Plush Terror from the Deep

I freely admit to having an above-average fondness for stuffed animals, at least among 39 year-old men, and I even have some rather unconventional examples. That said, I do have some limits.

To give you one example, a few weeks ago, my friend Paul posted a link to Facebook about the axolotl, an endangered salamander native to the lakes surrounding Mexico City. Partly inspired by this, I bought a mini squishable axolotl from Squishable.com, because while the axolotl is a strange and off-putting beast, it is also rather cute in its own proud way. See if you can spot which is which:

By th1098 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

axolotl

I also have a squishable Cthulhu. Don’t try to understand why—it would only drive you mad.

 

 

 

 

(I’m adding some polite space here because the next picture might be jarring otherwise.)

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of strange and off-putting beasts, this is a giant isopod, basically an oversized doodlebug that lives at the bottom of the ocean: Continue reading

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The True Truth About the Federal Reserve

I recently engaged in yet another attempted dialogue with a complete stranger on Facebook who wrote something generally indecipherable about the threat posed by the Federal Reserve System. It contained many of the usual tropes you might expect, held together by misspelled conjunctions, crimes against grammar, and explanations that the issue just makes the person so. angry. that. they. can. not. type. correctly……

It got me thinking, though. I don’t really know that much about the Federal Reserve, and it certainly has a not-insignificant number of people feeling threatened. It’s just that I can’t seem to find anything addressing the problems with the Fed that don’t quickly descend into conspiracy theorism. It seems as though anyone who has really looked into the workings of the Fed (or claim to have done so) come out as semi-coherent crazy people. And that’s when the truth hit.

It has been staring us in the face all this time.

The Federal Reserve is Cthulhu.

By BenduKiwi (Unknown) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Think about it: it’s vast, it’s older than any of us, and to try to understand it leads inexorably to madness.

Perhaps Lovecraft himself said it best:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

He might have even written about an early foray into the depths of the Federal Reserve itself:

It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. … The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.

Photo credit: By BenduKiwi (Unknown) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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