Author: Richard

… And it’s thriving in South Korea, of all places. The LA Times reports that

Across South Korea, entrepreneurs are holding controversial forums aimed at teaching clients how to better appreciate life by simulating death. They use mortality as a personal motivator. 

…

[At] the Coffin Academy, South Koreans can get a glimpse into the abyss. Over four hours, groups of a dozen or more tearfully write their letters of goodbye and tombstone epitaphs. Finally, they attend their own funerals and try the coffin on for size.

Interesting stuff. The article, which you can read in its entirety here, goes on to note that this is partially in response to the fact that South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the developed world. 

“The Bloop,” according to the ever-dependable Wikipedia, is an “ultra-low frequency and extremely powerful underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997.” The sound’s source, mysteriously, still remains unknown. 

The sound is believed to be coming roughly from 50oS; 100oW. After
reading that, I wondered how close that was to the coordinates given in
“The Call of Cthulhu”. Allow me to quote: “Then, driven ahead by
curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men
sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude
47°9′, W. Longitude l23°43′, come upon a coastline of mingled mud,
ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the
tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror – the nightmare
corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind
history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark
stars.”

 Gotta love it!

Whatever made it, you can listen to The Bloop yourself here. Personally, this whole thing gives me chills. The uncharted depths of the ocean are a scary, mysterious place. 

You can watch the video, which is very fun and well done and awareness-raising, here.Thanks to Today’s BIG Thing for pointing this out.

The nefarious Noughties are over as of 12:01 this morning – a welcome end to what most Americans consider the worst decade in 50 years, according to a recent Pew Research Poll. 

The debate is now on, of course, as to how to pronounce the year we’re living in. Some experts suggest that we used the “two-thousand-and” formulation to pronounce the years 2000-2009 mainly due to the influence of the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” (which also used the “two-thousand-and” formulation). This issue was discussed briefly on NPR two months ago: 

Are you, like me, tired of the New York Times Best-seller lists? Are you at a loss for reading material, and perhaps looking for books that are less mainstream, maybe off the beaten path? Stephen K. Baum, PhD, of Texas A&M University, has compiled an expansive, annotated list of interesting lesser-known literature. The list itself spans more than 300 pages, and includes a helpful sub-list of other lists of lesser-known books, too (my favorite of these are the 50 Essential Alternative Horror Books, the Guide to 20th Century Experimental Literature, and The Invisible Library – a list of fictional books that appear within other books). 

Scientists searching for evidence of the existence of dark matter, the hypothetical matter theorized to account for the majority of the observable universe’s mass, have found vague but intriguing clues at the bottom of a Minnesotan mine:

An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old
iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered
the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.

The particles showed as two
tiny pulses of heat deposited over the course of two years in chunks of
germanium and silicon that had been cooled to a temperature near
absolute zero. But, the scientists said, there was more than a 20
percent chance that the pulses were caused by fluctuations in the
background radioactivity of their cavern, so the results were
tantalizing, but not definitive.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Well, not exactly. Mammalodon, who vaguely resembles a manatee and lived at least 25 million years ago, 

fed by sucking small animals out of the seafloor mud with its short snout and tongue, 

experts say.

Researchers say the 25 million-year-old fossil is related to today’s blue whales – the largest animals on Earth.

The ancient animal’s mud slurping may have been a precursor to the filter feeding seen in modern baleen whales.

These whales strain huge quantities of tiny marine animals through specialised “combs” which take the place of teeth.

The research is published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 

You can read the full article here.

Merry Christmas to all! The Courier-Post Online reports that

Image via Wikipedia

While the earliest roots of the Santa Claus mythology likely trace back to European pagan traditions co-opted and combined with the story of the Christian bishop Nicholas of Myra, as we noted on Tuesday, the modern American conception of Santa Claus has its origins in politics. Stephen Heller of AIGA writes: 

Image via Wikipedia

Christmas is easy to take for granted, and it’s even easier to make assumptions about the nature of the holiday. Sure, we’re mostly aware that Jesus wasn’t actually born during the wintertime, but Christmas still is – and always has been – a celebration of his birth, right? Not exactly.

