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Thank you to everyone who played our celebratory contest! I hope you had fun looking at the images and thinking about what they are or where they are. We will quickly go through the correct answers–or at least we will list my best understanding of what is correct. At the end I will announce the proud winner of these exquisite mint-condition Zoomorphs toys and we can start to fumble towards the logistics of getting you your toys, hooftales…er I mean “mysterious contest winner”.
Wherever possible, I have linked back to original articles and posts, so, if you have a moment and are curious about these strange places and things, why not click all of the links and continue voyaging through vast realms of life, time, and art!
OK, here we go with the answers:
THINGS:
1.
A Song Dynasty (or ‘Sung” Dynasty…if that is how you Anglicize 宋) ewer not wholly unlike this one or these later Mongol ewers.
2.
A parasitoid fairy wasp (Mymaridae family) upon a human hand
3.
A Melo Pearl, the world’s rarest and most expensive type of pearl!
4.
Whoah! It’s an ancient Visigoth votive crown from the fabled treasure of Guarrazar!
5.
A Chiton, the armored mollusk
6.
Aww! It’s an adorable school of tiny little glass catfish.
7.
Roses, tulips, irises and other flowers in a wicker basket, with fruit and insects on a ledge (Balthasar van der Ast, ca 1614-1619) oil on panel. (Here is a Ferrebeekeeper post about Van der Ast).
8.
The Cap of Monomach, a treasure of the early tsars. I still think Putin wears it sometimes. Hell, he’s probably wearing it right now!
9.
It is the brain of an Etruscan shrew, arguably the smallest mammal. The arrows point to the trigeminal nerve (black arrows) and optic nerve (blue arrows).
10.
Hahahaha! These are Polish chicken chicks. Look at that expression! The poor li’l guy does look a bit down.
11.
A lituus, a mysterious Roman divination device.
12.
The underworld deity Xolotl, the scrofulous salamander deity of Aztec mythology’s weird death realm.
13.
The “Borghese Vase” a colossal Ancient Roman Urn which was one of the treasures of the Garden of Sallust
PLACES:
1.
The Faroe Islands (Photo by Tom Glancz)
2.
A Masai giraffe walking by Lake Manyara Tanzania
3.
Standard Poodles in the Ohio Valley
4.
The Halászbástya in Budapest. Hungarians have such amazing statues!
5.
A welwitschia plant in the Namib Desert
6.
The Giant Wild Goose Pagoda of Xi’an, Shaanxi. I need to write a post about this one in the future!
7.
Ovid Among the Scythians (Eugène Delacroix, 1862) Oil on Canvas
I find it strange that this fantasy piece about Scythians (and poets) was painted during the American Civil War.
8.
Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania
9.
The world’s largest potash fertilizer plant at Lop Nur, China
10.
The Planet Venus, sans clouds. Sigh…someday…
11.
The Armenian cemetery in Julfa, Azerbaijan…desecrated and bulldozed in the 1990s
12.
A colossal snake swimming in the Trans-Saharan Seaway of Mali during the Eocene
13.
The Site of Eridu, humankind’s first known city.
I can’t believe how well our contestants did! I am not sure I could have identified any of these…and I have written about most of them! There were a few humorous stray answers, but even the answers which weren’t a hundred percent right were still clever and well thought out. Our Ferrebeekeeper mental Olympics thus ends with the following champions:
Gold: hooftales
Silver: Vicki
Bronze: eekee
Everyone is a winner (although Hooftales gets the zoomorphs and the national anthem of the hooftales homeland is currently playing as we wipe away proud tears). I enjoyed putting this together and revisiting these concepts! Should we do another one at some point? Should the images be harder or easier or what? Talk to me below (Hooftales, we will figure out how to get you your prize) and thanks again for playing and, above all, for reading!
Today we feature something completely new for Ferrebeekeeper–a contest! This challenge will test your acumen, breadth of knowledge, and grasp of cultural and biological material. And this is not just for bragging rights (although those are certainly to be had); there is an actual prize–a good one. Hopefully this contest will also simulate the joys of travel and the delight of discovery in this sad & locked-down era.
Here are the rules: below are 13 images of things and 13 images of places. Whoever is first to identify these images most correctly will win the prize–an original, unopened mint-condition box of “Safarimorphs” mix-and-match animal toys which I made when I was a foolish young person who believed that success could be had in America without selling out to a huge monopolistic corporation an entrepreneur. Zoomorphs the company died a hideous death…but not because the toys lacked quality. Even to this day, strangers still hunt me down on the internet trying to find if there are any toys left. [Sean Connery voice] This is one of the very last boxes in existence so think carefully about your answers!
