Research Hole: Elephant House
Sometimes while my hands are idle waiting for the devil to come and fill them, a topic plops in my lap. My librarian brain and my curiosity brain seize on the topic and follow it where it goes. For most people, this can be known as a Wiki hole where you look up after three hours, twenty-nine tabs deep on your browser after going to Wikipedia to find out how much tigers weigh. For librarians, this can often include not only websites, but books, articles, maps, and sometimes a phone interview with an actual person.
Today it was the simple term "elephant house."
Started simple enough. A friend Charlotte showed me a picture of her friend's new dog. "Pixie [the dog] is only nine pounds now, but in a minute she'll be ten and full grown. They want her to be friends with Beau." Beau is Charlotte's full grown golden retriever a loveable oaf of a dog.
"Pixie can ride around on Beau in one of those… those houses like elephant's have to carry…" and I was off, not able to bring to mind the terms I was looking for like "litter" or "palanquin" or the most correct "Howdah."
But oh friends, what I did find.
The first was "The Elephant House," a nice little house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts that is now a museum of its former resident, Edward Gorey. Gorey was a Tony-award winning costume designer, artist, and collector of off-the-wall things in his home, some from the side of the road. I did not delve deep enough to find a reason for it to be called the Elephant House but did note that it has a magnolia tree out front, an oddity for the region.
The next stop on this tour is Toronto, Canada and a house with a nine and a half foot tall plaster white elephant out front. The elephant was an art project and placed in front of the house in 2003. The placement of the statue was for the lulz.
Then the crown jewel, Lucy the Elephant in Margate City, New Jersey. A sixty-five foot sculpture proudly proclaimed "the oldest roadside attraction in America" by some and "the oldest surviving example of zoomorphic architecture on Earth" according to Lucy's handler, I shit you not, named "Richard Helfant." While Lucy once had actual living conditions, now she is an oddity with painted toenails and the inside the color of "gastric pink" to match intestines. For a brief moment in 2020, she was an AirBnB for $138 a night.
What kind of holes do you find yourself in while on the Internet? Let me know how far you have found yourself from shore.