Author Archives: Jim DuBois

About Jim DuBois

Jim is a high grade nerd, made with premium ingredients for a nice, zesty flavor. He gets his kicks throwing dice around and pretending to be an elf or a god or whatever. Sometimes he writes genre fiction, and sometimes the people who he gets to read it look and sound really sincere when they compliment him about it.

Peeping Toms and a ripe harvest of old metaphors

Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I love to use folk sayings at every opportunity. The more, the merrier. Cliches are cliche for a reason, and that’s because good metaphors are like a diligent brain gardener … er … that is, they plant the idea right in your head and give you the context needed for an otherwise potentially obtuse statement. But some metaphors (Greek metaphora, “carry across”) have been around a long time, and the original meanings have been all but lost in favor of the ideas they represent. Here are a few that you may or may not know, arranged by some obscure categorical formula that I came up with myself!

Disclaimer! Folky stuff is not super well-cataloged and tends to be tricky to pin down. Some of these origins might be more recent urban legend than truth. For example, try to look up where the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” comes from.

Bible and ancient times

Doubting Thomas: In John 20:24-27, Thomas is the disciple who doesn’t believe all the others that Jesus came back from the dead, until Jesus shows up and is like, “Hey man, feel my wound-places.”

Good Samaritan: In Luke 10:29-37, Jesus tells the parable of a Jewish guy who gets robbed and beaten up, and the only person who would help him was a Samaritan (Hebrew Samerim, “guardians of the Torah”), a caste of Hebrews who were culturally opposed to the Jews in a manner similar to Protestants and Catholics in Elizabethan times. Bad blood. Of course, if you help somebody on the street today until the ambulance gets there, chances are you won’t be racial enemies with the person you’re helping.

Knock on wood: That’s where the Celtic forest spirits live. In the trees. They can help, maybe, or at least not specifically interfere with your intentions.

Scapegoat: In Leviticus 16:7-10, one goat was sacrificed and another, named Azazel (possibly Hebrew for “goat that departs” or “escape goat”), was used to transfer the people’s sins upon, and it was subsequently driven into the wilderness.

Achilles heel: In Homer’s Iliad, the mortal son of Athena, Achilles, was dipped in a pool of invulnerability water by his heel. Later, during the battle of Troy, Paris managed to shoot him there with a poison arrow to kill him. You all know this one.

Extra mile: In Matthew 5:41, Jesus tells people that if a soldier presses you to carry his crap for a mile (which was permissible under the law), you should take it an extra mile for him.

Farm and market

Fly off the handle: A loose and poorly tended ax head might fly off the handle when used.

Close but no cigar: Cigars were used as carnival prizes in the 19th century. Fun for kids of all ages!

Gift horse in the mouth/From the horse’s mouth: You can tell a horse’s age by its teeth. So while you shouldn’t insult a horse-giver (hence, “gift” horse) by checking out its teeth, you definitely should get the scoop before buying one from a disreputable horse dealer.

Down to brass tacks: A draper might use nose-to arm-length as a rough measure for cloth. You could ask them to get out the brass tacks for more precise cuts.

Cat out of the bag: Some shady people might try to sell you a bag of piglets but hide cats in there instead. If a cat gets out, then you know what’s up.

Dyed in the wool: Wool dyed before it is woven keeps color better than afterward, when it would be dyed “in the piece.”

Go to pot: Animals that outlive their usefulness (via age or stubbornness) go in the pot. To become dinner.

Peeping Tom: An anecdote about Coventry states that while under heavy tax, the governor Leofric’s wife Godiva said “Enough.” He told her he would relent if she went naked through the streets, and she called his bluff. Everybody stayed indoors except some tailor named Tom, who peeped out a window and was struck blind (by God, presumably) for his trouble.

Soldiers and sailors

Cut the mustard: You can cut out having to stand a formal troop assembly, or muster, if your unit is just that awesome all the time. Alternatively, this one might just infer that mustard is awesome.

Know the ropes: If you’re a sailor, you need to know the ropes, or you don’t sail so good.

Cut and run: When sailing, you might cut anchor in an emergency instead of taking the time to haul it back on board.

Flying colors/True colors: “Colors” means flags on a ship. You might proudly fly your colors to port after a victorious battle, and it wasn’t uncommon for ships to display false colors to confuse or fool other ships for various reasons, piratical or otherwise.

Heart on your sleeve: Medieval knights might have worn a token from their lady visible on the sleeve of their armor during a competition or battle.

Bite the bullet: Before anesthetics, biting something helped to shut out the pain of emergency surgery. In a war situation, bullets might be closest to hand for biting.

Sporting and bragging

Chip on your shoulder: In a boys’ dueling convention, circa 1830 New York, a chip was placed on one’s shoulder to instigate the other boy to knock it off and thus start a fight.

Drop of a hat: Some competitions started when the officiant waved his hat downward.

Beating around the bush: An indirect hunting method used to chase the birds out of the bush, where they could be shot by another party.

Break a leg: Yiddish hatslokhe un brokhe (“success and blessing”), awkwardly misinterpreted to German hals und beinbruch (“neck and leg break”), maybe? No other ready origin presents itself.

Pass the buck: You might have used a knife with a buckhorn handle as a poker marker to keep track of who’s dealing.

Hat trick: A cricket bowler, circa 1877, who took three wickets was given a new hat, or was allowed to pass his hat around for collection, by his cricket club.

Lily livered: White colored ichor from your liver meant you were bloodless and, therefore, cowardly.

Hands down: A horse jockey firmly in the lead can put his hands down as he approaches the finish line.

Misplaced meanings

Dog days of summer: Sirius (the dog star) rises and sets with the sun in early July through early September.

Kick the bucket: When slaughtering a pig, you might tie its legs to a wooden beam (French buquet), which it kicks while dying.

Scot free: “Scot” is an Old Norse word (skot) for a local tax.

Spitting image: Spit and image, as in “all the substance”: you’re made of your parents’ spit and look like them, too.

Under the weather: If you can’t stand up straight against the wind, due to being ill or drunk, you are under it.

Blue blood: In the middle ages, Spanish aristocracy had pale skin, so you could see their veins, as opposed to the Arab lower class.

Good-bye: “God be with ye.” I know, right?

Hoist by own petard: Coined by Shakespeare in Hamlet, a petard was a container of gunpowder with a fuse. If it exploded prematurely, it might hoist you into the air, quite fatally.

Pull out all the stops: To help the air flow through a church organ, you need to clean the stops by pulling debris out of them.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this little foray into folk wisdom as much as I have. Don’t miss the forest for the trees, now!

