InsanePeopleFacebook

I can't pull anything coherent out of this, of course, but there's some fun bits and pieces floating in the brain stew there.

• The Hiawatha Crater is a 31km wide impact basin under a glacier in Greenland, but the meteor that caused it is estimated to have fallen almost 60mya, so "only" a few million years after the Dinosaurs took their big hit.

• There are often cross cultural commonalities in legends and other folklore, enough to merit a classification system, Aarne–Thompson–Uther, that while problematic in how it treats elements found in stories not common in cultures well-studied by western academics, is still very much in use in academia. Of course, most of this comes down to "humans being humans" and few scholars think its worthwhile to go on wild goose chases trying to find actual events inspiring specific tropes, to say nothing of this... erm... theory(?).

• As far as I can tell, there is no meteor in the Kaaba, but set into a corner is the "Black Stone," a cemented aggregation of pieces of a large, likely igneous stone. As an object of veneration, it appears to pre-date Islam, as does the basic notion of the Kaaba itself, which was already a holy site for local religion when Muhammed came along. There is a broader tradition in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East of including large stones ("baetyls") in temples as representations of gods. The Roman Emperor Elagabalus was born and raised in Syria, and when he became emperor he (among other much weirder shit) brought along the "god" Elagabalus, the local temple stone, and tried to insist it be worshipped in Rome as a deity superior to Jupiter. If there is one thing Romans of that era did not like, it was being told that other gods were better than than their own, or even anything other quaint provincial re-namings of the Roman gods. They didn't necessarily need you to believe their religion (orthodoxy), but you sure as shit needed to to observe it (orthopraxy), and fucking around with the practice of the state religion is a very good excuse for your Praetorian Guard to finally stab the bejeezus out of you (and your mom).

• Finally, Pixie and Brutus is a pretty cute comic, if maybe a bit overexposed and SEO'd.