The deformed Elephant God of Val Yu Village

 Ia! Ia! Cthulu fthagn!

Note the fleshy sucker like mouth at the end of the tentacle like snout; the ribby swept back 'ears', the reddish baleful eyes. The ringed lichen-like spots and the shiny black hooves complete the unearthly appearance of this strange small, crudely ( could we say devolved?) sculpture...

One of the great treats of junk shops is old books, and one of the greatest pleasures of old books is references to even older books.
I found a copy of Willy Leys book on cryptobiology - printed before the term even became fashionable, or possibly even coined.
Flipping it open, I immediately found the following footnote:

"'Another one, hardly known to naturalists, is described in an interesting book which privately printed in 1858. Its author was one Dr. L. Lewysohn, who called himself "Preacher of the Isrealitic Congregation of Worms." The title of the book is Zoologie des Talmuds (Zoology of the Talmud)..."

My practical side assumes them mean the city Worms, but its a pretty marvellous title to a English speaker.
'Prediger der israelitischen Gemeinde von Worms'?

Amazon claims I can buy a copy, but Amazon claims that of all apocrypha, and I haven't 85 pounds to spare in testing the theory.

I also found a copy of  ' The Frozen Stream, An Account Of The Formation And Properties Of Ice'  by Charles Tomlinson,  published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It has some fascinating anecdotes concerning fabulous cold:

'In St Petersburg...Every one is very uneasy about his nose and ears which are very apt to get frozen; and as the sufferer is not aware of his danger by any previous uncomfortable sensation, the first person in the street who observes a nose putting on the appearance of white marble,  exclaims "Sir! sir! Your nose! Your nose!" and taking up a handful of snow, applies it to the strangers face and endeavors , by briskly rubbing, to restore the circulation. these are salutations which people of accustomed to in such climates, and by which thousands of these valued organs are saved from the clutches of the frost.' (emphasis mine.)

"The bodies of whales have been found embedded in icebergs..."

Bizarrely, the chapters on refrigeration and ice making are practical and accurate, as well as his adventures on the Saint John River during the Canadian winter. Its the mundane chapters that make the seasoning of madness more piquant: in what mind could the salutation of  "Сэр! сэр! Ваш нос! Ваш нос!" followed by a face full of snow seem reasonable?

As always, my reason staggers.


 

Bad Art as a Mental Vaccine

 I was trying to explain to a friend why I wasn't too interested in watching Ender's Game.
I've read the book three or four times over the years and didn't really care for it, not to mention that the shock value of the ending, like all surprise endings, only works the once. I thought Ender's Shadow was a better book, but I probably wouldn't watch it in movie form either.
"Its a really good movie", he assured me "You shouldn't miss a movie this good."
I made some rebuttal along the lines of 'lacking time', but he wasn't going to accept that.
He felt that since I would make the time to watch really bad movies,  that I should place really good movies at an even higher priority. But I'm not too interested in a 'good' movie. There is lots of those, and I haven't even taken the time to watch Citizen Kane yet.
I watch bad movies the same reason I read bad books; to learn from them. So I was somewhat amused to discover the footsteps of an explorer ahead of me:

 "In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.”  -- G.K.Chesterton

There is more than that, of course: reading the bad sharpens the mind; it trains by the example of failure; it exposes the reader to a thousand tricks and cons.

Because the Reader is tested by the experience, his mental immune systems improve*. Show me someone impressed by Mein Kampf, and I'll show you someone that has never read more than a dozen books  in their life**. 

This too, is the danger of censorship. Weak paradigms fear books because they immunize. If you've waded though, say The Book of Mormon, The Silmarillian, The Prophet, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, you're going to have a hard time to take seriously anything said by Paul of Tarsus or John the Divine. This,I suppose, is the lasting value of actually reading the articles in Playboy.***

So this is why I will not take the time to watch Ender's Shadow or Schindler's List or The Shawshank Redemption , but I will watch The Terrornauts or The Hooded Mummy Versus the Other Alien, or anything that promises Godzilla.

Because I have more to learn from the quirk of his scaly lips than from a thousand serious films.

*For instance, I could have phrased this as 'hers' or even as 'their'. I learned about gender phrasing problems by reading. I also learned the meaning of 'cissexual', which someday I will work into a complex 'Narcissisexual' joke.

** I'd like to make a similar remark about The Wealth of Nations, but that book's failure is too subtle for a fair comparison.

***Although it was Penthouse that infected me with the phrase "...contrasting with her hearty English labia." Which to this day I cannot decide if it was the product of a porn movie reviewer slowly losing his mind, or a massively overqualified journalist.

Two years ago, my wife showed up after a local auction was over to help her father load his purchases. It had been the estate sale of a batchelor that died without progeny. He'd been a heavy reader, and they had been selling paperbacks by the box full. Too bad I missed that part.
While walking through the house, Liz noticed several lots that had'nt sold because no-one wanted them: three bookcases full of science and astronomy books.
Needless to say, she grabbed the auctioneer, and in two minutes was the proud owner.
Then she called me.
We filled the back of the Volvo station wagon until the springs bottomed out. We also filled the passenger side of Liz's pickup. Seven empty bookcases were included, and a complete set of Hockey News from November 1952.
Total price ? $62.50.
Now -- ignoring of the bookcases and the sports magazine -- the science books were still there because nobody wanted to haul them away, let alone pay 25 cents for them. I could understand ignoring the books on string theory - they went to the Salvation Army shortly there after - but several hundred books on stars and dinosaurs and lasers and particle physics and, and -- (deep breath).
The astronomy/ astrophysics section alone was about ten times larger then the local librarys.
They would have been thrown out; the man's surviving family did not want them, the hundred-odd people attending the auction didnt want them, and his cat could'nt read them.
Its easy to ask ' what does that say about this town?' but conversely, this man was a resident of this town, and very few people knew about this hoard.
Makes you wonder how many 'closet scientifiphiles' there are in North America.