Category: goo brain

A True Holiday Story

White MaskA few years ago, Jessica, my brother Codos, and I, were Christmas shopping in an HMV, when we encountered something I have never forgotten.

A woman entered the store from the mall beyond, a bundle in her arms which she held with some care. As she moved to speak with a friend who’d already been browsing the albums, the angle changed and I could see what she was cradling.

It looked like a child, a boy of maybe five, but his skin was a shade I’m hard-pressed to describe. Pea-soup green maybe, or the colour of lush but rotting jungle foliage, and with an aspect as if a portion of skin might peel away and fall to the floor at any moment; not in the sense of a dollop of costume make up, but in that of an advanced leper.

The most unsettling part were the boy’s eyes, lolling as his mother turned about the store, bright against his Lovecraft-ian face.

I certainly do not mean to offend, I have no idea what condition the child might have been suffering from, but it’s a hard image to shake: the tender affections of the woman as she cradled a boy who looked like he may have been dead a week.

Post-Depression

Great Depression Soup Line I understand that there’s a lot to dislike in processed foods and sugary snacks, but I sometimes wonder if the current “obesity epidemic” is partially a long term backlash to The Great Depression.

My grandmother, (or Memere, as we call her,) wasn’t the most obsessive of the post-downturn hoarders that I’ve met, but throughout most of her life she maintained a small vegetable garden in the backyard; she made sure plates were full, that the scraps were used for something (often soup), and that leftovers were treated with proper respect.

(It was also common for my grandfather, Pepere, to refer to bologna as “poor man’s steak”.)

I don’t see anything wrong with the way Mom handled things, but everyone I know was raised with the same refrain of “you’re not getting up from that table until you’ve cleared your plate”, or “finish your ——, or no desert”. Are these just echoes of our grandparent’s lack? A warning to finish now what we might not have tomorrow?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OPQqH3YlHA]

Tourism Of The Damned

It took me quite a while to track down, so I’m reposting this list of damned cities (neighbourhoods, suburbs, etc.) for future reference, but it should be noted that the original work of collecting them was all Kris Straub‘s.

  • Amity Park
  • Amityville
  • Arkham
  • Carcosa
  • Castle Rock
  • Celephais
  • Centralia
  • Crystal Lake
  • Cykranosh
  • Damascus
  • Dartmoor
  • Derry
  • Desperation
  • Dunwich
  • Eng’gha
  • Gomorrah
  • Hamelin
  • Hinamizawa
  • Innsmouth
  • Jericho
  • Jerusalem’s Lot
  • Kandor
  • Kingsport
  • Lavender Town
  • Leng
  • Lomar
  • Point Pleasant
  • Providence
  • R’lyeh
  • Rapture
  • Ravenholm
  • Roanoke
  • Sarkomand
  • Severn Valley
  • Shermer Il
  • Silent Hill
  • Sleepy Hollow
  • Sodom
  • Sunnydale
  • The Nameless City
  • Thebes
  • Threed
  • Ulthar
  • Yian

Omega Man Trial

Bone To Pick

Image from http://chachabowman.wordpress.comImage from this how-to on creating sugar skulls

As my brain slowly gathers momentum I’ll get back to posting things with a little more meat to them, but, for the moment, I have a number of random items to address, such as:

Jessica was asking me about the last Mulligan story – shouldn’t the skeleton have been burnt up in the crematorium as well?

It’s a common misconception.

Contrary to popular belief, the cremated remains are not ashes in the usual sense. After the incineration is completed, the dry bone fragments are swept out of the retort and pulverized by a machine called a cremulator to process them into “ashes” or “cremated remains”, although pulverization may also be performed by hand. This leaves the bone with a fine sand like texture and color, able to be scattered without need for mixing with any foreign matter, though the size of the grain varies depending on the cremulator used. Their weight is approximately 4 pounds (1.8 kg) for adult human females and 6 pounds (2.7 kg) for adult human males.

– Wikipedia

Knit Knots

The longest tentacles are 4-stitch icords, while all the others are 3-stitch icords. They started out as 3-inch, 4-inch, 5-inch, and 6-inch lengths. – Raving Toy Maniac

I have no idea how to read knitting instructions, but I do know what would make a great Christmas present for yours truly.
Cthulhu Scarf

– and, as a follow-up, a little holiday music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftld7Ohojg]

Flu

Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases

I was doing some reading to keep my mind off my stomach bug, and I came across this interesting observation about the 1918 flu pandemic:

In civilian life evolutionary pressures favour a mild strain: those who get really sick stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, go to work and go shopping, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches the evolutionary pressures were reversed: soldiers with a mild strain remained where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. – wikipedia

I thought I’d be fine when I got up this morning, but around 4am my stomach informed me otherwise. My hope is to do a Flash Pulp a day for the rest of the week, but I haven’t been able to rub two thoughts together for days, so we’ll see how that actually pans out.

The Trouble With History

John Cabot - Detail from "The departure of John and Sebastian Cabot from Bristol on their first voyage of discovery, 1497." Oil on canvas by Ernest Board, 1906.I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by these kinds of things, but sometimes you don’t realize something that you’ve been told all your life is wrong until you’ve pulled it out of the drawer and given it a good shaking out.

Imagine I built a time machine and traveled back to the 1480s to give John Cabot a handshake and a thumbs-up. I’ve been informed all of my life that this fellow was the man who discovered the nation of my birth, Canada, but if I were to walk up to him on the street and say “Hey, John, good one,” he’d likely have no idea who I was even talking to.

Zuan Chabotto, on the other hand, would have no problem giving me a fist bump.

In Italy he is known today as Giovanni Caboto, in Spain as Juan Caboto and in England as John Cabot.
[…]
As for the way he described himself, only one set of documents has been found bearing his signature. These are Venetian testamentary documents of 1484, on which he signed himself as “Zuan Chabotto”, Zuan being a form of John typical to Venice. – wikipedia

“What’s the big deal?” you may ask, but I tell you this: If, five hundred years from now, I’m largely remembered for being the second fellow to land on a planet outside of our solar system but everyone keeps referring to me as JRD Скинер, I’ll be pretty angry.

Avoid the Noid

Have you heard of the Telenoid R1?

I would say it’s currently the creepiest robot humanity has managed to create.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JyDQlHo1A]

From a BBC article:

Ishiguro’s system uses a motion-tracking webcam to transmit your voice, facial expressions and head movements to the Telenoid, via a high-bandwidth web connection.

The avatar produces only a rough approximation of real body language, but it is surprisingly easy to dupe oneself into regarding it as ‘human’. – more

Its intentions are relatively pure, but it’s impossible (for me, at least) to not find the idea of speaking to a naked, crucified, milky-white quadruple-amputee kind of disturbing.
Elfoid (Image From The BBC Article)

(Image from the BBC article linked above)

It certainly doesn’t help that the robot’s creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, is also attempting to create a miniature version he calls an ‘Elfoid’. These things just strike me as a little too close to the kodama from Princess Mononoke, and that’s a no go as far as a device I’d want to use to communicate to my loved ones with.
kodama

Junk Science

Chimney Sweep Van Dyke From Mary PoppinsWhile I was doing some research last night, I came across this nugget from Wikipedia:

The first cause of cancer was identified by British surgeon Percivall Pott, who discovered in 1775 that cancer of the scrotum was a common disease among chimney sweeps.
– more

This sparks so many questions that I don’t have the time right now to discover the answer to, foremost of which is “why”?

Is there some naughty secret to chimney sweeping that I’m not privy to?