In Dead R’lyeh …

Actually, I’m more fascinated by the assumption that everyone, or at least everyone reading CT, has read Lovecraft.

Lovecraft?

i’m thinking Bosch. half badger, half octopus, all evil.

Like many allusions that are on the fringes of pop culture, you don’t have to have read Lovecraft to recognize “Cthulhu” (quotes added because actually recognizing Cthulhu would be all too disturbing). I’m fairly sure I first encountered the name in comic books, though I can’t remember what comics.

The NYT did a much better job than the Eurekalert – a case study in good journalism.

But then, it came from Carl Zimmer, who probably relished the opportunity to be a bit light hearted.

He runs the estimable Loom.

“I also (unsuccessfully) tried to convince my junior high English teachers that Lovecraft was fit for book reports.”

You should have gone with his non-horror works, such as The Silver Key, or Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath. They’re much more to the taste of literary types.

Yes Brett, Lovecraft had his sensitive side – but you wouldn’t have caught Lord Dunsany writing about a occult French Tickler like that.

I’m pretty sure I’ve read just about everything Lovecraft ever wrote, aside from one or two short stories, and I can’t recall any “French Ticklers”.

Funny, that picture reminded me more of “goatse” than anything else.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, someone else at CT post something! That image is going to give me nightmares.

Yeah, I’ve not read Lovecraft, either. But I wager that a lot of CT readers are like me and are unusually, um, aware of many, many things they’ve not read or seen or otherwise experienced directly. I don’t know why I am, exactly, but relative to most people I know this seems to be the case. Sometimes I wish this weren’t the case, as I deliberately don’t trust this sort of secondhand “knowledge” though, in practice, of course I do.

I think it’s fair to say that when the star-nosed mole claimed certainty regarding the presence of WMDs in Saddam’s Iraq, he was working with faulty intelligence, and therefore, while technically “not true,” his claims could in no way . . . uh . . . hold on a sec.

[Pauses. Reads post a second time.]

Oh. Voracity. Never mind.

Walt: “Pickman’s Model.” Not really the most representative of Lovecraft’s stuff, but pedegogically handy, I must say.

These moles have freaky noses? What kind of racist stereotyping is that?
Shame!

Hell, you can’t call yourself a blogger if you can’t handle the mole. And that cat has a crazy look in its eye.

Did i mention my mom hates moles with a passion?

And that the high res version of the photo does pass trough the big pipes of the gmail?

And that the internets are great?

I was amazed, yesterday, to discover a friend was disturbed by the mole. In an effort to make him feel more comfortable about the wee thing I told him that moles loved him and that all the star nosed mole in the picture wanted to do was to curl up next to his ear at night while he slept.

Curiously, this failed to put him at ease.

That’s not a crazy look from the cat; it’s a predatory look. He’s seen the mole and has plans for dinner.

bq. That’s not a crazy look from the cat; it’s a predatory look.

It’s neither (she’s slightly cross-eyed).

In Josef Skvorecky’s “The Engineer of Human Souls” (a book I highly recommend to anyone who likes fiction), one of the characters becomes confused because she has visited a Toronto sex shop named Lovecraft but her lover is speaking of the writer. Her bewilderment is amusing.

“Yeah, but there’s no connection – it’s a not uncommon Irish name, and we chose it a couple of months before Kieran’s Aoife was born.”

Yeah, and? You leap to the conclusion that there’s no connection? That’s a confusion of correlation with noncausation. What makes you so sure that Kieran didn’t name his daughter after your cat?