“Passengers react to TSA groping”

I won’t link to the story and haven’t even read it. We all know what it’s about.

In my own experience, the most obscene frisking has generally taken place at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. They’re absolutely shameless there and a few of them are bordering on arrest for indecent assault.

The friskers are also rude and cocky at Schiphol. Which surprises me a bit, because that’s a great airport, and in my experience the Dutch culture is generally polite and uninvasive.

Other than the frisking part, however, the most ridiculous airport security I encounter is at my home airport, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They act like some sort of special FBI team, but the effect is more like Barney Fife. They love bossing people around in tiny little ways, ordering them to step back 5 inches behind the yellow line, and so forth. Micro-fascism at its finest.

the end of Borders

They’re liquidating. HERE.

another reader

Joseph:

“By the by, I completely agree about the *resistance* of Cthulhu to visual representation—even HPL’s own drawing looks, I’m sorry, ridiculous. It’s the same thing that destroyed the latter half of At the Mountains of Madness: HPL works best when there is a weird quantum of undecidability, if you want, about his creatures and landscapes. It isn’t that it isn’t there, it isn’t spiritual, but it’s like a subatomic reality in superatomic experience. Elusiveness is the stuff of his horror, and when you take that away, like with a drawing of Cthulhu, it becomes, I think, silly.”

Agreed.

If you look at a critique of Lovecraft such as that by Edmund Wilson (and I like Wilson nearly as much as I like Lovecraft), he misses the point precisely by reducing Lovecraft through literalization.

Wilson ends up saying things roughly along the following lines: “Basically, Lovecraft gives us scary monsters who attack humans with suckers and tentacles and mighty winds. This is pulp hackwork, not adult literature.” And sure, Lovecraft sounds ridiculous when Wilson summarizes him in that way. But Dante and Melville can also be made to sound ridiculous if literalized in the way I attempted in this space a few days ago.

more on Cthulhu’s appearance

This is Michael Austin, making a good point:

“I may be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure all of the descriptions given of Cthlulhu are actually descriptions of representations of him. For instance, the passage where he is described as a mix of octopus, dragon and human is actually the description of the bas-relief scultpure created by Wilcox. The longer description that I remember is actually of the Cthulhu idol worshiped by the voodoo cult:

‘It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.’

Later on, when he is awakened, he is described as beyond description, though Lovecraft mentiones “flabby claws” and a “squid-head with writhing feelers.” I think it is safe to say that Cthulhu remains beyond any phenomenological description, but certainly characters have created representations of him, and that isn’t to say that we are to believe they are exact either. Even the drawing you posted of him by Lovecraft looks as though it could simply be a sketch of the statue’s description.”

Excellently put, and the “squid-head with writhing feelers” point would also explain why the head has to be the octopus part, bot the dragon part.