Pike's Ghost

David Stockhoff · 23 Nov 2011, 14:35 · from 2011-November.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:35:11 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's Ghost
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W1235A697A42BDF266821A3CFC90 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W1235A697A42BDF266821A3CFC90 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4ECD049F.7090506 at verizon.net>

On 11/23/2011 8:29 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
> The femur is the biggest/longest bone in the human body. The incus (middle ear bone)
> is the smallest/shortest bone. Of 200+ bones Wolfe had to choose from, these two
> choices cannot be a coincidence.

Interesting observation.
>
> It could simply designate the body size of Incus but that doesn't seem significant
> enough for such a cryptic but clearly presented puzzle to solve. If it relates to
> gender, as you propose, perhaps (ahem) the size of the bone is meant to reflect
> degree of maleness.

Or something about small men and big women? Note Incus calls Femur a 
"sibling," not brother or sister. Seems generally to be a sexually 
ambiguous family!
>
> Is it possible Incus, instead of simply being female, is hermaphroditic or
> transgendered in some way? Consider the theories regarding Hyacinth's ambiguous
> gender, based both on mythology and textual clues. Doesn't this present a very clear
> reason for a confusion between Hyacinth and Incus?

Could it it be a flag for that ambiguity, rather than evidence either way?

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