Sources include:

Facebook buys Oculus Rift: Awesome or not?

I remember walking into an arcade at some theme park or other almost 20 years back and seeing a haphazard rig set up in the middle of the floor. Barely more than a monitor with wires pouring out of it and a cushioned chair, what drew people to stand in line and gawk from afar was the specialized helmet that was hooked up to the electrical system. I watched as people donned the helmet, grasped a controller, and swiveled their heads around while the monitor showed a 16-bit Doom environment swivel in unison. When it got to my turn, I strapped on the helmet with inexpressible joy, took up my controls, and gawked at the images, so close to my eyes that they were all I could see. Then a demon popped out of the hallway and killed me, and my turn was done. For that moment, though, even with the crappy, low-resolution graphics, I was inside the game. And it was glorious.

If you’re tech savvy or into video games at all, you’re probably familiar with Palmer Luckey’s company Oculus VR and its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift a few years back. Unlike every attempt ever over the past two decades to put together a compelling virtual reality system, the Oculus and its prototypes have generated a nearly messianic buzz in the gaming magazines and related circles. “It works,” they say.

Demos, which showcase seemingly simple concepts, like a simple flight simulator, or undersea exploration, or even the guillotine program that makes you feel like your head is being chopped off, are all eliciting haunted responses from everyone who tries them out. The ability of the gizmos to pump out the appropriate resomolutions (I’m not an engineer) are “ready,” they say. A consumer version will be released sometime this year, they say. The time is now.

Then Facebook went and bought it.

Now don’t get me wrong. You won’t catch my ever blaming Luckey and his crew for this. If Facebook offered me two billion freaking dollars for my right eyeball, I’d be like “Uh … sure?” It’s almost more money than there is money. They would have been fools not to sell. It seems entirely likely that the $2 billion number came around because they rejected lower, more reasonable numbers. And his crew is, of course, still in charge of designing and engineering the device. Plans are still very much in the works to keep the video gaming end of the device on track, even bolstered with the influx of new money, though some developers seem to be jumping ship as a result of the sale. The Rift is still their magnum opus, their baby. It’s just that now, if Facebook tells them the baby has to jump, they have to make it jump.

So what the heck does a social media giant want with virtual reality, anyway? Well, there’s a lot of speculation, but the company itself says they’re going to use it to facilitate communication in a way similar to Skype or Google+ Hangouts. You and your friends, who may be in disparate cities, states, countries, all put the headgear on and voila! You’re in a room together, or at the pyramids of Giza, or on the moon. “Sexting” is no more. Say hello to “Oculust.” (Okay, maybe that one won’t catch on.)

Facebook is trying to take an idea to make video gaming more immersive and turn it into something that may very well fundamentally change the way human beings interact with each other. Want to work from home? Put on your headset and sit in on daily meetings with corporate HQ seven states away. Want to sing your kids to sleep but have to be across the country on business? Done.

Video chat lets us do these things as well, but we all know the hassle of dealing with low-resolution cameras, limited view fields, and visual lag. Much like talking on the phone, it’s hard to “just hang out” in video chat. If you don’t have anything in particular to talk about, then it’s like you’re staring at a screen, with your friend or loved one’s distended face taking up three fourths of the viewing area, wondering if things are likely to get less awkward. With VR, maybe it’ll feel more like hanging around your dorm room with your old college friends, just shootin’ it and watching TV, or like you’re really there with your parents in Tulsa, joining them for breakfast.

Facebook evidently thinks these ideas are worth pursuing and put a hefty price tag on it accordingly. The downside to all this, of course, is the idea that they’re going to make it Facebook-y. Put 3D ads flashing obtrusively across your field of view, like in Minority Report. No one wants to see his mother’s forehead plastered with the Maalox logo.

The other thing is that, unlike with our smartphones, the Rift requires a certain separation from the world at large in order to operate. You really need to sit down somewhere without a lot of breakables nearby and try to stay calm, because your nervous system is going to start trying to react to the virtual environment. This means that it’s very hard to be “present” in the world of the headset and also in the actual, real world around you at the same time. Perhaps Facebook has ideas about augmented reality, like Google Glass is attempting to master, where you can see the real world with virtual information overlaid on top of it. Either way, splitting off focus from the real world into a virtual one is already a source of problems, as the incidence of car accidents due to texting while driving can attest.

Ultimately, whether Facebook’s plans for the Rift unfold the way they want, or for that matter, the way we want, remains to be seen. If it lives up to the hype, and the United States starts to make sensible decisions about its telecommunications industry to keep up with demand for service, then we may all be talking about it in Middle Earth in a few years. Or Tatooine. Or Paris or something, for you not-nerds. Cheers.

Celebrating feast of St. Patrick: Booze 1, snakes 0

Today, everybody’s a little bit Irish. And the people who are normally just a little bit Irish are wearing Notre Dame shirts and getting into fistfights. It’s St. Patty’s Day, and the bars are enticing us all with green beer and playing Flogging Molly and Riverdance on the speakers. But who was St. Patrick, and why do we celebrate his day by getting sloshed?

Next to St. Nicholas, St. Patrick is probably the most widely known person with a St. in front of his (or her) name, though he was never formally canonized by any pope. Patrick, or Padraig in Irish, is based on the Latin word patricius, which simply means “father.” He was born Maewyn Succat in Scotland in the fourth century, though it’s hard to pinpoint anything more specifically. He was kidnapped by Irish pirates as a teenager (seriously), and brought to Ireland as a slave. At the supposed urging of God, he escaped captivity and ran 200 miles to a port with a ship bound for England.

Patrick joined the priesthood and then went right back to Ireland to become bishop of Armagh. He was famed for using the Irish weed, the shamrock, to explain the concept of the Christian trinity: one God with three distinct entities. Such a teaching would have resonated with pagan Irish, who already revered the shamrock and had a few models of three-in-one deities, such as the Morrígna of Macha, Anann, and The Morrígan. After many years trying to convert the Irish amid hostile conditions, Patrick, friendless and generally disliked, died March 17, supposedly, of an unknown year.

His legacy, however, did not. Early writings after Patrick’s time referred to him as a warrior priest who carved out converts from the pagan druids (though there is no real evidence of this) and established the highest moral virtues in great lords and ladies. Many accounts blur the line between Patrick and one or two other church representatives in Ireland at or near the same time. Regardless, Ireland became a Catholic country through and through, and Patrick was given the credit.

