Imagining dragons

Abandoning Clubhouse, animal adventures, and a classic book on mythic "cryptids"

This is the first general newsletter post I'm trying out. I often have interesting bits to share that don't seem to fit the blogging format. Blogs have been on their way out for while. It's my guess that the change to algorithms by Facebook and even Google to focus on particular news and big info sites has starved the blog sites of traffic. I noticed that in my own work. So, the push now is to gain "followers" - an ugly word that suggests you blindly listen to whatever is said. I prefer "readers" and that you keep your critical thinking faculties to judge what you see.

Coming up in a few days is the Weekly Weird News review post where I share some links and short commentary on the odd and anomalous events of the past week. If you like this stuff, please be sure to subscribe so you won't miss a post. I don't plan to do more than one regular post a week along with the WWN review.

In this post, I have a social media update, some animal encounters to share, and a short book review.

Abandoning the Clubhouse

Clubhouse is a trendy live audio-only app where you start a "room" and people join to chat. It's cool but it's not great because it's been swamped by people interested in only talking about cryptocurrency, side hustles of all kinds, or religious-based stuff. I'm not interested in any of that. When you start your own club, it seemed promising but few people ever showed up to scheduled events. Some of the clubs I tried just did not suit me. I actually don't much like talking to strangers. For a few weeks, Allison Journlin, Brian Dunning, Blake Smith and I did a weekly get-together discussing the weird news of the week. It was great. Everyone contributed something interesting on the stories collected. I learned a lot. It reminded me that collaboration > solo stuff. But, real life is hard and we couldn't manage to keep it going. Plus, the platform was just not conducive to growing an audience. Those that didn't have the app or weren't available at that time were out of luck. So, I'm abandoning the clubhouse for other things, like this site, which also has audio capabilities. So, we'll see.

Animal adventures

Last week I visited Cape Cod for the first time. I saw one seal in the bay by the Cape Cod canal. It was freaky - occasionally, you could see a head pop up or a rounded back. Now, I shall never accept accounts of a mystery creature offshore without thinking, "It's probably a seal," because seals look so sea-serpenty. The video I took is grainy or I would share it. So weird. So great to see. I was disappointed there weren’t more.

When I go on vacation, one of my greatest pleasures is to view the local wildlife. No whales or sharks were spotted on this trip. I was hoping to get the scoop on the dude who supposedly was swallowed by a whale off Provincetown earlier this month, but no luck. We did cross paths with some turtles on the dune trail at Great Island trail in Wellfleet, MA. Three of them were climbing around the sand banks, looking spry. When I posted to Twitter, herp expert friends said they were Diamondback terrapins, a threatened species in MA. So, that was cool.

Diamondback terrapin. Photo: Sharon A. Hill

Also spotted dead on the shore near here was a small sturgeon. I flipped it over to make sure. It was about 18 inches long. I'm unsure about the species.

Juvenile sturgeon. Photo: Sharon A. Hill

The Book of Imaginary Beings

by Jorge Luis Borges (translated)

This book consists of fairly short entries in alphabetical order and is admittedly not meant to be read straight through. But I did that. Many of the creatures are of human form - supernatural beings or half-human, half-beast constructions. While a few are real animals that have been endowed with exaggerated characteristics - the amphisbaena, panther, and remora (fish), for example - most of the beings are clearly mythological or fictional creations. However, I was struck by how blurry the line is between today's most popular cryptids and these folkloric or mythological creatures. For instance, the "Hidebehind" is a beast that you can never see because it stays so skillfully directly behind you, but it can kill you. This is not far removed from the common belief that Sasquatch can become "invisible" by blending into a tree or disappearing outright without a trace. Several famous cryptids are obvious myths - the Naga, the Mongolian death worm, Jersey Devil - yet people pursue them as if they are unknown animals. While it's reasonable to say that real animals might be at the core of these fantastic descriptions, the animals themselves are not unusual. Modern ideas about generalized and ambiguous mythological creatures - such as the Kraken - have brushed away the unsuitable outlandish nature of these creatures and squeezed them into specific animals. This seems not right and reflects an imaginative effort not too unlike that of the writers (Poe, Lewis, and Kafka) who developed monsters from scratch.

This book also compares the several types of dragons, which blend characteristics of several real animals into one uber-monster. The dragon, Borges says, has in its image something that “fits man’s imagination” so it shows up in many places in specific forms.

I'd compare this book, which was originally published in 1957 and expanded in 1967, to the marvelous Willy Ley's Exotic Zoology of 1959*. It's charming to read. I learned some new things, although there is not always a source for the information. To the knowledgable cryptozoologist scholar, the portrayal of mythical creatures sounds eerily similar to more modern accounts. We have always had monsters and we always will.

*Another similar suggestion is British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes (1880). Great fun.