Category: The Unknown

Wildlife Camera (Part 10)

July 29, 2015

It’s been a while, but once again it’s time for some snaps from our backyard wildlife camera! I dusted it off a couple of weeks ago and put it out on the back patio facing away from the house on an angle. Here’s the first shot on it:

If you think that’s me carefully placing a feeder in shot to attract animals… well I’m guilty as charged!

There were about 90 shots on the camera, about 45% of which were like this…

…and another 45% like this…

Yes that’s me mowing!

The other 10% were very interesting though. Let’s get the squirrel shots out of the way first:

We saw chipmunks (and birds) eating from the feeder as well, but apparently they are too small or fact to trigger the shutter so there were no photos of them.

However it seems the feeder wasn’t just popular with the squirrels and chipmunks. Here’s the night photos (click on them to enlarge):

Strangely I don’t think this is the cat we usually see in our yard. I bet Yossie and Emi know all about this visitor 🙂

That’s a deer, hiding behind the first bowl (which is full of dead branches yes I know and I will clean it up soon!)

That one is a real mystery. It’s small and sleek and probably dark-furred. Could it be a rat? I think it’s too big for a mole (which we have seen in our backyard before). Any ideas?

A possum! And the first clear shot I’ve got of one on our camera! I wonder where he lives?

Another first: a skunk! A little one as well, probably a baby. This is not surprising to us, since we’ve seen skunks in our yard before (even a mother and two babies a couple of years ago), but this is the first time I’ve caught one on the feeder.

These night shots surprised me because of the variety and because in every case there was only one of each animal. There were however a few shots with no visible animal and I wonder if there were things lurking in the dark beyond the range of the sensor that had triggered it. I fiddled with contrast on some of them to explore with no luck. Perhaps it was just the wind?

I love using this camera and the excitement of looking at the photos. I’ll be putting it out again this time for a month or so 🙂

The Fabulous Owlbear

May 22, 2015

First, read this post Adam did on his blog.

I’ve found a similar example. Here is the owlbear (an owl-bear hybrid monster) as illustrated in the first ever AD&D Monster Manual from 1978:

I have a copy of this book. It’s the 6th printing, from 1980, and was owned by KLS long before I met her. The owlbear in this version of the monster manual looks like this:

Fabulous isn’t it! It’s the only monster in the book that has been coloured in, but we can only dream she had done more as a child 🙂

Speaking of the owlbear… what’s this picture?

Interesting isn’t it? A few years ago it was revealed that some of the unusual monsters in AD&D were based on plastic toys. You can read the full story here (with more wonderful pictures). Based on the toy, and the supposition (which seems reasonable) that the toys were bootleg Ultraman monster toys, it’s obvious the owlbear is nothing more than… a kappa!

The kappa is a japanese water spirit which has a very rich mythology. Here’s an illustration done by Hokusai (famous for his The Great Wave Off Kanagawa) in the early 1800’s:

You can see the resemblance to the toy.

So what of the Ultraman connection? Japanese sentai shows often base their monsters on mythology, and it’s almost certain there is an early Kappa-based foe in one of the first few Ultraman series. I did a search and could only find one before 1978, a kappa-influenced alien named Tepeto in an episode of Ultraseven from 1967:

Not very owlbear-like is he?

So my guess is the original kappa designs (such as Hokusai’s) influenced the chinese toy which influenced the owlbear in AD&D.

What of the owlbear today? Here’s the latest illustration:

A bit literal isn’t it?

The Impossible Dream

April 16, 2015

Adam and I were boulevarding around Sydney, or maybe elsewhere, when we came upon a strange vending machine. It was a very tall box – ten feet or so – with a small keyboard and no screen. There was a dial to the right of the keyboard that had a few settings, but none were labeled. A tiny sign had been taped on and said it would print posters of anything the purchaser wanted. It was in the lobby of some building, alongside other more mundane machines. No-one seemed interested in it; we were.

The cost was $0.75. We fed it a dollar coin. It didn’t give change.

Since there was no screen at all it was unusual to use. We put money in and typed ‘Doctor Who’. Nothing happened for a while, then it printed out a poster which came out a slot at the very bottom near the floor. The poster was massive – about the right size to hang on a door. And it was amazing. I seem to recall a montage of heroes and villans done in a woodcut style. Absolutely not what we expected. More money went in.

‘Tardis’ got us a disturbing picture of the Tardis with a screaming face carved into the front panel and a ring (like Saturn) around the light.

I typed ‘Jon Pertwee’ and got something resembling a 1960s bond poster with Pertwee in leather on his bike, babe in arms. It was amazing.

Adam printed out more Doctor Who stuff, including using the same term twice and getting two different posters that seemed to be in a series. He tried the dial, using the same term three times with the dial set differently each time. The posters were different, but we couldn’t work out what the dial did, if anything.

We then switched to fantasy monsters (dragons, beholders, demons) and collected armloads of giant, unique, incredible door posters. I vividly remember a poster depicting a dark tangled forest in astonishing detail with monsters very well hidden behind almost every tree. The poster was printed in such a way that the setting sun seemed to glow like an actual light source. We were baffled.

I inspected the posters very closely and found no copyrights or trade marks at all. The machine itself had nothing written on it. It was a complete mystery.

I forget how things ended. I don’t remember leaving; we just kept printing posters over and over. It was addictive. I wish it was real.

But it wasn’t of course. It was just the dream I had last night.

Robot Claw