The Old Hack

A friend of mine who studied at Cambridge once told me this story. The choirmaster at the cathedral there amongst other things led Gregorian chants. But he was just a little depressed by the thought that probably no-one ever listened to the actual Latin so painstakingly performed. So one fine Sunday he replaced the chorus in one of the chants with "Barclayus Cardus Flexibus" repeated twice. When the choir started performing this at first no-one seemed to notice. But at the third repetition a distinguished professor in the audience broke down and howled with laughter. The choirmaster instantly stopped the performance and declared, "Thank God at least ONE of you were actually listening."

I hope she had him fed to the crocodiles.

What do you mean, full shift? It is only visible for seven hours and barely peeks above the horison. It would not count as a full shift even if it stayed there for eight hours because even when it is there we hardly get any real light at all. Half the time or more it is overcast anyway. But to be fair to Ra, I don't blame him. It is a long way north for that barge of his. And not only does he have all those monsters of the night to deal with but Danish traffic cops are being particularly unreasonable these days. I bet they would get him for DWD (Driving While Divine) if they got the chance to. (Darn hypocrites never stop Thor. Something about thunderstorms being a good time to sit indoors and eat donuts. What is the world coming to.)

On the other hand, we are still experiencing temperatures above freezing in Copenhagen and will likely continue to do so for at least a week. We did have some snow but it melted mere hours after falling.

Someone needs to provide more food for the sacred alligators.

I hear you. I wouldn't want to break out in roofing tiles.

On a somewhat more serious note, hair and fingernails have been considered potent symbols of life in some mythologies due to the mistaken impression that they continued to grow for a little while after death. (This was actually caused by the skin of the corpse contracting ever so slightly due to the onset of rigor mortis, causing hair still inside follicles to extrude and fingernails to seemingly lengthen.) Thus, hair and nail clippings from a still living person were believed to be connected to their life force, allowing the possessor to use them to magically harm the originator. If we were to stretch this premise a little, this might allow a vampire to steal life energy from a victim at a distance. I am not sure about the origin of this myth but I believe that Asia had vampires known as breath stealers. They would steal life energy from victims by inhaling their breath, usually while they were sleeping. Given time they would completely drain their prey of life.

I was shamelessly stealing from an issue of What's New with Phil and Dixie in which the Foglios explored precisely what it was that makes vampires so scary. They submitted hair-stealing vampires as a good example of monsters of the night that would carry rather less gravitas and feelings of dread.

AS MANY TIMES AS IT TAKES! As to Voltaire, HE PITYS THE FOOL.

Yeah. And we already know what happened to the A Team.

My brain hurts.

He was one of the dreaded Hair Stealers. He sucked the life out of his victims by eating their hair.

It is also worth pointing out that the President didn't actually die.

Actually they do usually fail. It is just that they manage to do so much damage in the process.

I kinda take what I said about pretentious names back, at least partly in his case. The real Zeus was a womanising jerk, too.

The extended time can be problematic. We used to have a fan here who would constantly complain about the pacing. He went absolutely berserk over a particular sequence that took place in the cellar of the Verres house and referred to it as the 'Trapped in the Basement' storyline and insisted it lasted forever. When I went back to it and counted the actual number of pages involved, it turned out to be just thirteen pages long and with two of them actually involving a brief scene change to elsewhere. (That Dan at the time was forced by RL to skip some updates did not help, really.)

Not really. Rhoda could just take a pair of scissors and make them small enough for the player pieces to run with.

That's more like it.

Bah. Discount Immortals. Real Immortals solve their disputes through beheading one another.

I guess the next step is running with scissors.

That's better than me. I am running on fumes.

It will be better in hindsight.

Once again, as a comment on human society these legends serve quite well.

Well, if she shrinks Tedd and makes Diane bigger, it should be easy. Tedd might object, though.

Is she strong enough to wave Tedd?