Large Fierce Mammal

Ichabod Crane’s last ride. (Click image to enlarge) Source: https://www.history.com/news/legend-sleepy-hollow-headless-horseman

The lovely and ever so eloquent Cinzia Dubois is a PhD student based in Scotland. On YouTube, her nom de guerre is the Lady of the Library where the bill of fare offers “Dark Pages & Eerie Epistles” of the sort that have been a point of LFM enjoyment for many a day.

Tonight’s Dark Sentiment is an exploration of Ms. Dubois’ recent and ongoing treatment of The History of Hallowe’en as she has thus far seen fit to present it. As a libation I would recommend something smooth and soothing to match the voice you are about to hear. (more…)

BG 561 by Gektograf (Gennadi Blohin)

Monster management has been a thing around here for many a year, leading to such frolics as The Monster Under the Bed, The Watcher at the Window, A Night on the Town, and of course Crime Scene Man, to name a few. Tonight is all about a more symbiotic relationship where some get what they need, others what they want, and a few what they asked for.

And any resemblance to people or other entities, living, dead, or defying definition, is not coincidental. Those of you named Martin know who you are.

In Praise of House Monsters

By LFM

Our house monster Sly lives under the stairs,
Whereupon visitors pass unawares,
More loyal retainer than blood kin is Sly,
And no one but us knows he’s waiting nearby.

It’s not that we like to feed people to Sly,
Just there’s always that few that you’re wanting to die,
When the morsel is someone you’re better without,
And desire where they went be forever in doubt.

There’s no sound, not a scent, neither tooth nor claw gleam,
He strikes with such speed they have no time to scream,
Just a snick and a gulp marks the end of their days,
Sly’s own special part in the mending of ways.

But just to allay any evidence fear,
Such as DNA dripped in a Croco-Sly tear,
I called in a Friend who hunts crime scenes for real,
And asked his advice — yes he’s in on the deal.

But root as he might, not a kernel of proof
Could he find for what’s happening under my roof,
I can make the assertion there’s nothing he missed,
And as usual, leaving, he slipped me his list.

Sly came with the house and we’ve no plans to sell,
In the basement’s a portal that leads straight to Hell,
With such fine creature comforts we’re glad to abide,
Even if Hell’s back door is locked from the inside.

“Communication is at its most powerful when all extraneous noise is stripped away. Think on this.” ~ Worldly Wisdom Wednesday – The Way of Communication

I have written here extensively of Communication in such lofty treatises as the above quoted The Way of Communication, LFM on Teaching the Child to Swear Well, Education, The True Arte of Intelligent Discourse, and The Bullshitter’s Grimoire. Tonight I will return to my roots and say more with less.

A Little Eloquence

By LFM

Any contrary opinion
Tends to scare the Great Unwashed,
The more eloquent the argument,
The more they want it quashed.

What’s needed is a language
That will make us understood,
A tongue that will say more with less,
And shut them up for good.

I’m back now from Sardinia
And quite fluent in Sardine.
It has no more than twenty words,
And every one’s obscene.

Temporal Dreamscape 2 by TheArtistKnownAsAdam

With so much of the world pervaded by assorted iterations of Abrahamic religious influence, it gets forgotten that parts of it aren’t — and by that I don’t mean geographic places but fragments as small as individual people. Of those, some pursue non-Abrahamic but nonetheless still recognized paths — Buddhism for example — a disconcerting number live predominantly secular lives that contain little to no religious or spiritual elements, some substitute by finding politics, still more adhere to doctrines that include Wicca and Neopaganism — and people being people, all of the above are adhered to and/or practiced on a spectrum of sincerity from all consuming, through until something more interesting comes along, to selling something.

While True as far as it goes, and sufficient for tonight’s purpose, none of the aforesaid is offered as an exhaustive summary of the world’s spirituality, and doesn’t need to be. Rather, it will serve as a backdrop for a lesson in manners that anyone can use, to the benefit of everyone, and best of all, everything.

Notwithstanding the spiritual path taken by people, singly or in groups as big as nations, and no matter what fulfillment any of them may find in it, what I see lacking most in the world is Manners and I’m not talking about please and thank you. (more…)

“… let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.” ~ W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act 1 Scene 2

The Moon in all her phases, o’erlooking deeds fair and foul, has been a recurring fixture in these pages.

