The Feejee Mermaid
Shaenon: Page from a comic I drew about fake carnival mermaids. I just like carny stuff.
Channing: The thing I like best, the absolute best, about carny stuff, is the lingo. This will be obvious to anyone who recognized the sinister undertones of H.T.’s blogger name, “Hey Rube.”
I knew about these things, but hadn’t heard that they came from Japan originally. No wonder the Pathfinder RPG called the monster they based on it “ningyo.” 🙂
Actually, the ningyo is a legitimate creature from Japanese mythology that’s described as a fish-like-thing-that-isn’t-quite-a-fish with a monkey’s teeth and/or a monkey’s face. If you catch and eat it, you gain the gift of extraordinarily long (but not eternal) life, completely with extraordinarily long youth (but also extraordinarily long oldth later on)
I’m familiar with the immortality story (from multiple manga, most notably Rumiko Takahashi’s Mermaid Saga) and the word ningyo, but I’d never previously heard of the monkey-ish aspects.
Probably the Salema porgy which swims in the Pacific and has square-ended teeth (to chew barnacles and coral). They are said to taste great as long as you don’t get one infested with hallucinogenic plankton.
So when are we getting a storyline with carnies in it?
Sounds good to me!
Somehow the fantasy never lives up to the reality.
…and vice versa.
Well, the “Poptropica” strip on GoComics (which seems to have folded up operations kinda abruptly) had a sequence with a mermaid with a fish upper body and human legs…
I just got done reading Fredric Brown’s “The Freak Show Murders”, and agree that carnies are a terrific story background.
Just received my Christmas gift to myself- a set of Skin Horse books… most of my first set vanished while moving… Love web pages but LOVE real paper! I highly recommend these!
You’ve got a copy of that? ‘Cause I could find only a couple of his mysteries…lots of his SF but only a couple mysteries…
$1.34 at Amazon.
Murder Draws a Crowd: The Collected Fredric Brown is supposed to come out tomorrow… emphasis on “supposed”. All his SF is easily available… this starts into his crime stories.
I recently visited NYC’s Museum of Sex/ It was generally pretty pathetic, but I mention it here because off in a corridor there was a poster for one of those “Mermaids”.
I don’t know if they still have it, but a trading post in Banff, Alberta, Canada used to have one of those fake mermaids. Ugliest thing you’ve ever seen.
It reads a lot better if given a faux French accent. Le Sea Monkey.
Shovelhead!
Makes me think of the x-files episode XD
…which leads me to skinner’s fist.
All things lead to Skinner’s Fist.
There’s a little curiosity shop in Bar Harbor, ME, which owns what they claim to be that very mermaid, or so it would seem. the spelling is with a g, not a j. But I presume the same creation?
They have the whole story of its history.
It’s very creepy, and very cool.