ScreenOS Cookbook

Colophon

The animal on the cover of ScreenOS Cookbook is a bulldog (Canis familiaris). Compact in size with short, stocky limbs that account for its peculiar walk, the modern bulldog usually has a friendly temperament, due largely to the recent work of breeders, that belies its aggressive reputation.

The dog is sometimes known as the English bulldog, perhaps for its ancestry: it was bred in England from a cross between a mastiff and a pug. But the name has other origins. In the 1600s, the dog—then bred for the qualities of “ferocity and courage”—was frequently used for bullbaiting, a violent spectator sport in which a bull tied by the horns with a long rope in the center of an arena defended itself from the attack of a bulldog by attempting to gore the dog’s abdomen. So ferocious was the bulldog that even after sustaining such an injury the dog would often continue fighting.

Before its name became common, the bulldog was known as Bondogge, Bolddogge, and then Banddogge, a name popularized by Shakespeare in Henry VI: “The time when screech owls cry and Banddogges howl and spirits walk and ghosts break up their graves.” Yet bullbaiting began well before Shakespeare, around the 13th century in England, when the Lord of Stamford came across two bulls fighting over a cow in a meadow. Upon seeing the fight, a local butcher’s dogs chased the bulls through the village and reportedly slaughtered the bulls after a brutal battle.

The Lord of Stamford enjoyed the fight so much that he offered ...