posted
I was on mission today and thought to myself, in 1000 years will people think Big Bird and the Cookie Monster are Mythological Creatures that we believed to be true?
I could not get my Plt Sgt to answer, he just said, “P#)&%*& I wonder what goes on in your head some times”
I don’t know how to answer that with a right answer.
Any way I thought it might work in a futuristic Scifi and they wonder about our Cookie Monster, ETC. Rommel Fenrir Wolf II
posted
I don't believe there will be much "mythos" about the Information age because we have too much information.
Baring Large scale wars that wipe out communication infrastructures or Authoritarian Governments in the "west" that restrict the teaching of history to only gov't approved books (no we're not there yet no matter what anyone says on anyside of the asile); there will be very little lost that will lead people 1000 years in the future to believe that we in 2007 believe X fictional creature was real.
However, what is more likely to occur is that like our understanding of the records of people from 1600's-1700's, our descendants will be missing many of the nuances and cultural clues that allow us to accept things like Paris Hilton as really a joke and not really all that important.
Being a social scientist i've toyed with the idea of writing a story set several hundred years in the future about people studying American culture. The science would be the techniques anthropologists/sociologists use currently to interpret cultures of the past.
I'm not sure if it would have a hook except as a comic satire.
"Do you see this analysis? in a one year span Paris Hilton was mentioned 1,000,000 times on major news networks while Darfur was only mentioned 10,000 times." "Is that a surprise?" "Well, no. Its long been theorized that Americans in the early 21st century valued Hilton and other celebrities 100 times more than suffering people."
Or something like that
[This message has been edited by Matt Lust (edited July 03, 2007).]
posted
Mythological creatures come and go with the ages. I remember seeing a well known painting (I don't remember the title of the painting or the artist) in which a women is sleeping while something that looks like a troll or gargoyle is perched on her stomach. It was painted during a time when demons were thought to enter and seize control of people. Science later showed such people were either epileptic or suffered from some form of mental illness. Then there was the Salem witch trials - once again a "demon" for all seasons, or at least one for that particular time. One theory is that those who had become a "witch" were in fact the victims of eating ergot which sent them on a "trip". These demons never seem to die, they simply evolve with the times to fit the needs of a society that for whatever reason seems to need them. Witches and demons have pretty much been tossed aside - only to have been replaced by the current state of the art "demons" - alien abductions. Funny how with so many abductions being reported, a person is snatched right out of their bed, out of their home, into a waiting space vehicle, with nary a witness to bolster the claim of the abducted. These abductions are hard to prove/disprove so this current "demon" is likely to be with us for awhile.
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I'm pretty sure TV is the mythology of today. In the West, at least, what's gone on in Nick-at-Nite TV-Land TV shows is the latter-day epics of the gods of Olympus. I don't know what would be the new Medusa or Cerberus---Herman Munster, maybe? no, he's a person, not a creature, well, maybe...
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Hey, i don't want to scare anybody, but I live about fifteen miles from the site of the alien abduction that the movie "Abducted" was made from . . . ooohhh, spooky!
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i would have survived the werewolf trials in Europe because of my way of knowing how to dissipeer when things go wrong. and i Love The .50 cal, Happyness is belt fead. Rommel Fenrir Wolf II
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I went to a parochial school whose rectory, I found out later, was supposed to be haunted by Bishop Pike. I never saw anything.
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uh...ergot is a disease:Ergot, caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea, is a disease of cereal crops and grasses. The disease causes reduced yield and quality of grains and hay and also causes a livestock disease called ergotism, if infected grains or hay are fed. The disease cycle of the ergot fungus was first described in the 1800s, but the connection with ergot and epidemics among people and animals was known several hundred years earlier. Ergot's medicinal applications and animal poisoning properties first called attention to this plant disease. Human poisoning was common in Europe in the Middle Ages when ergoty rye bread was often consumed.
Ergot occurs to some extent every year on cereals and grasses in North Dakota. The disease generally is more prevalent in rye and triticale than in other cereals, but significant losses have also been reported in spring wheat, durum, barley, and other small grains. Although the crop loss caused by this disease is important, the effects of the ergot's alkaloid toxins on man and animals is of much greater significance.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited July 04, 2007).]
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"Ergot is a disease" - yup. But I had to laugh when I first saw it mentioned on here because it's also part of a horse's leg. The large joint just above the hoof has hair that grows to a point on the back in horses that don't have heavily feathered legs (like Clydesdales, Gypsy Vanners, Shires, etc.). Inside this tuft of hair is a piece of skin similar to the chestnut on the horse (one on each leg, a scaly kind of thing that just grows continually - you have to peel them off, or they can break off on their own, or they'll stick out). The ergot is usually trimmed off in horses that are shown with trimmed hair on their legs, but it grows back just like the chestnuts. If you're into evolution, the ergots and chestnuts are supposed to be the remains of some of the toes of the prehistoric horse. I could go into more detail, but I suspect y'all have already dozed off. But anyway, the reference to "ergot" made me chuckle as I wondered how a callused kind of thing on a horse could make people sick.
posted
I stand corrected . I thought you guys were making a joke - this, ergo, that. But i seem to recall the rye sickness from somewhere. Doesn't it have a hallucinatory effect?
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posted
That is what made it a major influence in the werewolf trials. There was a mass hysteria, and a number of things -- ergot among them -- led to thousands seeing werewolves.
Didn't know about that part of a horse. We used to own two, but I was very young.
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Ergo, if it is just ergot, how do you account for Rommel?
Also, Rommel, I wonder if mythogical beasts of our time will be the Bigfoot, Roswell aliens and the Loch Ness monster. Granted they were all first reported much earlier, but as our unknowns continue to shrink, soon they will be proved or disproved one way or another. If they are disproved, to the folks who still believe they exist, they will enter the mythos of our time.
[This message has been edited by debhoag (edited July 05, 2007).]
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. I thought you guys were making a joke - this, ergo, that. But i seem to recall the rye sickness from somewhere. Doesn't it have a hallucinatory effect?