Stories about Patrick include how he prayed all the snakes away (though evidence would indicate there were never any snakes in Ireland in the first place) and that he once took so long giving a sermon that a staff he planted in the ground at the beginning grew into a tree by the end. He is a revered figure throughout Ireland, swept up in the cultural and religious identity of the island, and his feast day, the purported day of his death, is celebrated by breaking the Lenten fast and indulging in a little booze. So remember that you’re in mourning when you’re chugging green (or otherwise) beer tonight.

Now let’s talk a little bit about that booze. If you’re drinking beer (Old English beor, probably borrowed from Latin biber, “to drink”; or derived from Proto-Germanic beuwo, “barley”), go for Guinness in Ireland’s honor. Our “Modern Urban Gentleman” has already given a nice primer about the drink, but allow me to expand a bit.

Beer is made from malted grains (malting is the process of soaking grains in water and then heating them up rapidly, to turn the starch into soluble sugars) left to ferment (yeast eats at the sugar and poops alcohol). Most all beer today contains hops, for the bitter flavoring and as a preservative. Initially, the term “ale” (Proto-Indo European alu, “sorcery, possession, intoxication”) was used to mean “beer without hops,” but by the 18th century, they all used hops, and the term “ale” came to mean “beer brewed in the country” as opposed to in town. (Today, “ale” is specific to beer produced through top-fermenting yeast, versus bottom-fermented “lager.”)

Beer is one of the building blocks of civilization, indirectly responsible for every technological advancement from farming to refrigeration. The drink’s economic value throughout history cannot be overstated. Need something made cheaply that can serve as food, medicine, and suppression of rebellious inclinations for the masses? Look no further!

The first beer was probably brewed sometime around 9500 B.C, along with the introduction of cereal (Latin cerealis, “of Ceres,” the Roman goddess of harvest and agriculture). One of the earliest recipes for beer comes from the Sumerian religion, where Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, had her own hymn which essentially laid out how to make the stuff in an easy to remember, spoken litany. Beer came to Ireland around 3000 B.C., and might well have been brewed with a little bit of opiate in the mix, against pharmaceutical advice.

What’s the other Irish drink? Oh, right. Whiskey! Everyone but the Americans and the Irish spell it “whisky” (Gaelic uisce beatha, “water of life,” as Latin aqua vitae). Jameson and Bushmills are the go-to choices, while the Modern Urban Gentleman recommends Redbreast. Distilled spirits haven’t had nearly the storied history of beer (or wine). Distillation as a practice — that is: boiling out the different parts of a chemical solution, in this case to get all the alcohol into one container — may be only as old as about the 13th century, where it was done in Italy. Back then, these beverages were largely made in monasteries and used as medicinal anesthetic and antiseptic. Think rubbing alcohol. It didn’t take long to become recreation, however.

Beer and wine can only reach alcohol levels of about 20 percent, maximum, before the yeast starts to die off faster than it poops. Distilled liquor (from Latin liquere, “to be liquid”), made of barley (whiskey), potatoes (vodka), sugarcane (rum), wine (brandy), and other produce, can get much more alcoholic than that.

A brief side note about the nomenclature for alcohol levels, because it’s interesting: We typically use ABV — alcohol by volume — these days, because it’s useful and easy. However, you may have heard the term “proof” to refer to this as well. The term comes from 18th-century British naval convention, when sailors might have been paid in rum. In order to determine that the bottles were alcoholic “enough,” some of the liquor was set afire. If it burned, meaning it was at least 57 percent (four-sevenths) alcoholic, it was “proved.” Therefore, 100 proof meant four parts alcohol per seven. Since then, the term has gone out of fashion everywhere except the United States, where we use it, largely for style purposes, to mean twice the alcohol percentage (i.e. 80 proof means 40 percent ABV).

So, no matter what you’re drinking tonight, remember to be safe, raise a glass to the departed, and keep away from snakes!

Is your daylight safe? Time stops for fun, profit

For many of us, daylight saving time has been the norm throughout our whole lives. Spring forward, fall back. A bedrock of how the world conducts its business. In actuality, though, the practice is a recent phenomenon and something of a contentious issue. While there’s little in the way of scientific consensus, several studies show deleterious effects on health and well-being to counteract the gains in retail revenues that come from sliding our schedules twice a year.

First, a bit of background. An hour hasn’t always been an hour. The ancient sundial, for instance, marked time by the passage of the sun, and therefore, the shadows on its face. In the winter, hours were shorter than in summer (an effect which grew more pronounced with increased latitude). Each day had 12 hours, and each night — regardless of which was objectively longer. As clocks became more precise, able to separate hours into equivalent units, midnight and high noon were used as the stable benchmarks, as they consistently happened 12 real hours apart.

Until the industrial revolution(s) around the start of the 20th century, most of the world’s economies were primarily agrarian. Farmers didn’t care what numbers heralded dawn or dusk at any given point in the year; they set their schedule based on the sun. Life was more lax and less regulated. With the introduction of railroads and communication networks, though, timekeeping became something important. Business matters had to be conducted at precise intervals. Shop hours needed to be set and kept. Trains had to leave when they left and arrive when they arrived.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical essay in Paris suggesting that people should wake with the dawn year round to save candles. While the essay offered outlandish ideas such as rationing candles and waking the public at sunrise with cannon fire, the merit of capitalizing on sunshine probably seeped through to modern times in some part from him.

The first individuals to propose a shift in official time for mass use were George Vernon Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand who wanted more daylight hours to capture bugs, when he published his paper on the subject in 1895, and Londoner William Willett in 1905, who liked to play golf as late as possible. It wasn’t until 1916 in Germany when the idea was made into law, and apart from use during the two world wars in an effort to capitalize on daylight, the United States didn’t make use of daylight saving until the energy crisis of the 1970s.

While Germany was the first state effort to rename the hours of the day, a few myths deal with keeping the sun overhead for longer than normal. In the Old Testament book of Joshua, for instance, the title character takes his Israelite armies on a whirlwind tour of genocide through the lands of Canaan at the behest of Abraham’s God. The residents of one city-state, Gibeon, meet with Joshua under the guise of people from a far-off land, so, you know, they don’t all get murdered out of hand before a bargain is reached. Joshua agrees to ally with them at this meeting, so when he later discovers that, psych!, they’re Canaanites after all, he can’t murder them because he gave them his word he wouldn’t. He just presses them all into slavery instead.

Anyway, a few nearby cities decide that, even if they can’t take on the Israelite army, they’ll pound Gibeon into the ground for making an alliance with the genocidal foreigners, and they march to the attack. Joshua shows up and lays into them, however, and God actually causes the sun to stop moving overhead so the Israelites have more time in the day to beat on the Canaanites. Gotta be thorough about these things.

