Wolfe at Readercon

James Wynn · 21 Jul 2009, 20:55 · from 2009-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:55:50 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wolfe at Readercon
In-Reply-To: <4161.72.171.0.148.1248207611.squirrel at brunians.org>
References: <c04.6495caeb.3796536e at aol.com><2C6039EAF3814649A6DB724C936B9E18@eMachinePC>
	<4161.72.171.0.148.1248207611.squirrel at brunians.org>
Message-ID: <ADB3229B43EC46339B159012515EBD53@eMachinePC>

>>Also it is full of stories of manticores (verified),

> I don't know what Herodotus was referring to here, but it wasn't nothing.

"Manticore" is from the Indian word for tiger. Granted, tigers don't have 
three rows of teeth or a tail with spikes, but Pausanias (2nd century) 
recognized it as the tiger with fanciful flourishes.

>> flying snakes,

> There are flying snakes (or at least gliding snakes).

Yeah, but Herodotus describes a whole Egyptian ecology involving birds etc.

>> wool growing on trees (verified),

> It's a variety of Indian cotton.

Right.

>> and a personal encounter with Pan.

> People have personal encounters with God literally all of the time.

Yeah, but only Abraham claimed to have met him in the mundane way (on the 
road to Athens) that Herodotus relates.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net