Close Encounters of the Puritan Kind
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” ― H.L. Mencken We know that 17th Century New England …
Category Archives: Mythology
What Dreams May Come from Herr Wesermann?
“New roads; new ruts” – Gilbert K. Chesterton Sigmund Freud once referred to dreams as the “royal road to the …
Release the Calamari: Hans Egede and the Greenland Kraken
“Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty” – Brian Greene On the internet, nobody can hear you scream. Unless you use …
John Campbell Besley and the Amazing Amazonian Telegraph
“Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great …
General Barter and the Ghost Who Dressed for Dinner
“They say that shadows of deceased ghosts do haunt the houses and the graves about, Of such whose life’s lamp …
If It Weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, We’d Still be Eating Frozen Radio Dinners
Veteran anomalist Seriah Azkath and I spend an hour discussing the vagaries of strange history, the War between the Pygmies …
Fear No Evil When You Walk through Oberlin’s Valley of Death
“Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted” – Percy Bysshe Shelley …
When a Volcano Erupts and Nobody Hears it does the Climate Change?
“The Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of …
Our Furry Forefathers: The Basque History of Inter-species Relations
“When the fox is engaging you in conversation, keep an eye on your chicken” – Basque Proverb The Basque people …
The Ecstasy of Error: Green Cards in Magonia
“It is then that ceasing to take the natural, the spiritual view of the world and its waywardness, he takes …
Diabolus in Musica: The Devil is in the Dissonance
“Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the …
Haunted House Hunting with Mrs. Butler
“It is curious to think that what to one of us means so much to another is without any signification. …
Bugging Out During the Second Great Dying
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten …
The Bottle Smashing Ghost of Via Bava No. 6
“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine” – Eduardo Galeano The problem with …
Quantum Entangled Escargot: Sympathy for the Snail Telegraph
“We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered, we get wise, for a well-packed question …
Tempting Fate at Ticonderoga: Major Duncan Campbell and The Black Watch
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality” – Edgar Allan Poe Names …
Lies, Damn Lies, and Anomalies: Fake News and Skeptical Schadenfreude
“Every science is made up entirely of anomalies rearranged to fit” – R. A. Lafferty Every Tom, Dick, and Harriet …
Divine Messaging for Fun and Prophet
“As we see from the Scriptures, it had become a common and proverbial expression that if someone wanted to refer …
Outsourced Morality: The Conscience-Formed Phantom Drums for You
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not …
An Oasis in the Desert of the Real: Looking for Zerzura
“The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others” – …
Prosecuting a Poltergeist: The Defamation Trial of the Curé of Cideville
“These days, there are angry ghosts all around us – dead from wars, sickness, starvation – and nobody cares. So …
The Specious Present: It’s the Size of the Moment that Matters
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what …
Our Colonized Consciousness: Defense Against the Doppelgänger
“If you meet your double, you should kill him” – Chris Cabin, Double Take The marketing potential with doppelgängers is …
He Knows Where the Bodies are Buried: Gottlieb Pfeffel and the Billing Perplex
“Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: …
The Doppelganger is Ready for His Close-up
Miracle Max: He probably owes you money huh? I’ll ask him. Inigo Montoya: He’s dead. He can’t talk. Miracle Max: …
EsoterX: Podcasts are the Retina of the Mind’s Eye
The inimitable Greg Bishop and I discuss folklore as an early warning system, skeptics vs. believers (who often have the …
Doomsday will be Dry: The Water Clock of the Apocalypse
“I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes” – W. C. Fields The average human is about …
Statutory Murder: The Trial of Theagenes of Thasos
“A fiction of law shall never be contradicted so as to defeat the end for which it was invented, but …
Combat Cats, Tactical Mice, and Special Forces Fish in Pelusium
“Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, …
I Left My Heart in the Vanished Kingdom of Chicora
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started …
Galaxy Noir: The Case of the Stellar Strangulation
“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death” ― William S. Burroughs There was …
Where the Wild Things Are: Anomalies and the Poverty of Critical Thinking
“People tend to say ‘I like independent thinkers but they must think what I want them to think independently’” – …
The Devil’s Paparazzi: Spinello’s Unflattering Portrait of Lucifer
“A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted” – Samuel Butler One of …
Charlemagne: Frank Encounters with UFOs
“It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But …
Has Anybody Seen Where We Put the Dauphin?
“Your part can be the king, but unless people are treating you like royalty, you ain’t no king, man” – …
Eternal Love and Other Supernatural Phenomena
“We have a love affair with the idea of the ‘natural,’ even though we, as a species, are about as …
The War that Never Was: Goths vs. Egyptians
“It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, …
Waffling on Witchcraft: I’ll Get a Lawyer and Your Little Dog Toto, Too
“What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It’s because they’re so fascinating and exasperating, so other” …
Sympathetic Empiricism and the Palatine Lights
“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response” – Arthur M. Schlesinger How many …
Rooster-Based Planetary Defense Systems at Morial’s Den
“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid” – …