Another instance of sun-stopping occurs on a bit larger scale. The Celtic god Dagda (Proto-Celtic for “good god,” and perhaps contributes to the Old English dæg, source of “day”) decides to have an affair with the goddess Boann (Old Irish for “white cow,” in the best possible way, I’m sure; shares a root with the word “bovine”), and she gets knocked up. Well, rather than admit what happened or try to be a cuckold, Dagda stops the sun for a whopping nine months, allowing the child to be carried to term in one day. I’m not sure how nobody noticed that such a long freakin’ time had passed at some point, but hey, simpler times, right?

The child, Aengus (Proto-Celtic oino-guss, meaning “one choice”) played his own lingual trick on his old man. When Dagda parceled out his lands among his children, Aengus was away, so he got left out. When he came back, the clever and tricky deity Lugh told Aengus he should ask his father if he could live at Dagda’s own home for láa ogus oidhche, which ambiguously can mean either “a night and a day,” or “night and day.” The latter interpretation was a folksy way of saying “always,” so when Dagda agreed to the terms, Aengus claimed the ancestral homeland for himself, permanently.

So after all that, my question is, if we can just shove time around as we please to take advantage of daylight hours, why can’t we set the clocks way forward in the summer time, say two weeks or so. We don’t need those weeks in March. Who cares about March, anyway? Then shunt them onto the end of November for a nice, end-of-the-year vacation. Who’s with me?

What is it good for? War, archery to win wives

War. War never changes. Or so says Ron Perlman at the start of the Fallout video game, anyway. Syria is embroiled in all-out civil war, Russia is on the brink of rampaging through Ukraine, and Venezuela is newly plagued by violent unrest. War is something that permeates human history and leaves scars, both physical and cultural, in its wake.

While we’re all quite aware how poorly real people deal with war, maybe we can learn something from the myths and legends about how to resolve our differences in a better way. Let’s find out.

The fall of Camelot

Ah, the nobility and honour (English spelling intentional) of the chivalric court of King Arthur (“Arthur” possibly means “bear king” in Old Irish). The golden age of Britain, when Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table slew ferocious creatures like boar demigods and dragons, and sought to engender unity and goodwill among men. Surely these paragons of virtue can tell us something about how to conduct just wars and strive for peace.

Yeah, it’s a great thought, but these guys were as bloodthirsty as anybody else. Arthur reportedly conquered Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, took Gaul from the Romans, and ran roughshod over the Saxons that tried to invade. When he had to march out to defend Gaul from the Romans who wanted it back, he left his nephew (or possibly his bastard son) Mordred in charge of Camelot. When he returned, Mordred had stolen his wife, Guinevere, and usurped the throne. There was another battle among the family at Camlann (which could be a word derived from “Camelot”), and both kings died there, or maybe Arthur escaped to Avalon (which could also be a word derived from “Camelot”) to recuperate.

What can we learn about war from these noble knights? Mostly that you shouldn’t trust family members with your crowns. But, y’know, d’urrr. Moving on.

The battle of Troy

No other mythical battle has received quite as much cultural exposure in this country than the battle of Troy (Greek Ἴλιον, or Ilion — now you know why Homer called his poem The Iliad). There are movies and retellings and Wishbone episodes — you name it. We all know how it goes. Trojan prince Paris names Aphrodite the prettiest goddess, so she makes Grecian princess Helen fall in love with him. Helen’s husband Menelaus and his brother King Agamemnon (“very steadfast”) get some Greeks together to go burn their topless towers, or some junk.

After a 10-year siege, including lots of heroics and human sacrifices and dead warriors, Odysseus (obviously the root of our word “odyssey”) carts out his big wooden horse and the Trojans take it into the city, accepting it as a gift to the victors. Greeks pour out in the middle of the night and open the gates, and the rest is a slaughter. Troy is razed to the ground. Pretty much all the remaining Greeks get killed on the way home, though, save Odysseus the wise, who has a very eventful journey and has to win his wife back in an archery contest when he finally returns to Ithaca.

So, what can we learn from the Trojan War? Maybe that you shouldn’t commit genocide just because your wife runs off with another man? Also, it’s okay to look a gift giant-wooden-horse in the mouth.

Mahabharata

The “great tale of the Bharata dynasty” is the longest poem ever written, consisting of about 1.8 million words (or over 7,000 pages — twice the length of all of the Song of Ice and Fire novels so far put together). It’s a Hindu holy book, filled with philosophical and religious instruction about the gods and living nobly, but the story it tells is that of the Kurukshetra War that took place sometime in the 1000s BC, beginning the fourth and final age of mankind, the age of Kali.

The war was fought between two sets of cousins, the Kaurava and Pandava princes. More family trouble. Basically, this guy named King Shantanu falls for a girl who already has a child. They have two sons together who inherit the throne, but both die childless. The girl’s first kid, Vyasa, beds some of the former queens of his half brothers and two sons come out of it: Dhritarashtra (king of Kuru, hence the Kauravas) and Pandu (hence, Pandavas). Pandu gets the throne, but then his son bets his kingdom in a crooked dice game with his cousin and loses everything. After the cheating is found out, war happens.

The Bhagavad Gita, probably one of the most famous works of Hindu religion/mythology, concerns one of Pandu’s semi-divine children, Arjuna, who balks at the idea of fighting his own family. Krishna, one of the avatars (incarnations, from the Sanskrit avatāra, “descent”) of the god Vishnu, convinces him to fight, as it is his duty to uphold the law and serve his royal father.

(Arjuna, point of interest, also wins his wife Draupadi in an archery contest, in which he wields a heavy steel bow and shoots a target shaped like the eye of a big fish. What is it with people winning wives by shooting? Wasn’t that also the deal in Disney’s Brave?)

Anyway, the Pandavas eventually win out, though the battle only leaves 10 surviving warriors in the aftermath.

So, what can we learn from the Kauravas and the Pandavas about warfare? Probably a lot of things, but mostly that you should never bet your kingdom in a dice game. I swear, even Richard would have put up his kingdom for a horse that one time. Bad policy.

So there you have it. Legendary wars are a lot like real world ones, with death and sorrow being the primary leavings. Justice only ever prevails at great cost, and virtue is mostly rewarded with a quick, clean death rather than one drawn out and terrible. If the ancient heroes rarely live through their wars, why do we suppose we will live through ours?

Turn! Turn! Turn! Seasons and mourning goddesses

Winter has officially worn out its welcome. Yes, yes, I know that this winter has so far been warmer than the average recorded, and climate change, and it’s just my perception based on recent experience here in south-central Pennsylvania, but still. I don’t like being cold.

