Time

Nov. 19th, 2018 12:36 pm
pjthompson: quotes (quotei)

Random quote of the day:

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

—Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Laurel and Hardy, Ariana Grande, or the Salvation Army Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Puffy

Oct. 27th, 2016 09:43 am
pjthompson: quotes (quotei)

Random quote of the day:

“It doesn’t actually matter if we are aging naturally, or resorting to surgical assistance. We experience brutal criticism. The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others—and in my case, to the actual public.”

—Ashley Judd, “Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance,” The Daily Beast, April 9, 2012

aging4wp 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

pjthompson: (Default)

sidehill_gouger_by_jayoen

The Sidehill Gouger by Jayoen at Deviant Art

My uncle and my older cousin called it the sidehill toggler, an infamous creature from Utah legend. It was fearsome, they said, hanging out in the high mountains, and if you encountered one you had no chance of outrunning it because it was fearsome fast. And carnivorous. Well, there was maybe one way to evade it: run in the opposite direction from the way it faced. It might be a little tricky to get by it to run in the opposite direction, but if you went downhill or uphill a bit, you could generally squeak by. See, the sidehill toggler could only run one way on a mountainside and it could only run round and round the same pathway because it had a regular sized leg on one side and a very, very short leg on the other. Which was why it was so impossibly speedy on mountain slopes…in one direction.

Even though I was little, something in the glint in my uncle’s eyes and the way my cousin bit her lower lip made me skeptical. I was made even more skeptical when I asked what it looked like. They hemmed and hawed, but eventually agreed it was a giant flightless bird, bigger than an ostrich—like maybe a cousin of an ostrich or something, only this bird had a gigantic curved and sharp beak that could tear a person limb from limb.

My mom liked nature shows and watched them all the time, I said. I thought for sure something as terrible and strange as this bird would have popped up on one. But no, my uncle said, the government didn’t like people talking about it because it could cause a panic or something and so the sidehill toggler was confined to the remotest mountains in special nature preserves where no one was allowed to go. Lumberjacks were the only ones who ever saw them, and brought the tales home to tell around firesides.

Mom got back from the store at this point and told my uncle and my cousin to stop filling my head with trash. They laughed a lot at that point.

“I knew you were lying,” I told them.

“Not lying,” my Uncle Rupert said. “Storytelling.”

“Well, Francie was lying,” I said. She blushed.

But it turns out that the sidehill toggler is a real thing. Okay, not a real real thing, but not just a story my uncle and cousin made up. It’s a folklore thing. A tall tale thing. One of the things that lumberjacks really did like to tell stories about around firesides. The most common name for this creature is the sidehill gouger, but it has dozens of names, including the rickaboo racker, the sidehill winder, the gyascutus, the sidehill badger, the rackabore, and so on and so on. My uncle and my cousin may have made up the part about it being a giant bird because I haven’t found any other accounts of it looking like that. Although storytellers do disagree about its appearance, sidehill gougers are often described as badger-like, or deer-like (only with sharp teeth and carnivorous tendencies). Apparently, it’s not just Americans who encounter these extraordinary creatures: the French have one called a dahut, and the Scots have a sidehill haggis. Which calls up pictures of a giant stuffed carnivorous sheep’s bladder with legs. But maybe that’s just me.

Folklorist Carol Rose in Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth says of the Guyascutus and its ilk that they are part of:

the folklore of lumberjacks and forest workers (and later fraudsters) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the United States….The creature belongs to a group of monsters affectionately known as the Fearsome Critters, whose exaggerated proportions and activities not only explained the weird noises of the lonely landscape but also provided some amusement at camps.

