Twice as funny today because the university’s network has been acting up, and I spent much of the morning in fact on the telephone with various Help Desk technicians.
Tip of the English woolen cap to Fretmarks.
Tag Archives: weirdness
Piglet is in trouble again
No, Kanga has not mistaken him for Baby Roo and is trying to give him a bath.
It’s certain Middle Eastern Muslims again who have it in for A.A. Milne’s character.
A blogger in Qatar reports that images of Piglet are being censored from children’s books. Follow the link for photos of the evidence.
Next step, perhaps: stern imams will thunder in their Friday sermons: “Do not even think of a cartoon pig, or you will be damned!”
The censored Piglet is the colorized, Disney-fied version. The Piglet in the graphic here, however, is based on Ernest H. Shepard’s original 1920s pen-and-ink drawings.
Oh my iGod!
From a PhotoShop contest with an Apple theme. (Click photo for larger image. Hat tip: Violet Blue.)
The Nigerian (419) Book Scam
In the early 1980s, M. and were dues-paying members of the Fellowship of Isis–sort of a souvenir of our honeymoon in Ireland, when we made a couple of visits to Clonegal Castle, its headquarters.
Our contact details were published in the FOI newsletter, which brought several letters to us from Nigeria.
They always took the same form: “Dear Glorious Wonderful Adepts . . . I so much want to learn blah blah blah . . . Please send me all of the books that you have . . . for free.”
Having received a bunch of these letters, I was pretty well inoculated against the “419 scam.” You get those emails too, I am sure: the widow of the minister of something-or-other who has millions of dollars stashed in a bank account, and only you (or some other sucker) can help her retrieve them, with the help of God, of course.
(Lots of sample letters here, and if you want to have a little fun scamming the scammers, here are some helpful hints.)
So it was a blast from the past when Llewellyn forwarded to me this week a letter from one “Mr. Inemesit Sanctum” (if I read correctly) of Abia State, Nigeria.
It begins “Dear Spiritual Don,” I wonder if he means “Don” in the Spanish/Italian sense, as in “Don Giovanni,” or an Oxbridge academic “don.” Perhaps the latter?
My edited book Living Between Two Worlds “opened his eyes” blah blah blah.
“I never knew that witchcraft could be so exciting and unassociated with the typical diabolism which I used to be told, which caused me a great dread of it.”
Etc. etc. etc. And then the pitch:
“Finally, to cool my thirst, send me such books as [lists four titles from the Llewellyn catalog]. Doing this will give me and my yearning friends hope to climb the strange but exciting spiritual ladder.”
No mention of payment, of course. That’s the Nigerian touch. They never even offer to cover postage.
And the closing: “Yours spiritually.”
Ah, nostalgia. A handwritten begging letter in this day of email 419 scams.
Fairies, the Dead, and Book-Blogging
Spring semester has started, and teaching does cut into blogging time. And my reading list (for myself) is huge: all the books that I ordered at AAR-SBL (and elsewhere) started arriving in December.
I just finished At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things. Author Diane Purkiss is an Oxford historian, primarily of early modern England, and this book is a romp. She does not set out to “explain” fairies, but rather to trace the different ways that they have been depicted–from being rather interchangeable with the Dead to being literary creations, evocations of rural charm, inspiration of Irish nationalism, and advertising gimmicks.
Factoid: Proctor & Gamble won’t admit it, but apparently in the early 1930s the company dropped its successful Fairy Soap and Fairy Liquid, previously sold with images of helpful fairies assisting the housemaids, because the term “fairy” was increasingly synonymous with “homosexual.”
While dealing with Fairy-like characters in The X-Files, Purkiss oddly misses Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia which argued back in 1969 that Fairies and UFO aliens were the same class of interdimensional beings in different guises.
These are stacked on the dog kennel-nightstand:
Dereck Daschke and Mike Ashcraft, eds., New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader. Rastafarians! UFO cults! Wiccans! All of us in the study of new religious movements are in it for the spectacle.
Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. I mentioned it earlier, but I had to send the review copy to someone else and only recently acquired my own.
Robert Cochrane, The Robert Cochrane Letters: An Insight into Modern Traditional Witchcraft. Never mind the oxymoron in the subtitle; it’s the subtle and shifty Cochrane in his own words.
Nikki Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual. Taking on Arnold van Gennep’s hallowed theory on initiation–and Nikki is the new Pomegranate reviews editor, too.
George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Ufologists saw a progression happening, from “saucer” sightings to “alien” sightings to . . . certainly . . . the “third kind”–direct contact. But why is resolution always just beyond our grasp?
David H. Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. It’s not just for Cubans anymore.
The Rosvellov Incident
Now the story can be told . . . in Pravda, apparently taking its journalistic lead from the supermarket tabloids, which, as we all know, are staffed Florida-loving expatriate British journalists fired from their UK jobs for excessive-even-by-Fleet-Street-standards drunkeness:
In the beginning of August 1987 five soldiers of Leningrad Military District went to the North of Karelia region on a special mission. They were required to guard the object of unknown origin. It was found on the territory of another military unit near the town of Vyborg. The item was 14 meters long, 4 meters wide, 2.5 meters high.
Barbie, the Hot Pagan Witch
I am in debt to Mark Morford’s SF Gate column on the latest, must-have Barbie doll. (Mattel offers a dark-complexioned version as well.) She would be just right to look down on you and your plushies while you are reading some of Llewellyn Publications’ latest teen-witch fiction.
Demeter on a John Deere
I love a good conspiracy theory, especially when it involves what I always thought was one of the most innocuous of fraternal orders. You will find a calmer discussion here.
Eighties flashback
Maybe if more people knew that the Freemasons had sex slaves , their membership would not be declining!