Of course, almost as soon as the cold goes away, we get the heat. It feels like the mild seasons, spring and fall, are only shadows of the more extreme seasons, wistful and fleeting. In fact, not all cultures have four seasons like we do in North America. Tropical climates have two: the hot season and the wet season. So why do we even use four? Where does that come from?

There are, of course, two solstices (Latin: “still sun”), so named because those are the dates when the sun reaches its visible apex in the sky during summer and its nadir in the sky during winter as the Earth rotates on its tilted axis. The two equinoxes (Latin: “equal night”), so named because those are the days when the night and day are the same length (though that’s not quite scientifically true), occur in between the solstices on either side; they are the vernal (which is just a Latin and Norse term for the season of spring) and the autumnal (Latin and Old French term that potentially shares a root, auq, with the word August, meaning “drying up season”).

The seasons don’t actually begin on the solstices and equinoxes, though, because it takes a few months before the actual weather begins to change in relation to the prolonged/shortened exposure to the sun. Sort of like how outdoor pools don’t warm up at noon, but in the afternoon after the sun has been shining on it for a few hours. The atmosphere works somewhat similarly, but on a much greater scale.

“Spring” comes from an Old English word (springen) meaning to leap, burst forth, or fly up. It began to be used in relation to the seasonal change in the 16th century, in a descriptive sense, as in “spring of the year.” Before that, the word “lent” was used to indicate the season, from Old English/Middle Dutch, meaning “length,” as in lengthening of the days, along with printemps, French for “first time.” Spring is the season when plants spring up, and the sun springs above the horizon earlier and earlier. Representing change and birth and optimism, it’s usually considered the “first” season of the cycle.

“Summer” seems to come from an ancient Sanskrit form (sama), meaning “half year” or “season.” Far enough back, people would have used two seasons, the warm and the cold, and summer was one half of the year. The other season was — well, we’ll get to that.

“Fall” comes from Old English as well (feallan), meaning to fail, decay, and die. It also found usage in relation to the season in the 16th century, both as an antonym to spring and because it’s the season when things fail, decay, and die.

“Winter” means, roughly, “white year” from Proto-Indo-European and Celtic words (wind/vindo). So summer was “half year” and winter was “white year.” I’m not sure if there was originally a subtle distinction in the language, like “regular half year” versus “white half year,” but it seems likely, to the extent that the words share a root language. Summer and winter originated well before spring and fall — as seasons, at least.

Now that we know something about where the idea of seasons and their names came from, let’s figure out who these ancient people blamed for the cold. And before you start to think these myths are silly, ask yourself how much stock you, or people you know, put in the predictions of a groundhog on these matters.

Demeter and Persephone

These two Greek harvest and nature goddesses, mother and daughter, whose worship predates that of Zeus and his cohort (though Zeus is also supposed to be Persephone’s father), kept everything bountiful and sunny, year-round. One day, Hades, god of the underworld (and Persephone’s uncle), kidnapped Persephone ‘cuz she was pretty. Creeeeeper. Demeter flipped out and went into mourning, causing the land to turn bitter cold and dry up. Naturally, Zeus intervenes.

“Hades,” he says. “What in tarnation is you doin’ wit’ mah youngun.” (I like to imagine the Olympians as inbred mountain folk, for obvious reasons.)

“She et six seeds from a pomegranate. She’s mah wife now.”

“Dag nabbit. If’n it’s only six seeds, you only get ‘er fer six months.”

So Demeter makes “summer” happen half the year, when she has her daughter around, and “winter” when Persephone’s in Hades.

Inanna and Dumuzi

The Sumerian goddess of the sun decided she wanted to check out the underworld, where her sister Ereshkigal, keeper of the dead, lived. They weren’t close, and Inanna was probably just going there to brag about how great things were on the surface. She got told by gatekeeper after gatekeeper that she had to give up her items of power, like her wand and her headdress and necklace, to pass, so she did (for some reason). When she finally got to her sister, Erishkigal killed her immediately. Once again, no more sun meant no more summer, so Enki, leader of the pantheon, sent some servants in to go fish her out and bring her back to life.

Erishkigal said, “No fair, send someone to replace you.”

Inanna looked around and found her husband, Dumuzi, lounging about, not in mourning but living it up bachelor style, so she said, “Yeah, he’ll do.”

Dumuzi’s sister offered to take his place in the underworld for half the year, and Inanna, conflicted about her feelings, still mourned for him for the half of the year when he was down there, causing winter.

Amaterasu

The sun goddess (kami) of Japan, Amaterasu, got ticked off at her brother, Susanoo, flaying ponies and throwing them at her loom, so she hid in the cave, Amano-Iwato, leaving the world in darkness. The other gods showed up and begged her to come out, to no avail. Finally, Uzume danced around naked, which caused the male gods present to laugh (for some reason?), and that drew Amaterasu out of the cave.

Uzume had put a mirror at the mouth, which stunned Amaterasu long enough for some other gods to block the way back in. They made her shine her light again and, eventually, she and Susanoo made amends, sort of. While this myth doesn’t directly mention the seasons, it’s easy to see that the sun has some volatility in how she behaves.

So, while the ancient myths have more death (and pony-flaying) in them compared to our Groundhog Day, I’m sure there’s more than a few people who’d like to take a hunting rifle out to Punxsutawney and change that score. Gotta blame winter weather on somebody, after all.

Obscure, ancient sports may be Olympic material

The Olympics have a storied history. The Greeks (and Romans) held them virtually unbroken for a thousand years until they were banned in the fourth century in the interests of Christianity. They came back in the late 1800s and have stuck around until present day, no longer connoting paganism, but now presenting a worldwide competition, complete with advertising, paparazzi, and terrorist attacks (sometimes). We marvel at the figure skaters and gymnasts, we cheer at the runners, swimmers, and skiers. We wince at the inevitable slips and tumbles.

Some of us tune in, though, just to see the stranger sports showcased, such as biathlon (you ski, and then you shoot stuff!), bicycle sprint (you try very hard to go slower than the other person for as long as possible before the finish line, when you speed up and go for the win), and curling (I … uh … truth be told, I have no idea what’s going on in curling). What we strange-sports enthusiasts need is more! More weird stuff, the weirder the better.

“But Jim,” you ask, “where are you going to get weirder sports than those?”

Have no fear, dear reader. There’s gold in them thar hills.

