First post from new laptop.
Author: Dan
Categories
Jack the Ripper
Categories
Pied Piper
Hypotheses for the origin of the Pied Piper of Hamelin:
- Piper = Paedo
- Piper = Death – Children died of disease/natural disaster
- Piper = Recruiter – Children leave on crusade/pilgrimage and never returned
- Children = Emigrants
While I can see the plausibility/likelihood of the emigration hypothesis I don’t quite see how it fits with the rats? In that sense disease fits best: a town plagued by diseased rats, the rats either die but not before the weaker members of the town’s population die from it or in poisoning the rats the children are also accidentally poisoned. The Piper represents Death taking away the rats, but then also the children – perceived punishment for reneging on a bargain with who/whatever.
Or perhaps it’s just a story – if anything even happened it happened several hundred years ago so I guess we’ll never know.
Things like this make me wonder about how well our history of the present will survive in the future – every generation must see its advances in recording history as so far ahead of their predecessors but with our advances in technology we’re rendering storage media obsolete within years. I suppose the mighty Interweb/cloud computing mean that everything’s out there rather than rotting in dusty tomes or sitting locked away on unreadable discs but there’s a distinct Library of Babel factor to it. Perhaps the difficulties facing historians of the distant future will be an excess of information rather than a scarcity of it.
Categories
It’s like all of my favourites in one
If only they were dressed as Stormtroopers.
See also: Wakaterru!
Categories
Dog + Dog + Dog
A very cool mythical creatures Venn diagram:
This has also made me realise that with a bit of creative pronounciation Cockatrice might actually be the greatest ever Didn’t Even Know Her.
(via kottke)
Categories
Salamanders Rock
Which makes this news a little sad:
New survey work suggests that fewer than 1,200 Mexican axolotls remain in its last stronghold, the Xochimilco area of central Mexico.
Just in case you weren’t sure whether salamanders actually rock:
Axolotl look freakin awesome
(and retain this larval appearance throughout their lives)
They’re pretty shit-hot at regeneration[1]:
After amputation, the epidermis migrates to cover the stump in less than 12 hours, forming a structure called the apical epidermal cap…Motor neurons, muscle, and blood vessels grow with the regenerated limb, and reestablish the connections that were present prior to amputation. The time that this entire process takes varies according to the age of the animal, ranging from about a month to around three months in the adult and then the limb becomes fully functional.
Ōsanshōuo or Japanese Giant Salamander are frickin huge
And are pretty much living fossils. The Chinese Giant Salamander is even bigger but unfortunately both are critically endangered due to habitat loss, over-collection, and in the acse of the Chinese Giant Salamander it’s used in traditional Chinese medicine and considered something of a delicacy.
Finally…
- As any good medieval bestiary will tell you Salamanders are impervious to flame, even Aristotle believed that the salamander, ‘not only walks through the fire, but puts it out in doing so.’ (not actually true)
- And as a result of the misconception, when asbestos was discovered it was thought to be the wool of the salamander – Pope Alexander III had a tunic made from it (as did Prester John, but he’s made up)
[1] The wikipedia entry is worth reading just for the bit about children regrowing fingertips which reminds me of the man who regrew his finger using magic powder