Hunter’s Moon, Silent Moon, the lantern lighting the way of Hunters and Travellers, (more…)

Shit Storm (Source: Linkedin.com)

“There’s an old saying — ‘Safe as houses’ — usually spoken in reference to situations that were anything but safe, but not always. There have forever been people who lived their lives in a wide eyed and blissful belief there can be some place where pain and death won’t find you.

“Enter the ‘safe space’ which, interestingly, seems to be a phenomenon built by and for people of a vintage unaccustomed to the joys and perils to be found in working without a net.

“The modern societal shift toward ‘safety first’ represents another case wherein the utterance elicits a nodding of heads and stroking of chins as if it stands axiomatic for living a fulfilled life. If risk represents any impingement on safety, then it must be avoided at all costs.” ~ Risk: Nothing of Value Happens Without It

In last night’s Dark Sentiment I set forth the preamble for tonight’s offering so if you haven’t yet set the stage by reading that, go do it now. When ready, get the storm chips handy, pour a flagon of your favourite salt washer downer, and follow me.

I want my daughter to feel safe in her home. That’s why I’m rebuilding with climate change in mind is the title of a First Person (Translation: “It happened to me”) piece by Jason Charette published just yesterday by CBC News in keeping with its long standing tradition of giving me exactly what I can use to prove a point pretty much right when I need it. The link to the entire article is embedded in the title at the start of this paragraph, and I will ask that you read that through before moving on to my own interpretation below.

For background, Mr. Charette’s “about” page says, “In rural Prince Edward Island, Jason Charette lives with his small family in his purpose-built tiny house. He is a former Green Party of P.E.I. candidate and advocate of small houses.” (more…)

Storm…., by Dinosz (Click to enlarge. Source: Deviantart)

“To be Truly prepared to Live in the world is to understand and accept complete exposure to it in all its manifestations. No species in Nature, and you may be surprised to learn this includes our own, is naturally predisposed to ‘master’ the elements, nor holds entitlement to live apart from them. Rather, to Thrive is to take your place as a part of them, and to do otherwise as our own species tends to do is an expression of ill advised and contemptuously destructive preference.

“Even as a ‘mere’ element of weather, wind is undeniably that most indomitable and capricious of Elements, manifesting moods diverse as soother, mover, overturner, and destroyer of dreams, all rolled into one …

“… Growing up in the seaport town of Lunenburg on the south shore of Nova Scotia, I absorbed an awareness of wind as an element of the Natural world that could as easily make a Man’s fortune as his Wife a widow. In the Lunenburg of my youth, it was a rare family that didn’t wear the scars left by the August Gales of 1926 and 1927 that took the lives of 138 Mariners, and still today people telling stories of family lore around Lunenburg County kitchen tables are as likely to refer to a departed loved (or even not so loved) one as ‘lost in the August gales’ as that one of the wars took them, and heads still nod in sympathetic understanding. ‘Hurricane season’ has a special meaning to folks with loved ones at sea.

“Soul inspiring, deadly, not to be trifled with — all these describe the Natural element called ‘wind’ as Men have come to know it. Capricious? It may appear so. Untrustworthy? Naturally! These can as well be used to describe wind as any other Force of Nature, but most often spring to lip when outcomes fail to match expectations. This is very wrong headed because as creatures of Nature, we can only expect that She will provide what is needed while caring nothing for what is wanted, and none of it has anything to do with any one of us personally beyond what we ourselves do to better or worsen our chances.” ~ Winds of Change — Part the First — MAAJAKal Inspiration

As my regulars here will know, not only was I was born, and all but for periodic dashes of a certain key ingredient raised, in the Town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, I launched and for the first 17 years of its now 40 year life, based my business out of it. (more…)

Source: YouTube’s Algorithm: What You Need To Know In 2023

“Spirit Messengers. The term conjures images of animals sent by a higher power to offer guidance toward the right Path. A Google search will turn up reams of pages identifying the characteristics of each creature, along with its “meaning” should it choose to make itself seen to you under a variety of circumstances.

