December 2011
20 posts
It always irritated me...
…that the Twilight Zone episode “The Hunt,” in which a backwoodsman tries to take his dog into heaven, only to be told that dogs aren’t allowed there, and then refuses heaven on account of that, never gives credit to its obvious source: the famous scene in the Mahabharata where Yudhishthira, on being told by Indra that heaven can be his if only he will leave his faithful...
Did I ever tell you guys about...
…the play put on in war-time Shanghai by the Kids’ Theatre of Shanghai in which Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is actually King Kong? When the Japanese invade China the Monkey King swims from Skull Island to China and drives away the invaders. #ikidyounot
Vampire-imps and dangerous sociality in Mongolia.
This is a chötgör, as rendered by the Aga Buryat (Mongolia) shaman Yaruu. The chötgör are a general class of Mongolian demon/ghost/evil spirit/goblin, but among the Buryat the taken on a vampiric aspect, feeding on human labor, livestock, and eventually human flesh. They resemble people who”have been interred in the grave,” are skeletal (arag yas shig), have long nails, dishevelled...
Walter Besant's "The Humbling of the Memblings" →
Rationalized horror with a clockwork ghost. #steampunk
Saucy Assyrian Omens.
From Prof. H.W.F. Saggs’ The Might That Was Assyria (1984):
On the other hand, we do know that some ancient Mesopotamian men engaged in anal intercourse with their wives. We learn this, as we do much else about life in Babylonia and Assyria, from a collection of omens, one of which refers to a situation in which a man ‘keeps saying to his wife: “Bring your...
Hitchens on Salman Rushdie
From years back, when I agreed with Hitchens more often than I disagreed with him. In this case, defending Rushdie against both the fatwa and those Westerners who, for their own vile reasons, decided to side with Ayatollah Khomeini, Hitchens got it completely right, and said it wonderfully.
This is an all-out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar...
"More than 100 million EU citizens have never... →
In our rush to make e-books and shift everything online, let’s remember these people the many like them around the world.
Hey
Who’s got three thumbs and found a book review from 1835 in which the reviewer claims that the author in question has invented a new genre of fiction: science fiction?
This guy.
Full article on io9.com sometime next week.
Update: also, apparently there was a “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” in Great Britain in the 1840s. Must remember to something with them.
...
Sex Change in the Pulps: Demonic Shapeshifters,... →
My latest column at io9.com.
The Stanley Rocket.
It was, literally, a steam-powered canoe on wheels, and in 1906 it went 127 mph. Here’s its story.
interesting hobo facts →
Data-heavy blog post by me: pulp sf before the sf... →
Steampunk idea fodder, free for the taking.
Mark Wyman’s Hoboes is a very interesting book, full of information I didn’t know or hadn’t properly considered, and I’ll be quoting from it here over the next couple of days.
For starters: irrigation and the railroad drastically changed the economic set-up of the West. New crops appearing everywhere—cotton in Texas, oranges in California, fruit trees in Oregon. And...
