So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
Some of my favorite tags so far:
@asleepinawell “Natural Curiousities” is on netflix and I think the PBS streaming app. BBC streaming keeps crashing on me but probably there too. It’s very much like his usual work, but with 500% more “Look at these funky specimens and the frantic scribbles of early scientific illustrators confronted with a fucking kangaroo” and “I’m Sir David Fucking Attenborough And I’m Going To Snuggle This Cheetah”
@heedra You are correct! According to Wikipedia: “The name “flamingo” comes from Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, “flame-colored”, in turn coming from Provençal flamenc from flama “flame” and Germanic-like suffix -ing, with a possible influence of words like “Fleming” THEY WERE TRYING TO TELL US ALL ALONG!
@melifair You’re in good company- I used to call them “Pimentos” until I was three and finally got the hang of the Letter “F”
Also, Apologies about the spelling. I have a reading disorder and it causes me to mis-read and by turn misspell certain words, especially ones with two nonidentical vowels in the middle of the word like Their and Becuase. Good thing we all know what I’m talking about anyway!
But how could you not tell us WHAT THE FLAMINGOS ARE DOING IN A VOLCANO?????
So Flamingoes are pretty badass.
They’re hyperspecialized filter-feeders, not unlike krill-feeding whales, and thier heads are shaped Like That, so they can dangle thier heads in the water, suck up water full of algae and brine shrimp and other goodies, and filter them out with thier Spiny Tongues.
(Image Source Apparently, according to the Ancient Romans, Flamingo Tounge has a “Superb” flavor. You Wacky Roman Bastards)
But the lakes with the tastiest and most dense algae and arthropods are not Normal lakes. African Lesser Flamingoes (lesser becuase they have a smaller range, but probably our phoenix given how people were travelling at the time) like to hang out in extremely Alkaline Lakes where thier favorite algae grow, and those lakes are mostly in the volcanic Great Rift Valley. Where the lava and occasional venting of hot toxic gasses happen.
In addition to the wierd diet, and caustic water, Flamingoes can also cope with some pretty intense climate. The Alkaline Lakes Lesser Flamigoes like are also VERY HIGH in the mountains, where they cope with low oxygen, Intense UV radiation, and rapid and extreme temperature fluctuations- below freezing at night and heatstroke hot in the day.
You can tell how well a Flamigo is Flamingoing by it’s color! The lovely red-pink color comes from the algae and arthopods they eat: the better-fed and healthier a flamingo is, the more intense thier colors will be! Zoo famingoes can thrive on a wide variety of diets, but thier colors will fade, and it will cause everyone to lose romantic interest, so they have to be fed a special color-intensive diet to keep breeding programs going.
So while Flamingoes probably weren’t the bird you were picturing when you thought of a Phoenix , they’re Pretty Badass and worthy of the mythic lore.
One of my favorite things about writers is that you can post any vaguely relatable “writer’s problems” sentiment and writers will use it to call themselves out. It’s like going up to a stranger of a fellow writer and saying, “Hey, are you down to absolutely roast yourself?” And the answer is always an enthusiastic, unwavering, “Oh, hell yes, let me tell you about this fuckin’ bitch.”
This reminds me of the “penny auctions” of the Great Depression.
I’m reblogging this again, because I forgot to mention;
My family has lived in Iowa for, oh, a hundred and twenty years? Maybe a hundred and thirty.
My grandpa and grandma and great grandpa and grandma were part of the penny auctions and bullying bankers and mortgage holders into behaving.
Grandpa was 6′ 3″. Great grandpa was an inch shorter. Both were big old farm boys, who could heft an eighty pound hay bale in each hand and toss them up on the hay wagon.
Grandma told me a few times about how they went around with some of their buddies to ‘explain things’ to mortgage holders during the Depression, and how the farmers would all get together for coffee and settle among everyone in the township how no one was going to bid on the Miller auction but the Millers, and oh, if everyone could chip in fifty cents or so to loan the Millers to buy their land and equipment back at the auction, that’d be the Right Thing To Do.
This is still a point of pride for many farming families around here, decades later.
God, this actually suggests that Peach isn’t just a specific instance of “the adult/ruling form of a female Toad,” but that Peach should properly be called “a Peach,” because the blonde hair, blue eyes, haircut, facial structure etc. etc. are all shared among mature forms of Toads –
Peach Toadstool is Type-Peach Name-Toadstool, the way Peachette is Type-Peach Name-Ette, isn’t she. Peach is the species. Peaches are a type of cuckoo or parasite which have slowly developed a codependent, controlling relationship with Toads.
A Super Crown is a symbiont Power-Up which converts a viable female Toad to an immature instance of the Peach species, granting aerial mobility, but slowly co-opting the nervous system; Peach Toadstool is a matured form, so completely infesting her host (presumably Princess Toadstool) that she remains in control even after the host body is damaged and shrinks to miniature form. Her age also reduces the efficiency of the gaseous jet systems which provide aerial mobility and convince Toads, earthbound residents of a traditionally very vertical ecosystem, to use Super Crowns – why would she need it in such prime condition, if her host is so thoroughly controlled? And of course, as one of the oldest Peaches, her mastery of language is sufficient that she can use social adaptations to maintain her control over the Mushroom Kingdom.
We might imagine that gliding/double jumping is an adaptation to avoid the Peach’s natural predators, likewise landbound Koopas, and navigating their natural habitats. And the human appearance? Another step in the cuckoo process – think of it as something like toxoplasma gondii, which can only reproduce in the stomachs of rats. The Peach adopts a particular form in order to allure human beings, which it can then use to spread its spores or bear its cuckoo children. Selecting a suitably mobile new host vessel, the Peach then manipulates that host vessel into budding off new Peaches across a wide range of locations, spreading them to brick blocks and empty Question Mark blocks by physical contact. Each different outing provides the spores for more Super Crowns. They take years to mature, yes, but eventually the Mushroom Kingdom will be infested.
i literally can’t stop thinking about this video and i lose it every time
Lmfao
okay everything about this video is absolute gold:
the fact that the guy argues via the puppet the entire time
the music
“let’s discuss the contradiction”
the overuse of the word “camera”
the way the puppet goes from trying to placate the guy to actively arguing against the guy and like turning it around on the guy
“youre consciously making a conscious choice”
the fact that by the end the puppet is basically screaming and the music is just. so loud.
“YOURE BREAKING THE CAMERA” as the video abruptly ends
for anyone who wants to see more stuff like this, you can probably find clips of it on YouTube. it came from a show called “Wonder Showzen” and it’s responsible for these gems, too:
This Is a Backup Blog 