“As with publications that purport to assist you in the interpretation of dreams, I personally hold that this “if A then B” approach at once trivializes and over complicates something my experience has shown to be both subtle and powerful, as is Nature Herself.” ~ Musings on Mindfulness

If you read the excerpt above, and even better, the entire article it’s taken from, you’ll have at least some grasp of my philosophy of connectedness with all things. Naturally, your degree of understanding will be dictated by how much of your life’s fulfillment has come to you by way of connectedness with Nature, and how much it relies on having subscribed to the Human conceit that places you “above all that“. ~ Dark Sentiments Season 8 — Day 3: Of Mini-miracles, Odd Synchronicities, and Sublime Messages

My position on connectedness is widespread among the seeds I’ve sown here lo these fifteen years since the launch of Large Fierce Mammal, on 2 September 2008. In that time, most particularly in the course of my cyclical series such as this very season of Dark Sentiments and Long Winter’s Night, it is not unusual for me to find inspiration of the moment, as it were, in the form of the published work of others and personal experiences that seem to come into my ken at just the right time to stoke the fire, as it were.

Rarely though does it happen that something arises on the heels of one of my publications, through a seemingly unconnected delivery system, that strikes notes of synchronicity lying outside Truly Natural connectedness. (more…)

If the Foo shits … (Source: Here)

hu·man

noun
A self-identified lesser god designed by a committee consisting of the feuding members of a large and dysfunctional extended family obsessed with entitlement to positions of inheritance from the estates of elders who not only aren’t dead yet, but certain to outlive them all.

~ Excerpt from Large Fierce Mammal’s Bigge Booke of Mythical Beasts ~

There is a very simple, and that is not to say simplistic, frame of reference defining what ails the world. It isn’t tribalism, political leanings, religious beliefs, rich versus poor, strong versus weak, or any other intellectual construct popularly (or unpopularly depending on your perspective) held up as justification for absolute division among people, although those are manifestations of it.

It isn’t human caused climate change or mass human migration although those are justifications for it.

Cutting to the chase, what I am talking about is people behaving badly, and in keeping with the kind of clarity of which I have previously spoken, I will pause to define what that means.

Common use would define bad behaviour as any act that is at odds with the accepted rules of the society in which the act is committed. These may be written or unwritten and are mechanisms by which the suitability of any person or group may be assessed for its propriety and acceptability to the good of the community that surrounds them. Among other things, it sets out the framework defining who can be trusted and who cannot, delineating the law abiding from the outlaw. The safe from the dangerous. The good from the bad.

Even the most trusting among us will have little difficulty picking up on just how this can lead to abuse of power at all levels. Few of those same trusting souls would ever identify themselves as having any part in such abuses.

Even fewer will realize that weighing the gravity of a bad behaviour purely against its effects on other people and their communities or societies is as big a waste of time as defining the value of Nature purely in the context of needing to be preserved for the benefit of humans. (more…)

Cyclist, in Swansea area, c1900 — Can’t you just FEEL the temptation to put something rebelliously exciting between her legs? Source: Digital Archive

The title of tonight’s Dark Sentiment is not a reference to one of those personal expressions of passion referred to as “sex face” which should need no explanation among this crowd, nor is it an insult like “fuck face”. It’s not the facial expression one may get at the moment of perception that an accident is unavoidably imminent, nor has it anything to do with road rash.

Nay, bicycle face is a now discredited medical term that came into vogue in the Victorian era among experts in the settled science of innate female weakness.

Much has been written of this scourge, and I recommend the brief but highly informative Beware of Bicycle Face by Katherine Conroy which you can download here, a portion of which follows.

Many thought women (as the weaker sex) were particularly susceptible to the evils of bicycling. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the cautions against Bicycle Face. The physician, Arabella Kenealy, warned girls that too much bicycling would transform their feminine charms to masculine traits. Worse still, ruddy cheeks from sun exposure and a strained expression in the muscles of the face could eventually result in a deterioration in the nerves, a headache and by some accounts, even dementia.

I can hear it now — “I know it sounds silly dear but we do so want grandchildren and, you know, better safe than sorry!” (more…)