woomack: When threatened, the Bombardier beetle ejects a stream of boiling chemicals onto its attacker. Reactants hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide are released together to cause a violent exothermic reaction.
(Source: pixie-sabre)
Via Scientific Illustration
Conrad Veidt (with Mary Philbin in top photo) - The Man Who Laughs (1928)
Happy Birthday January 22nd
Via Dark City
the plunge
While she was on the plane she dozed
off, not quite asleep but not awake either
exactly, and thinking about ice cracking,
procedures for extreme sterilisation,
and the possibility of lakes that were maybe
as warm as a handshake or a book left
lying in the evening sun,
in that drift a little way off from the world,
she found herself amazed at the thought
of a moon she could no longer fit
snug inside her mouth;
and didn’t stir even to the snap of a sound
as sawblade-acerbic as someone’s baby’s scream
at waking up and still not having landed on slow earth.
Sts. Sergius and Bacchus
(martyred ca. 303)Sts. Sergius and Bacchus are ancient Christian martyrs who were tortured to death in Syria because they refused to attend sacrifices in honor of Jupiter. Recent attention to early Greek manuscripts has also revealed that they were openly gay men and that they were erastai, or lovers. These manuscripts are found in various libraries in Europe and indicate an earlier Christian attitude toward homosexuality.
After their arrest, the two saints were paraded through city streets in women’s clothing, treatment that was meant to humiliate them as officers in the Roman army. They were then separated and each was tortured. Bacchus died first and appeared that night to Sergius, who was beginning to lose heart. According to the early manuscripts, Bacchus told Sergius to preserve, that the delights of heaven were greeter than any suffering, and that part of their reward would be to be re-united in heaven as lovers.
The feast of these saints is October 7. The inscription at the bottom of the icon is their names in Arabic. The saints are particularly popular throughout the Mediterranean lands, in Latin America, and among the Slavs. For nearly a thousand years they were the official patrons of the Byzantine armies, and Arab nomads continue to revere them as their special patron saints.
Hey, that reminded me I’d been meaning to go back and look for this article.
Immortality in Two Forms
(as practiced by cnidarians)
1: be devoured by a nudibranch and bequeath your cnidocytes(1) to the cause of its
blistered back
2: be turritopsis nutricula and slip back and forth between polyp and medusa(2) until you get
caught either by sickness or teeth
(1) aka nematocysts, when stolen aka kleptocnidae, always aka inevitability and a toxic
nebula of barbed stab wounds and nature’s amor fati only looks like escalation
and learning from the experts is a wisdom of its own
(2) aka the importance of keeping your head down and making not even a ripple in the
delicate world
And back to worms
“Something to think about:
• if everything vile is a worm –
(leeches are worms maggots and hagfish are worms or
close enough mosquitos start out as worms close up
anthrax is a worm same with ebola and yes cancer
mindless self-replicating buried-under-the-skin
invisible cancer is a worm THEY ARE ALL
FUCKING WORMS)
– then the worm recognises no
artificial divide but tunnels universal in disgust;
• and if the worm is unknown even to its host then beyond
signals in the nerves does it even exist;
• and if the worm is universal;
• and if the worm can be translated into pulses firing from the
neurones and the so-subtle way that it bends the world to its urges;
• then the worm –
(having no more use for its fragile compromised
body and so no need for poison and choking hands,
for midnight and disappearances, for bait, for traps)
– would have found a host to end all hosts,
transcendent, super-corporeal, a silver city sketched electric
and webbed across the earth with the unknown worm
crawling free, dug into the code.”
He Followed the River
He spoke to it, too. Not
with words, but in a falsetto river-
language. “Supposedly…” he told me, with
broken goggles and smoking
a butt fished from the empty
stream of the streets, that
syllables of garbled bubbles,
interruptions of rocks, aquatic homes:
the river spoke to him, too.
Said river still with him, here
flowing over trashcan lids and
the dirtiest retreats; I didn’t
understand the marking. Didn’t
mean to drift, arranging didn’t
dream concretely, didn’t
float, drown the sidewalk.
Broadcast On Radio 4 this morning…
“Hello everybody, my name’s Alan Moore, and I earn a living by making up stories about things that have never actually happened.
When it comes to my spiritual beliefs that’s perhaps why I worship a second century human headed snake god called Glycon, who was exposed as a ventriloquist’s dummy nearly 2000 years ago. Famed throughout the Roman Empire, Glycon was the creation of an entrepreneur known as Alexander the false prophet, which is a terrible name to go into business under.”
A live, tame boa constrictor provided the puppet’s body, while its artificial head had heavy-lidded eyes and long blond hair. In many ways Glycon looked a bit like Paris Hilton, but perhaps more likeable and more biologically credible.
Looks aside, I’m interested in the snake god purely as a symbol, indeed one of humanity’s oldest symbols, which can stand for wisdom, for healing, or, according to etho-botanist Jeremy Narby, for our spiralling and snake-like DNA itself.
But I’m also interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist’s dummy. After all, isn’t this the way we use most of our deities. We can look through our various sacred books and by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say.
The big advantage of worshipping an actual glove puppet of course is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them gak in the gox. And you know, it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to go gak in the gox, they have to go gak in the gox.
Anyway, thank you very much for listening and from both me and Glycon, a very happy new year to you all.
(Transcript from the Forbidden Planet Blog. Thanks!)
About me
The Greb Machine runs on coffee, books, music, pictures. Occasionally it spits out words in what might be a fun order.