Caber toss

The Scottish “heavy” sport of throwing logs around. From the Gaelic word for “pole,” a caber is a long, wooden beam, 19-and-a-half feet tall (about 4 people), that weighs around 75 pounds. The sport is probably only a few hundred years old, and it’s believed that the first caber tossers practiced their craft in order to construct impromptu bridges during wartime, perhaps as part of sieges or invasions of contested territory near rivers and marshlands. They’d throw a tree trunk so their fellows could scramble across quickly and catch the enemy in an unguarded flank.

The caber is lifted up vertical, so the top of it is directly above the tosser’s head. The tosser lets the caber fall forward, running after it, until it hits a precise angle. Then the bottom of the caber is lifted up. The top (now the new bottom) plants into the ground and the bottom (now the new top) flips up and over, hopefully, landing on the other side. The object is not to get the most distance, but rather to have the straightest possible line. If the caber does not flip entirely over, the tosser loses major points.

Would this sport be a good addition to the Olympics, or a great addition to the Olympics? I, for one, would absolutely tune in to see this in the Summer Games, especially if it were jumbled together with some other sport, like biking or distance running. Run a mile, then toss a caber, run another mile (or more if your toss doesn’t make it over). Great fun!

Pankration

Greek παγκράτιον (pan: “all”; kra-tee-on: “strength”) is essentially the mixed-martial arts of the original Olympic Games. A sort of crossbreed between wrestling and boxing, the only rules were no biting and no eye-gouging. Everything else was fair and square (though excessive overuse of kicking was not considered very manly). The one who tapped out (or passed out, or died) first was the loser.

In one of the games, a man named Arrhichion managed to kick his opponent in the toe, breaking it, while trapped in a chokehold. The other man forfeited from the pain, thus granting victory to A-Dog, but by the time the ref called the match, Arrhichion was dead from the choke. They named him winner, put a crown of laurels on his head, and marched him back home as a champion, though.

Theseus was supposed to have used this fighting style against the minotaur, and Hercules against the lion in his first labor. Indeed, the grappling and choking techniques of pankration were used by the Grecian and Macedonian armies, including the Spartan hoplites. (“This is madness! This is pankration!“)

Should pankration be part of the games? It was an original Olympic sport, after all. But probably not. There’s a reason Ultimate Fighting Championship-style, “anything goes” combat tournaments are not shown on daytime television. People get hurt. People die. Granted, there have been seven athlete deaths during modern Olympic games, from 1912 through 2010 (mostly in practice), and hundreds of injuries, but we don’t go seeking them out, either.

Pankration is more of a blood sport than fits well into a competition designed to bring people and cultures together. When Pierre de Coubertin sought to revive the Olympic Games in 1896, the archbishop of Lyon told him, “We accept all, except pankration.” Yeah, but what about chariot racing?

Mesoamerican ball game

It has a more fun name than that. The Mayans called it Pok-Ta-Pok. Probably onomatopoeia. The ball game was serious business! Even more so than football! It was deeply entrenched in the religious rituals and myths of the Mesoamerican people. Games were sometimes held to represent historic battles, where one team were the “losers,” so they would lose the game, then be sacrificed to the gods.

The Mayan hero twins, Hunahpu (“Who?” “Nah, Pooh”) and Xbalanque (“Chi ball on, ‘kay?”), played against One and Seven Death. (Mayans named their kids after the day they were born, and Death was not a great day to be born on.) Mssrs. Death were the rulers of Xibalba, which is sort of like Hell, a little. It’s where the dead go. After overcoming seven trials, the heroes won the ball game! Then got thrown into a fire. Then they came back and disguised themselves as magicians for a while, until One and Seven Death invited the twins to perform, and the Xibalbans were like “Ooh! Ooh! Saw me in half now!” so Hunahpu and Xbalanque did. Anyway, the ball game was super important.

While some of the aspects of the original game are lost, we still know a lot about it. The ball was solid rubber, heavy and tough, about a foot in diameter. Players bopped the ball back and forth with their hips, and wore thick leather girdles to prevent bones breaking and such. If a ball hit you in the head, hard and fast, you could very easily die. You scored points by knocking the ball into the other team’s wall. Eventually, they started putting vertical hoops about six meters (20ish feet) up the wall on either side of the court, barely large enough to fit the ball into — think Quidditch. If you got the ball through one, you won the game, though trying for it and missing cost you points.

Should the ball game make an Olympic comeback? Heck yeah! With ergonomic and safe equipment, athletes could be throwing their hips around like Elvis impersonators at a bar mitzvah in no time. I mean, cut the bit about human sacrifice, anyway, and it’s all gravy.

What do you all think? Are weird sports your tea and biscuits? Any others I haven’t mentioned? Let us know!

Are you ready for some cuju?

Ah, American football. The roar of the crowds. The crunching of bones. The instinctual dopamine rush of identifying with an in-group against a common “enemy.” The blinding splatter of advertisements on everything in sight. Oh, and there’s also the skill and athleticism of professional sportsmen on display, which I guess is appealing.

It’s no wonder that you can’t spit without hitting a football fan in this country and that nothing else on television can compete in the ratings. But we didn’t always have football. The National Football League has only been around since 1920. And in fact, if you pay careful attention to the weird letters that come after the word “Super Bowl,” you’ll notice there have only been 48 of them so far. This isn’t news for the elders among us, but come along with me and let’s explore where this crazy game came from.

First, let’s go to China. What? I’m serious. It’s likely that the ancient Greeks and Romans played games involving the kicking around of balls as well, but there are actual records of rules (well, instructions anyway) in a Chinese military manual from around the second century BC. The Chinese called the “game” cuju, Chinese for “kick ball,” and it consisted of kicking leather balls through silk hoops placed 9 meters off the ground.

Cuju may not have a national tournament these days, but the Japanese offshoot, called kemari (means the same thing, “kick ball”) still gets played today at Shinto festivals. Kemari is a cooperative sport that looks more like Hacky Sack than anything, where you kick the ball around a circle of players, trying to keep it in the air without using your hands.

Different ball games were played all across the world, from Mesoamerica (we’ll get to the Mayans next week) to Greenland to Australia, but our version’s most distant traceable ancestor comes from England in the ninth century. Back then, whole villages would compete with each other, throwing around balls made of inflated animal bladders, including pig’s bladders (hence the phrase “pigskin”), trying to get them to some landmark or other, like a church or a well. No limits to the number of people playing, and you could use hands, feet, sticks, whatever to get the ball around. They usually played during festivals.

(Some towns still do play on Mardi Gras, called Shrove Tuesday across the pond. The County of Derbyshire holds such matches).

