Today’s title was one of my grad school catch phrases, which grew out of attempting to date nerds. There was just no way of predicting what nerd girls would find interesting, so I tried to know a little bit of everything.
Month of the Dragon
Caribou Coffee in the Friendly Center has a 10-cent trivia board behind the counter. Sunday’s question was What is the Chinese zodiac symbol for 2024?
I spent quite a bit of time during December doing “research” for an anthology prompt. This consisted largely of streaming documentaries, some of which I mentioned in previous issues:
Giant Sea Serpent, Meet the Myth
Antarctic Dinosaurs
Modern Dinosaurs
and some of which I didn’t:
all of which I enjoyed at some level, even that last one from 1998, which had pretty bad CGI by today’s standards. Thing is, every documentary focuses on whatever research is relatively new and exciting at that time (though that last one tried harder than most). If you want something comprehensive, you have to read a book, and even those don’t always represent the controversies ongoing at the time.
Nothing especially compelling came together in my head, and I ended up submitting an existing story based not on dinosaurs or birds or reptiles but backing up a step on the evolutionary tree to amphibians. Olms are large cave-dwelling salamanders in Europe, ancient relatives of the mudpuppies that I learned something about during this local scientific meeting last spring.
Olms are eyeless albinos, so their skin is pinkish because of the blood showing through. They were sometimes called “human fish” because of this unusual color, Europe being full of pale people. At other times people thought they might be baby dragons.
This last stuff did not come from a documentary but from just poking around on the Internet. I also learned about Valvasor, who kind of rhymes with dinosaur but was actually an early naturalist who described the olms in his own encyclopedia. (The name, in medieval Latin, means “the carrier of a feud.”)
I had a lot of fun linking all this up with UFO lore on the Annunaki, amphibian aliens who supposedly jump-started human culture in Sumeria by impersonating their gods, without ever having watched the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, which apparently had a special dinosaur genocide espisode (which the reviewer really did not like). I am careful to label my stories as fiction, however, which practically guarantees they will not sell millions of copies or get me interviewed on basic cable.
Yesterday I discovered book 2 of a series that sounds interesting:
In The Paranormal Christian, journalist Richard D. Lewis explores his own true spiritual journey and real stories of others to correlate supernatural phenomena and the biblical worldview—without compromising either.
in part because the author is originally from the Triad area of North Carolina where I currently live, and in part because like better-known researchers Tanya Luhrmann and Pascal Boyer, I just wonder why people believe the things that they do.
Happy New Year, y’all!
That story, by the way? Rejected.