Well, the burn victim towel animals have continued to appear in my cabin.
Below is a recent one, which is obviously a dog.
The folks who guessed a penguin for the first one were correct. At least that’s what the cabin steward said it was.
One reader suggested a snow covered penguin, but I think there’s more to it than that. It was not only jet white, it also had no eyes.
Can you think of any albino, eyeless penguins?
I can.
According to H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness . . .
Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin – albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits.
The one in my room must have been a baby.
I’ll keep an eye out for shoggoths oozing out from under my bed.
The albino eyeless penguins are the penguin assassins.
Not just any dog — I think that’s Gromit!
If that’s a dog I don’t know why, when I look at it, I get an insatiable appetite for BBQ baby back ribs!?
…and it looks like an apple would fit real nice inside that tasty little critters mouth!
It DOES look like Gromit!
And remember in the W & G short “The Wrong Trousers”, the villain was… a penguin!
Coincidence?
It’s a dog? There I go again, I only see an oddly folded towel. White. On a bed….I give up.
That’s why you’re the Canon Lawyer, Ed. 🙂
Have I mistakenly come across an evolution website? First it’s a penquin, today it’s a dog, tomorrow it’s a presidential candidate…at least the dog appears to be praying, which is more than I can say about the presidential candidates.
On closer look this is a nun’s poocher – look at the ears – is it a Daughters of Charity pup?? (Can’t recall who has those winged tip headgear!)
Most importantly – what’s wrong with the single piece of gold wrapped chocolate – why hasn’t that at least multipled – or “evolved” into a big box with my name on it?
What’s scary is that you’re in the middle of the sea and still able to quote from Lovecraft. Either you brought it along as light reading, have it downloaded to your computer, or you quoted from memory. In any of those cases, I’m worried for your sanity. J/K. I wish I was reading Lovecraft while on the Catholic Answers cruise. . .
“South Station Under – Washington Under – Park Street Under-Kendall – Central – Harvard . . . ”
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
Ed Peters,
I bet you can’t see the “Magic Eye” posters either!
🙂
Dr. E: Nope 🙁
TimJ: Tell you what do I see in that towel: hard EVIDENCE that some domestic service personnel have way, way too much time on their hands, thus justifying cuts in wages and increases in work quotas!
Hmmm. Maybe I can see beyond the surface after all.
…some domestic service personnel have way, way too much time on their hands, thus justifying cuts in wages and increases in work quotas!
Actually, I wouldn’t pay good money to an employee who folds a towel as terribly as that!
It’s Alf!!!
On the other hand, the penguin did rather look like a ghostly Kermit the Frog…
Ed –
Of course, the reverse of my good-natured (honest!) dig at your response to the towel animals is my knowledge that, given my free-wheeling, unfocused ruminations on things like broken speedometers and pop singers and what-have-you… it is a very good thing I am NOT a canon lawyer. It doesn’t seem like a field that would be amenable to whimsy.
Better to give me a paintbrush and leave the real thinking to more disciplined intellects.
Gee, and I ever REALLY wanted to be able to do was to draw…and play the pipe organ.
No, it is I who will eat you!!!
I thought it was an elephant.