Unfortunately there are some problems with web contests, like Google’s search-by-means-of-image feature (which is for losers, but will probably work). Worst of all, I can’t imagine where to put the answers (my email sometimes plays havoc with unknown incoming messages) so we are going to have to put them in the comments below. If you don’t see your answers at first, don’t worry, I will approve them in the order they come in (assuming you don’t cuss TOO much), but it does mean that other contestants can see your answers too, so consider carefully before posting! Also, there could be multiple right answers–a featureless arid plain could be “The silk road”, or “Kazakhstan” or “a desert” or “The Northern Hemisphere” all of which are right, but some of which are more right. Our highly qualified and morally unimpeachable judges will determine the MOST right answers by means of secret deliberation to which there is no appeal.
The contest ends next Tuesday when I will announce the winner and give my own answers. The number refers to the image immediately below it. Good luck and thank you for playing (and thank you even more for reading). Speaking of reading, there are some hints for a lot of these in Ferrebeekeeper…somewhere in those 2000 posts before last week, so maybe you should browse the archives. OK! Here are the images:
THINGS:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
PLACES:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
You probably know them all already…but at least the images look quite strange and impressive with this white box gallery format. Post you answers below and good luck! Let me know if you have questions and thank you so much for everything.
The Chimera
I have a special affection for the next monster on my list. Of all of Echidna’s brood, the Chimera seems like the most fanciful: she was a mixed-up creature with three heads from completely different animals. The Chimera had the body and head of a lioness, but a goat head protruded from her back, and she had a live snake instead of a tail. The Chimera breathed fire and haunted the volcanic mountains of Lycia. Even in mythology, this was an improbable beast, and therefore, since classical times, writers and poets have called unbelievable fabrications “chimeras.”
Zoomorphs! The chimerical building toy
I am fond of the Chimera because I designed a line of toys, the Zoomorphs, which is a kind of do-it-yourself chimera kit. The toy consists of a set of plastic animal parts which can be snapped together to make an actual creature like a Tyrannosaurus, a dog, a goldfish, or a parrot (to name only a few). The user can also pop the different pieces together to make crazy fantasy creatures such as a dino-dog with parrot’s wings and a fish tail. You can find them for sale at finer independent toy stores. Here’s a link to the company site. Sorry for the shameless plug—but it was germane to the subject. Anyway…back to mythology….
Like a surprising number of the monsters born of Echidna, the Chimera was slain for no good reason–thanks to a sequence of events which had nothing to do with her. Bellerophon, prince of Corinth (and the grandson of wily Sisyphus) fled from his father’s court after committing murder. He took refuge in Tiryns, where he was a favorite guest until the queen accused him of ravishing her. The king of Tiryn sent Bellerophon to his father-in-law with a sealed note to kill the bearer (coincidentally, do such death warrants ever work properly in fiction?). The father-in-law also had qualms about murdering a guest, and so he dispatched Bellerophon on a suicide mission to kill the Chimera. With assistance from Athena and Poseidon, Bellerophon tamed the magnificent winged horse Pegasus. In order to deal with the Chimera’s fiery breath, Bellerophon attached a hunk of lead to a spear. When the Chimera breathed on the lead the soft metal melted down the creature’s throat causing the poor animal to suffocate.
Bellerophon fighting the Chimera (watercolor by Walter Crane, 1895)
Bellerophon performed a few other heroic deeds and ultimately became king. However the dark shadows in his character did not vanish with a crown. After a few years of increasingly tyrannical behavior, he resolved to fly Pegasus to Mount Olympos and join the gods as an equal. Zeus sent a blowfly to sting the winged horse, and Bellerophon was thrown down into a thorn bush. Maimed and blinded, he wondered Greece as a beggar, while former subjects pretended not to recognize him. The moral of the story is that Greek gods can tolerate murder, rape, chimeracide, and despotism, but woe to those guilty of hubris! And thus does Bellerophon’s troubling story come to a stupid end.
Fortunately modern biologists do not agree with nonexistent gods (or their adherents) as to what constitutes hubris. This is relevant because the creation and study of “chimeras” in biology has become widespread. In the context of biology, a chimera is an organism (or a part of an organism) with tissues created from more than one distinctive sets of genetic information. Such an organism can come about through organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering. Some chimerical organisms have a long history and are familiar–like grafted rose bushes or organ-transplant recipients. Other chimeras, particularly those created by genetic tinkering, are rather more apt to stir up passion among the traditionally-minded. For example, in 2003, Chinese biologists created an early stage embryo which combined rabbit and human parts. Bio-ethics and our transgenic future merit further writing, however splicing the genes of organisms together is about to become more frequent. Why not join the wave of the future with some delightful, high-quality morphing toys!
You are not getting off this merry-go-round!
ferrebeekeeper 