As this strip says, “Never argue about who has priority when you’re about to be eaten.”
Getting Frustrated
In this week’s issue of The San Diego Reader in the News of the Weird column one story is on an event in Colorado where a store owner found she had a visitor. That visitor being a young doe who was taking a look around the place.
The animal was calm and collected, had no trouble associating with a human, and after some coaxing let herself be led out following a treat.
So the deer was enticed out and the human went back to work on her store. Only to find an hour later that the doe was back, and her three fauns. And all were looking for food from the human.
You get right down to it, the doe had no reason to be afraid of the woman, and since she trusted the human her fauns could trust her as well. They just didn’t see the woman as a threat. What you basically had here was an example of what domestication really involves. You take an animal such as a deer, a raccoon, or even a sugar glider from Australia who isn’t afraid of human. Who indeed is accepting of humans and who takes us pretty much as a source of food, assurance, and comforting. Pretty much as a parent in other words. That’s pretty much what I got from the story; Human gives good to a deer, along with a soft voice and may even have petted the deer much as deer mothers pet their fawns. And that’s really what it is, only we use our fingers to lick instead of our tongues.
The message the doe got was, she’s mommy. She feeds me, she comforts me, she assures me. I have kids to take care of. She took care of me, she’ll take care of them. That’s what domesticated animals do, they adopt you. To that fox or bobcat you are mother. That’s the same role you fit in the life of a tasmanian devil or Australian sugar glider. You provide for the animal much as a mother animal would, which makes you mother for all intents and purposes.
At this moment there are ranchers in South Africa who keep southern white rhinos as pets.Rhinos who pretty much behave as though the humans taking care of them were mother. Safari Park in San Diego County has its own population of southern white rhinos, who behave pretty much the same way as their cousins in South Africa.You get right down to it, we have domesticated rhinos and all your fussing about how this just can’t be doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Not only can we be wrong, but more often than one is ready to accept we are wrong. Much of what we know about nature is based on what we think should be, and not on what we actually see. Red foxes in England and bobcats in the eastern woodlands of the U.S. are known for going up to kitchen doors to beg for food. Those who do ask for and get food from humans tend to be healthier, live longer, and have more young than those who don’t. What you’re seeing is evolution in action and whatever promote survival and the continuation of the species wins out over any bollocks involving such malarkey as “dignity”. Dignity doesn’t fill your belly, dignity doesn’t raise the kids.
Thought you’d be interested, and I thought I’d asked if you’ve heard of more stories like this.
Walking With Dragons
The time is the Pennsylvanian, the latter half of the Carboniferous. The first of the reptile like reptiles and mammals have become established, though true reptiles and mammals have yet to appear. One of the proto reptiles is the archosaur, the ruling lizard though it just looks like a lizard instead of being a true lizard.
This animal—though it may be a juvenile instead of an adult—is a foot long diapsid with sprawling limbs and socket’s for the teeth. The brain is small, and apparently not well organized. Divination has produced varying results, and it is suspected that those diviners who have used such castings on the fossils have shown a bad habit of insisting on producing results, so actually getting honest results can be rare.
It should also be noted that there are some who insist this specimen can’t be an archosaur. Some say that it is an archosauriform, some an ancestor of the latter. Again, there is disagreement regarding the divinations used to investigate the subject, with again some researchers refusing to accept findings that disagree with their prejudices.
But I tend to say that it is close enough, and it has features that tie to to later archosaurs such as dragons, dinosaurs, saurischians, and ptersosaurs. Changes are coming, but they will take some time getting here.
I Did It
I’ve gotten all the magick effects listed according to the plane or sphere involved. Such as, say, mundane auguries and divinations, either of which are involved with the ordinary. Divination being an effect in which the caster learns just what an ordinary item is in the mundane sense, while an augury is a type of divination in which the caster learns the ordinary—mundane—fate of an ordinary—mundane—item. For example, an augury saying a racing harness may be involved in an accident fatal to an observer at the racing track.
Now I need to put together a table showing the effects, the planes and spheres involved, and the costs in involved. That’s going to be fun.
The Preternatural
It is my observation that Gary used the term preternatural in a specific sense, one that fits it’s use when speaking of the preternatural arm strength of the gorilla, or our preternatural trotting endurance. That is, something that is natural when you get right down to it, but which is still extraordinary compared to what is normal to use.
Thus in existence you could say that you have the natural—what is to be expected, the preternatural—what can be expected even though it is extraordinary, and the supernatural—which deals with matters beyond what we can expect.
Just something that struck me.