So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
Harry, the core of your wand is from this majestic creature; meet Fawkes, my Phoenix
Me: so do any of you have parents or grandparents who were guest workers?
Pupil: yeah, my grandfather was one! He did different things around the world: he was a builder, went to save people in the antarctic, worked on farms…
@murdo-ck has given me this meme to fill, and fill it I have. “Childermarse,” you might ask, “haven’t you made, like, four JSMN memes in the last month?” “Yes,” I reply, hastily minimizing photoshop window after photoshop window of memes-in-progress. “This is the last one, I swear.”
De Gene Zijde 