was holding his grandchild who looked to be about 6 months old. He was going to give the baby a sip of water out of his water bottle. The mother flipped out and said that it is extremely dangerous to give babies water. As a mom of two, I had never heard of that. I had my kids way back in the 1900s - (1978 & 1985). I’m pretty sure I gave them water on occasion.
I Googled it, and sure enough, it says giving a baby under six months old can cause water intoxication, leading to swelling, seizures, coma, and brain damage.
I imagine giving infants a sip of water isn’t dangerous, but during a time when 100% of their nutritional needs are filled by giving them liquids, the one thing they absolutely don’t need is extra hydration.
Remember the scene in Goldfinger where 007 swims up to a beach in a wet suit, then takes it off to reveal he’s wearing an ivory dinner jacket underneath, so he can infiltrate a dinner party?
When I was an eight-year-old in 1964, I thought that was pretty cool. But when I watched it again as a 69-year-old a few months ago, I thought it was pretty ridiculous and implausible. Besides, it was obviously not a real wet suit (it was kind of satiny).
Well, according to A Spy Among Friends, about Soviet spy Kim Philby, MI6 actually pulled that trick off.
A Dutch agent named Peter Tazelaar was put ashore near the seafront casino at Scheveningen, wearing full evening dress and covered with a rubber suit to keep him dry. Once ashore, Tazelaar peeled off his outer suit and began to “mingle with the crowd on the front” in his dinner jacket, which had been sprinkled with brandy to reinforce the “party-goer’s image.” Formally dressed and alcoholically perfumed, Tazelaar successfully made it past the German guards and picked up a radio previously dropped by parachute. The echo of 007 may not be coincidental: among the young blades of British intelligence at this time was a young officer in naval intelligence named Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond books.
By definition, anything you wear under a wet suit is going to get wet. That’s why it’s called a wet suit. The “rubber suit” that Tazelaar was wearing was probably a dry suit. A properly working dry suit really does prevent water from entering, although is more difficult and complicated to operate than a wet suit.
If he needed several unobserved moments to come ashore and get out of the wet suit, it would probably be easier just to carry the dinner suit in a waterproof container.
An article I found reported that “Mythbusters tested wearing a dry suit over a dinner jacket in 2010 and also had success in keeping the clothes dry and looking fairly wrinkle-free after the ordeal.”
The book doesn’t go into further details, but I assume that since it was wartime, he used the radio to communicate and coordinate his activities with his handlers in Britain, like any other resistance fighter. The author reports that Tazalaar survived the war.
I also found this article about the mission in The Telegraph, but it’s paywalled, so I don’t know what details it reveals.
He was caught by the Gestapo on a subsequent rendezvous to pick up a couple of radio transmitters from a fellow resistance member. But:
He managed to bluff his way out, however, by sticking to his story of being a drunken reveller and offering his interrogators a drink from a bottle of genever, or Holland gin, which he had taken with him. A local policeman, luckily also a member of the Resistance, vouched for him, and the Germans let him go.
However:
But the Dutch Resistance was betrayed soon afterwards and he was unable to extract the two men he had been sent to rescue, although he was able to escape from the country himself.
Interesting. This incident, or something like it, features in the movie Soldier of Orange, based on the memoir of a Dutch agent.
It seems that the Dutch government’s agents suffered from the same problems as the agents and crucially radio operators sent by the British SOE, who were almost all captured and often turned by the Germans to send back disinformation (apparently the SOE leadership refused to believe that the operators’ deliberate errors were signs of trouble - see Leo Marks’s Between Silk and Cyanide).
Actor Creed Bratton who plays the self-named character in “The Office” was once a member of the rock band “The Grass Roots” - they had top-ten hits with “Midnight Confessions” and “Let’s Live For Today”
The reverse situation – German agents in England – was very interesting. The British Double Cross System used German agents who were captured in England or turned themselves in to British authorities to send carefully designed disinformation back to Germany. Analysis after the end of the war revealed that EVERY SINGLE German agent sent to England eventually was absorbed by the Double Cross System. There was not a single German agent in England who was not working for British interests.
Google tells me that this is a result of logging in California and lots of planting in the UK in the Victorian era. Redwoods thrive in British climate and grow at a faster rate.