Christmas’s winter date was probably originally chosen to co-opt the Roman festival of Saturnalia (which, according to Wikipedia, was celebrated with similar customs (gift giving, feasting) that are done to celebrate Christmas today) or pagan European celebrations of the winter solstice. The tradition of the Christmas Tree, in fact, is considered to be closely associated with pagan traditions of tree- and nature-worship; it, too, was effectively co-opted by the Christian celebration when 

St Boniface (c. 672-754) […] cut down the tree of Thor in
order to disprove the legitimacy of the Norse gods to the local German
tribe. St. Boniface saw a fir tree growing in the roots of the old oak.
Taking this as a sign of the Christian faith, he said “…let Christ be
at the center of your households…” using the fir tree as a symbol of
Christianity. ^{[3] (from Wikipedia)}.

This is all easy enough to swallow. Christmas altogether is complex enough to be fodder for doctoral treatises, though, and perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Christmas is the cultural phenomenon of Santa Claus, aka Saint Nicholas, aka Father Christmas. Even when you step back to consider the “basics,” Santa Claus seems bizarre. He lives in the far northern reaches of the arctic, where hundreds of elves build toys for him to deliver via flying reindeer to all the Christian children of the world. But it gets even stranger than that.

Santa Claus, of course, apparently arose from pagan traditions, too – perhaps granting some credence to the complaints of those Christians who claim that he detracts from the holiday (this argument, though, falls flat in light of the pagan origins of Christmas itself). While the kindly Saint Nicholas of Myra, a Bishop from what is now part of modern Turkey, is considered to be the original Christian inspiration for the figure of Santa Claus, Father Christmas can alternatively trace his mythological origins to Germanic pagan traditions.
Says Wikipedia:

Numerous parallels have been drawn between Santa Claus and the figure of Odin, a major god amongst the Germanic peoples prior to their Christianization.[…] Odin was sometimes recorded, at the native Germanic holiday of Yule, as leading a great hunting party through the sky.^[16] Two books from Iceland, the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, describe Odin as riding an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir that could leap great distances, giving rise to comparisons to Santa Claus’s reindeer.^[17] Further, Odin was referred to by many names in Skaldic poetry, some of which describe his appearance or functions; these include Síðgrani,^[18] Síðskeggr,^[19] Langbarðr,^[20] (all meaning “long beard”) and Jólnir^[21] (“Yule figure”).

Image by riptheskull via Flickr

Santa Claus’s history takes an even weirder turn, though: excluded from modern American conceptions of Old Saint Nick is his trickster sidekick, Krampus, who is to this day an important part of the Christmas mythology in Austria and other parts of Europe. Krampus, Santa’s demon-like counterpart, frightens bad children and punishes those on the naughty list by beating them with birch rods. Wikipedia notes that “images of Krampus usually show him with a basket on his back used to carry away bad children and dump them into the pits of Hell.” Closely related is the similar Dutch figure Zwarte Piet (meaning “Black Peter”), the mischievous, black-faced (from chimney soot) companion of Santa Claus who kidnapped naughty children away to Spain, where Santa apparently dwells during the off-season. Both of these figures seem to stem from traditions of vanquished demons serving noble saints, their evil turned to good through the power of Christianity. While they’ve largely dropped their associations with the Devil, Krampus and Zwarte Piet continue to feature prominently in European Christmas celebrations. Visiting Americans often find them off-putting, but let’s be honest – are they really that much weirder than our own conceptions of Santa Claus?

Others have even suggested an association between Santa Claus and Finnish shamans’ use of psychedelic mushrooms:

In Finland, the Shamans, and one
in particular called Hold Nickar, are known to have worn red suits with
white spots to pick the sacred Amanita Muscaria or Fly Agaric mushrooms, which are themselves red with
white spots. On returning home from picking, on reindeer sleighs, they had their mushrooms in
a sack, and re entered their lodges through the smoke hole in the roof !
Hold Nickar and friends ate those mushrooms to enter the Christ Consciousness,
that’s how he became Saint Nickar, or Saint Nicholas as we now know him !

The
reindeer also ate the mushrooms, which is why they are characterized as
flying, although this ties in with other older legends of gods flying the
skies at night once a year giving gifts to the worthy. (read more)

At any rate, the story of Christmas is a lot more complicated than “Away in a Manger” might have you think, and not even Santa Claus is straightforward. And we won’t even get in to Space Santa:
 
(You can see more of these at goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com)