Because every now and again somebody got knifed in the back, say, or perhaps on account of the drunken and disorderly conduct surrounding these outings, several attempts were made to outlaw the sport of football in its early years, though these efforts never seemed to stick. Typically, the penalty for breaking the law would be a fine. I expect if someone tried to ban football today, the NFL could afford to continue playing while paying the fine each week. Heck, that would be a great new source of government revenue! (Note: The author of this article does not advocate or endorse the banning of football in this country, mostly because he does not want to be stabbed with a knife.)

Fast-forward to a school in the town of Rugby (“Rook Fort,” whether referring to the bird or a man’s name) in Warwickshire, England, in 1823. By this time, the game of football had evolved into something a little more organized, with loosely defined rules and a set number of players on the field at a time. Inflated pig bladders were still used, though. The game resembled soccer (itself abbreviated from “association football“), with each side trying to kick the ball into the opponents’ goal. At the Rugby School, a boy named William Webb Ellis was alleged to have received a kick, catching it. The normal response would have been to back up into controlled territory, drop the ball, and try to kick it further downfield. Instead, Ellis said (to himself, I’m sure — and I’m guessing here), “F- this,” and ran forward, ball in hand, thus inventing the game of rugby.

If you’ve ever seen the game of rugby played, it is frantic and violent. I mean, so is American football. But in rugby, each play starts out with the ball in neither team’s control as the opposing teams huddle around it. When the whistle blows, they try to hook the ball with their legs to get possession, and end up creating a terrible mess of potential injury in the process. They call this a “scrum,” short for “scrummage,” which is a form of the word “skirmish,” a military term, which itself derives from an old French word meaning “defend.” More military analogues! Yay!

In the late 19th century, rugby came to North America. For the most part, colleges would compete with each other using eclectic rules that changed from game to game. A coach named Walter Camp was the one who came up with the idea of a line of scrimmage and one team having possession of the ball at the start of plays, along with the need to advance 10 yards within four downs.

Between the start of these new rules and the year 1905, some 300 odd college kids died at football, prompting President Teddy Roosevelt to authorize the agency which would become the NCAA to take charge of streamlining the rules and making play safer. They made forward passing legal, which ultimately changed the game into what we now know as American football.

So what about the Super Bowl? When the American Football League came into the picture in 1960, in direct competition with the NFL, both leagues knew they couldn’t coexist independently. They drained away too much of each other’s audience. So they decided to merge together, and after the 1966 season, they held a grand tournament. But what to call it? The officially designated name, “AFL-NFL World Championship Game,” lacked a certain … kick?

Well, the biggest after-season college football game in those days was held at the Pasadena Rose Bowl Stadium (named after the bowl shape of its stands, which itself took cue from the Yale Bowl stadium), and the name of the game officially became the “Rose Bowl Game” after about 1923. Eventually, all postseason college games became known as bowls. The principal founder of the AFL and coach of its champion Kansas City Chiefs, Lamar Hunt, said he jokingly referred to the game as a “Super Bowl,” because his kids were playing with the bouncy balls called super balls. You know the ones.

So there you have it. The most-watched sporting event in the United States, with all its humble origins. I, for one, think it would have been more fun if everyone from Denver had lined up against everyone from Seattle, trying to get a football to the Seattle Space Needle, last weekend, but maybe that’s just me.

I got 99 protagonists, but a woman ain’t one

I’m a white man. I should probably get that out of the way up front. Now, then:

Women and non-white folk get short shrift in all manner of media. Time after time, they are relegated to support characters and trophies. When, after all, was the last time you watched a feature film in which the primary protagonist was a black female? There’s Precious … uhhh, Catwoman … oh, and that Disney frog movie. (She’s a frog for half of it, but that still counts.) I am having a lot of trouble thinking of others.

In video games, though, the problem is even worse. Most games don’t have playable female characters. Of those that do, the females are usually one or two choices out of a dozen characters (see fighting games), and/or their only real purpose is to feature in one or another state of undress on the cover of the game box. There are, of course, notable exceptions. I could talk about Mirror’s Edge, Metroid Prime, or Ittle Dew, but they are diamonds in the rough. And make no mistake, there’s a lot of rough.

I get ads on Facebook for online games that warn, “Males only allowed,” and show CGI girls thrusting their hoo-has at me in improbable poses. In video games, female armor seems to cover up, on average, about one-fifth as much of their torsos as male armor does. Women in games are constantly getting kidnapped (to spur a man’s rescue quest), murdered (to spur a man’s revenge quest), or just bartered around between male characters like a used lawn chair at a yard sale.

Make a game starring a woman, “they” say, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot financially. (“They” say the same thing about women in movies.) Males play video games, and they won’t buy a game that forces them to play as a woman.

Never mind that women did 45 percent of the gaming in 2013. Never mind that women gamers over age 18 outnumber male gamers under 18 by a factor of 3-to-2 (even if many of those women are, in fact, your mom, who likes to play Words With Friends with people from her high school graduating class … or from your high school graduating class, for that matter).

What “they” say creates a self-perpetuating cycle in which certain kinds of games turn away women because they aren’t represented, and then the game developers are told not to cater their games to women because women don’t buy them.

Marketing zooms in on specific demographics, I get that. The pink aisle is for girls and the black/blue/white/brown/grey/red/green/yellow aisles are for boys. If you can sell more units by indulging your target demographic’s prejudiced and misogynistic tendencies, then gods bless you, you big damn hero of the free market.

OK, now that I’m done ranting, I want to bring up another point that’s sort of been missing from this particular conversation. Even if women made up 0 percent of the gaming population — if something about that mysterious “woman gene” inured them to the sweet, sweet lure of pixelated, interactive media — even then: Why shouldn’t games be made by women, featuring actual female protagonists, with actual feminine perspectives, solely for the sake of the male gamers who would play them?

Perhaps it is because there is a stigma about male gamers playing games as female characters. In many recent games, particularly in MMOs like World of Warcraft and western RPGs such as Mass Effect, where players are permitted to choose dialog options in social situations, it’s become common practice to allow gamers to choose their own gender. Sometimes women play these games with the male option. Sometimes men play them with the female option. Many reasons are cited, ranging from, “If I have to stare at someone’s butt for hours on end, I might as well stare at one I find attractive,” to, “I like the female voice actor better,” but not many of us male gamers are very comfortable telling non-gamers (and sometimes even other gamers) that we enjoy playing as female characters.

For example, I played a game relatively recently called Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stones, a game in which the protagonist is a tomboyish 12-year-old who kills monsters with her sword and makes friends with her schoolmates. I absolutely adored the game, but almost everyone I talk to about it looks at me funny. You, dear reader, are quite possibly looking at me funny right now, I shouldn’t wonder.

