Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.
The Runcible Spoon
“They dined on mince and slices of quince,
which they ate with a runcible spoon.”
You’ll likely recognize the line from Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” which immediately came to mind in reading a list of wedding gifts to a distant relative in the 10 August 1928 edition of the Sussex Chronicle and Sussex Observer. They received two gifts of Runcible Spoons.
Browsing other hits on runcible in the British Newspaper Archive I found no mention of such utensils in lists of wedding gifts. 
Wikipedia defines it as “a fork with three broad curved tines and a sharpened edge, used with pickles or hors d’oeuvres, such as a pickle fork. It is used as a synonym for “spork”.”
Do you have a favourite crumboblious term that Lear or others used?
Sir Arthur Doughty
Word is that the statue of Sir Arthur Doughty, for many years has behind the LAC building at 395 Wellington, is being moved. Preparations will start next Friday with the move on Saturday. The destination is the LAC complex in Gatineu.
Gemini Ultra – Full Review
With the release of Google’s Gemini Ultra this week, including available in Canada which Bard that it replaces wasn’t, there;s a real competitatoe to GPT4.
This YouTube video, a bit specialist, but interesting if you like that kind of thing, is a good review. Personally I found Gemini was able to interpolate data using a cubic spline that Bing, which supposedly used GPT4, couldn’t do. In another case I had to be persistant to finally get it to extract matching items from a table of contents.
London Roll
A database of the records of eleven London livery companies can be searched on the website of London Roll. The records of additional companies are due to be added in the future. Via https://genealogyjude.com/2024/02/10/judes-gen-february-2024/
a temes loff
From the Essex Record Office blog.
Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Joseph Denis Wayne Laverdure, Sunday Thompson, Sylvia Smith, Teresa, Unknown,Wanda Sinclair .
