powerful katrinka: try acrania not arcania.

Thanks! I Googled arcania and all I could find was video game sites.

I had a look at some fetuses and infants born with acephalia-whatsit and some of them look like baby trolls. A lot of folklore is based on medical anomalies.

I am a bad, bad person for saying so, but some of the pictures were hilarious, in a sort of H.P. Lovecraftian way. And if you think a frog is cute, some of the babies were horribly, tragically cute.

Here's a tender and touching photo of one such little monster and its proud parents:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/facebook-sorry-for-deleting-family-ph o to-of-newborn-with-brain-defect/

Humans, gotta love 'em. There's some good in the old hairless monkeys yet.

The famous writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, better known for his Lost World and Sherlock Holmes novel, defended an Irish family for killing a deformed enfant in the belief that it was a changeling--in folklore, an elderly, retarded or simply impossible to live individual that the Good Folk swap for a human infant like cuckoos or mocking birds laying their eggs in another bird's nest.

This belief was not doubt fostered in part by such cases. The enfant would look like a troll or elf to traditional peasants, and not knowing any better, they would assume that it was a changeling.

The traditional responses are somewhat comical (such as going through the motions of brewing beer in an eggshell or casting millet seed before the fire because the Good Folk can't resist fascination with these tricks and will reveal themselves by their reaction) or the tragic response of exorcising the supernatural creature by placing the infant on a red hot shovel. In this historical case, it was the tragic response which was tried.

I've always been fascinated with folklore. I read a lot of books on the supernatural, mythology, folklore, anomalies and so forth long before I discovered the works of Charles Hoy Fort and became a long time reader of The Fortean Times magazine, which is practically Fark's sister site.

I have a strong stomach when it comes to medical anomalies as well. I don't lose any sleep over monsters, horrible diseases, deformity or mutants. Some of them are even attractive and interesting people which I would like to meet.

Have you ever seen the podcasts where Ricky Gervais (a very amusing a-hole of the practical joker sub-type) introduces Karl Pilkington to the famous British dwarf actor. In one of them Ricky Gervais has the dwarf dressed in a frog costume. He's one of the world's biggest jerks, but the frog costume is brilliant. I think it would be a great costume ball costume, or Halloween costume. If the dwarf had a prince costume on underneath and could do a quick change, it would be a shoo-in for first prize.

Pilkington is a long-time reader of The Fortean Times but he muddles everything he reads or thinks about so thoroughly it either comes out as Zen Koans or complete and utter nonsense, even if he has a valid and very clever point concealed in the rubbish he talks.

I love Karl Pilkington. He should be an honorary Farker. And Ricky and Steven are such jerks sometimes. If they weren't so busy being "rational" and "scientitians" they might learn something profoundly wise and intelligent from that little egg-headed idiot they torment.

I feel his pain sometimes but other times I have to laugh because joke's on the smart guys.

I've seen some of the most ghastly things--men with their faces half destroyed by disease, for example--but also some things that are straight out of fairy tales and mythology.

Weird, wild and wonderful. That's how I like my www.

blatz514: ChipNASA: [www.audizine.com image 800x475]

W T F is this?

I'm kinda amazed that you, of all people, don't know about that....

/I remember my first time....

Shoot the wabbit, shoot the wabbit

/thanks Elmer