I hear they have mosquitoes the size of cows out in Wisconsin and Minnesota, too. Or maybe there’s just so many of them in the summertime it feels like you’ve been bitten by a blood-sucking cow or two. Pretty fearsome either way.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

pjthompson: (Default)

uniquehorn-sm2

Returning once again to my old favorite, Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland by Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green, to speak of fairy horses, the fíor-làr. There are many, many stories in Celtic lore about horse spirits, but Mr. Lenihan’s informants say that they are generally born to regular mares. There’s some debate what makes a horse fairy instead of ordinary, because to outward appearances they look like any other horse. One story goes that you know you’ve got one of those “funny fish” when the gestation of the foal takes 366 days—the old, magical formula of a year and a day. Most foals gestate in ten or eleven months (according to the old timer telling this story).

Like as not when you have a fairy horse they will be a good horse, but given to disappearing for short spells of time when the fairies require its services. But never fear, the fairies play fair in this regard. If you’re depending on that horse, they’ll substitute another until it’s time for the fíor-làr to be returned to you.

And then there’s this, a more spirit-horse version of fairy horses, taken from The Paranormalist.

He recounts the story told him by author, Herbie Brennan:

Shortly thereafter, as Herbie and Jim turned to leave the rath, along the top of the earthen ring, there suddenly appeared a herd of approximately twenty to twenty-five tiny, white horses “no bigger than cocker spaniels”, in the words of Mr. Brennan. The tiny horses galloped along the top of the earthwork, disappearing down the opposite side. Herbie and Jim ran out of the rath andto the other side to see what had happened to to the tiny horses, but they had vanished. Neither man had any explanation for what they had just seen.

Some years later, Herbie told the story of the white horses to his good friend, the late author Desmond Leslie. Leslie had a fascination with mythology and was quite knowledgeable about the subject. Upon hearing Herbie’s account of the tiny horses, Leslie replied, “Dear boy, don’t you know what those were?”. Herbie replied that he had no idea whatsoever what they were, only that he’d seen them. “Those were faerie horses,” Mr. Leslie continued. “They’re associated with the megaliths of Ireland, and there are also reports of them in Japan.”

You can watch Mr. Brennan himself tell the tale below, the first of three stories that explain how he was very reluctantly convinced in the reality of fairies through personal experience:

I’ll have more to say about “fairy photography” one of these days, but let me conclude by saying that I think anyone who’s been around horses much—and I used to be, although sadly not so much anymore—knows that some horses just are special. Even if they don’t have unexplained disappearances to their credit, are not miniature white glowing spirits, sinister kelpies or what all, some of them do seem to have a touch of the fey. Great, dreamy-eyed beasts that they are, they often have their heads in two worlds at once and seem to know much more than the two-leggers astride them. Old souls or fairy-led, I cannot say. Just that they are special.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

pjthompson: (dreams)
"I'd ever dreamed before..."

I dreamed about my close personal friend, Johnny Depp.* Although we'd been very close for quite some time, he started holding me at arms' length. Not only that, he implied to anyone who inquired that we'd never been close. He'd only been humoring/being kind to me/I was delusional. This hurt quite a lot because he and I both knew this wasn't so.

My friend, Lisa, told me, "You know what he's like. He's really close with someone for awhile, then he gets restless and moves on." I know it was Lisa because it felt like her, but she only ever appeared in shadow.

"I know, you're right," I said. "Still hurts."

Now, if we look at this in a Jungian light, I myself am everyone who appears in this dream (sorry, Lisa). So, perhaps a part of myself has gotten restless with my old self and has decided to move on. Or I've left behind a part of myself that isn't working. And my shadowy right brain is telling me not to worry, these things happen. I'll get over myself.

Either that, or it means something else entirely and I'll have to think on it some more.

Or not. Moving on is always a good option.



*I do not know Mr. Depp in real life. Why my unconscious chose him for this appearance I have yet to figure out. Unless it's that whole Wino Forever thing.
pjthompson: quotes (quotei)

Random quote of the day:


“Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.”

—Confucius, The Analects

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Mug shot

Jan. 9th, 2008 03:38 pm
pjthompson: (Default)
Random quote of the day:


"So what?  I never saw anyone hit with their face."

--Yogi Berra, when it was remarked that he was not handsome


Illustrated version. )

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