I’m no pervy old man who gets off on watching underage girls swing “swords” around, all right? The truth is, there’s not much difference between playing a game with a certain protagonist and watching a movie or reading a book about one. Why should I be ashamed of playing Fortune Summoners, but not of watching Pan’s Labyrinth, or reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?

I shouldn’t be.

I can watch Pan’s Labyrinth and strongly empathize with the plight of a brave, creative young girl trying to survive the harsh reality of living in a household surrounded by violence. I can read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and cheer along young Francie Nolan as she struggles to thrive in a society that’s determined to push her down into “her place.” I love these stories. I love that they come from a fresh perspective, one that happens to be so different from my own. Both of them have contributed to my personal and moral growth as a human being.

So in sum, I absolutely want games with well-fleshed-out, interesting female characters for women gamers (who deserve them greatly, though I will let them speak for themselves on the matter), but I also want those games for me. And, for that matter, for my fellow male gamers, who on the whole (and especially among the 12-17-year-old demographic) could probably use the education.

The final paragraph of this article has been modified since its original publication.

From bloaty to sparkly: Tracing monster origins

Monsters, some say, are a means by which society can separate out the most abhorrent and depraved aspects within itself. If a man can walk into an elementary school and murder 20 children, it’s much easier for people to call him a monster — an “other” — than to admit he is a part of our own in-group.

There is much of the monster in us, and much of us in him. Perhaps this “othering” is a healthy process, enabling us to deal harshly with law breakers by removing our empathetic mercy and species-preservation instincts. White blood cells don’t attack cancer, after all, because they think the diseased cells are a part of the body.

Anyway, I suggest watching Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods for a more thorough (and bloody brilliant) examination of those themes. I’m here to talk to you about words and stuff. So let’s take a look at three of the most popular monsters in media lately — vampires, werewolves, and zombies — where they come from, and what makes them tick.

Vampires

Nobody really knows where the word “vampire” came from. Best guess is the Slovak vrepit’ sa, which means “to thrust into or stick to.” I guess, because vampires … ah … thrust … their teeth into your flesh? I dunno. Anyway, the term came from Eastern Europe in the early 17th century, but similar figures appear all over the world long beforehand, from the Mayan camazotz, which was a head-snatching bat god, to the Japanese kappa, who were river-dwelling blood drinkers (and rapists to boot).

A lot of corpses were exhumed during the 17th and 18th centuries all over Eastern Europe, from Romania to Austria, as rumors were circulating of unexplained killings of people and animals. (Mind you, this was happening at the same time the United States was being founded and rational philosophies were spreading through German intellectual circles.) The dug-up bodies looked purple and bloated, like ticks, with blood streaming from their mouths — almost as though they’d been drinking human blood! (Of course, many bodies swell with gas after death, causing fluids to seep out. Oops.) These bodies were then variously decapitated, dismembered, driven into the ground with spikes, staked through the heart, mouth, and stomach, and stuffed with garlic.

Belief in vampires never completely died out, but the periods of mass hysteria associated with the phenomenon were relatively short-lived. Our current conceptions about vampires largely come from Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel Dracula, in which the vampires’ various strengths and weaknesses are spelled out explicitly. Anne Rice popularized the idea of a sympathetic vampire in the late 20th century, and, most recently, Stephenie Meyer made them sparkle. If vampires do exist, these more recent portrayals must grate on their nerves terribly.

Werewolves

“Wer” means “man” in Old English. There, we’re done! Nah, just kidding.

The idea of transforming into animals is not any newer than of drinking blood to steal someone’s power. It happened all the time, from the Norse berserker (“bear shirt”) to the Grecian gods, who turned into all manner of things in order to see what having sex with different species was like. Zeus transformed a guy named Lycaon into a wolf for attempting to feed the Thunder God baby meat (for some reason). Typically, people turn into wolves either from a curse, a pact with a demon, lying out under a full moon, or even drinking a specific kind of beer (probably an Oktoberfest).

While werewolves became popular in Eastern Europe about a century before vampires, they share a lot of commonalities. In Serbia, a single term (vulkodlak) is used for both. Vampires are sometimes purported to be able to change form to that of a wolf or to use wolves as “familiars” (a sort of mentally controlled animal). The sign of pointed fangs from the werewolf condition indirectly led to the idea of vampire fangs. Both monsters are frequently considered cursed or possessed by evil spirits. Werewolves, however, are mostly not already dead and can even be cured! The best cure is to stab them in the head with a knife (though sometimes exorcism, or even just scolding, will do the trick). The silver bullet thing was totally tacked on later, in the 1941 film The Wolf Man.

Turning into a wolf doesn’t seem that impressive, next to coming back from the dead and enthralling people. But wolves are scary! Imagine videos you’ve seen of guard dogs taking down men in heavy padding, then picture that with an animal of twice the size and bulk, razor sharp claws and teeth, coming at you with six of his buddies. Obviously, knife to the head is the best option available here. Good luck.

Zombies

The word “zombie” doesn’t have a cut-and-dry meaning, though it may be partially related to the Congolese nzambi, which means “god.” I guess because zombies defy death and can’t be hurt? It’s also alike to the word “simbi,” which is a kind of Haitian water snake spirit. (More specifically, the simbi is a Loa, or Lwa, which is an intermediary between the creator and humanity that can possess human hosts and ride them around.)

The origins of these creatures come from West African vodou, where sorcerer-shamans called bokor trapped human soul-bits in their fetishes (magic objects) to enhance their power. In Haiti, bokor killed people (typically, bad news bears that the common folk didn’t much mind dying) and brought them back to life as slaves. One theory is that the bokor actually used pufferfish powder to send their victims into a state of near-death, as well as inflicting brain damage to make them more susceptible to mental control upon their waking up (those that survived the ordeal, anyway).

How did these undead Haitian man-servants turn into the apocalyptic plague-drones we now associate with the term? The 1932 Bela Lugosi film White Zombie introduced American culture to the word and the concept, still used at the time to describe a sorcerer’s voodoo slave. From there, George A. Romero mixed the general idea of zombies with Richard Matheson’s vampires (found in I Am Legend), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before it, to create his weird, shambling hybrids in the vastly influential 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Romero didn’t call them zombies in the film (or explain them at all, really) but used the term exclusively in its sequels. From there, the idea and the word became inextricably linked, and people have since mostly associated zombies with some scientific cause rather than vodoun magicks.

Yep, popular culture has come a long way from the original mythology that surrounds our various monsters. It’s almost hard to recognize them anymore. And once we do recognize them, it has certainly become more difficult to stab them in the head with knives. After all, they sure do look a lot like us, don’t they?

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