"... the hyena disturbed the family's dinner guests by crunching one of the guinea pigs"

This is the Reverend Dr William Buckland ...

He was a Church of England priest and his doctorate was in Divinity.  He was also made Reader in Mineralogy and Geology at Oxford in 1815.  Beyond that he was the kind of all-out eccentric that you can't help but be fascinated by the moment you start reading about them.  Deeply inspired by the new thinking from France that rocks might contain extinct species of plants and animals he went on to become one of the great investigators of the past.  His house was filled with rocks, fossils and a menagerie of animals, he used the vertebrae of long-extinct reptiles as candle holders, and he owned a pet hyena, Billy, who had a habit of eating of upsetting Buckland's dinner guests by chomping the guinea pigs that roamed the house.  Not that this would have disturbed Buckland himself too much, given that the Reverend had set himself the goal of eating every species of creature on earth.  At one dinner, after his host showed off what was alleged to be the desiccated heart of Louis XIV, Buckland is supposed to have wolfed it down, saying "I have eaten many strange things before but never the heart of a king".  To cap it all, Buckland had a pet bear called Tiglath Pilesar, which he would sometimes take along to academic dos dressed in a student's cap and gown.  Though whether this was because of his high opinion of the bear or a low opinion of his students, none of the sources I've looked at say.

It slices as it dices as it chops as it ...

"Oh no, Sir knight ... Sorry, just a squire you say?  My apologies, only I thought, what with your noble bearing and the way your discerning eye led you to this little beauty ...  

Yes, the Excalibur XL.  Wonderful model of sword, sir - apologies again, so hard to call you 'squire', you've just got something so knightly about you  - wonderful model the Excalibur XL.  Lovingly handcrafted by artisan dwarfs from the finest organic starmetal and then sent to our enchantery deep within the mountains where a round-the-clock team of expert wizards imbue it with ....

... but I see I don't need to bore sir - there I go again - with the patter. Magical, sir?  Oh yes indeed!  Just look at the inscription ... 'Almost as if it were slapped on by an illiterate junior bellows-boy in the back of this very smithy', you say?  Sir has the knightly wit already, I see".

[The British Library needs someone to translate a magic sword for it.  This is, of course, marvellous].

Of course, I should really have been writing ...

I should have been writing.  For the past six months.  But I wasn't. At least not really.  A few sketches here, lines for video games there, lots and lots of script-editing and line-tweaking and, oh-dear-this-scene-will-have-to-go-ing.  And then a holiday. But no 'proper' writing.

But I did go to the Jackfield Tile Museum on holiday, where I read that in March 1830, Alderman Jones recorded in his diary that the landlord of The Lloyds Head ...

'was catched in bed with another man's wife at Worcester by the woman's husband, and the husband stuck a pickel in his backside which caused him to run away without his cloths and after that he offered 15 shillings to make it up'.

... which makes up for everything.