Licking, Part 3

so to refresh on the previous two episodes. In part one, we talked about licking in the context of ancient Egyptian ritual magic, where licking could bestow healing and divine blessings.

For example, in the Licks of the Cow goddess Hathor who is described licking the limbs of Pharaoh Hatchupsot to give her life and kingly power, and licking could also be a vehicle for curses and magical violence, like the danger described in the Book of the Dead of the danger of being licked by the demon Crocodile in the afterlife, where the lick is some kind of attack understood is

removing protective magic from the dead person's soul. We briefly talked about some research on at what age children start to get the idea that food or eating utensils can be contaminated by being licked by other people. And we also talked about the surprisingly interesting question how many licks does it take to get to the center of a TUTSI pop? That question kind of well, it starts from a classic candy commercial. If you haven't seen it, where

have you been? Look it up? But also that sort of moved from the commercial to a bunch of laboratory experiments, empirical testing, and then I think you could say, finally winds up in the mind of the philosopher or the philosopher of science, prompting us to think about think about the ways that assumptions are often hit in seemingly mundane empirical questions and how that should affect the way we try to answer them.

evolution and preservation of that behavior. Though fortunately humans have come up with a technological replacement for wound locking, which is washing wounds with clean water or clean water and soap, which gives us most of the same benefits while eliminating most of the risks. We also talked about the specific qualities of the cat's tongue and its roughness and function, and self cleaning, and some prevailing theories about what it

means when a cat licks of human. After this, we got into eye locking, especially self eye looking in geckos and in a few alleged cases, I guess, some verified cases in humans with extraordinarily long tongues. And we're back today to do another episode.

know that. That was really interesting to me, and it made me want to do a whole segment here. But I have to also mention that with this email, Elena attached a medieval illustration of an adult bear licking. I guess what's supposed to be an unformed lump of flesh. It is like a three lobed little pink ham, just a little kind of three three hump thing. And I

didn't know where this was from. Elena did not include that information in the email, but I did a reverse image search and figured out that this is originally from a twelfth century text called the Aberdeen Bestiery, which has been held by the Aberdeen Library in Scotland. Since the

mid sixteenth century. The bear entry in this bestiary actually shares a page with the entry for the monoceros, a legendary one horned creature sometimes equated with the unicorn, or maybe a different creature than a unicorn, but sharing a lot of the same characteristics. Rab I went back and I got a picture of the whole page for you to look at here, so you can get bear licking the three and the one horned unicorn or non unicorn type creature right above it.

but there are modern English translations. First of all, I have to say that the best Eieri entry on the bear is full of awesome twelfth century bear facts varying accuracy. I'm going to come back to the claims about the unformed newborn bear in a bit, but first I just wanted to talk about a few other things said in this text, especially since a few of them end up

connecting in interesting ways. Back to the bear's tongue. The first thing that this book says, apart from some claims about bears being unformed at birth, is quote, the bear's head is not strong. Its greatest strength lies in its arms and loins. For this reason, bears sometimes stand upright. And I don't know, I think it's kind of hilarious to imagine somebody in the twelfth century looking at a bear and saying, not a very strong head.

your body is. Even brown bears tend to have a smaller bite force quotient than many other carnivores, like less than half of that of standouts like the Tasmanian devil, which has an incredibly high bite force quotient and still significantly lower than that of a jaguar very high bite force quotient. So it's a huge body and a very powerful jaw. But you can say that its jaw is not especially powerful for its body size, but its body size is enormous.

I was reading around. It seems that people with a lot of experience with bears emphasize that the most common reasons bears seem to do this is for information gathering purposes.

So the head contains the sensory array the eyes, the ears, and the nose, and by standing up and placing the head higher, bears allow themselves a longer viewing horizon, seeing over obstacles, better ability to use directional hearing, and the ability to isolate smells wafting from a distance as opposed to what's coming up from right around the ground where you are. Bears might also stand up to reach objects high up or to manipulate objects with their forelimbs. So

there is some truth here. Bears do tend to have more forelimb dexterity than many other carnivores, though not as much as most primates. That dexterity comes from a number of things, in part, like the way that bears are able to rotate their arms with a greater degree of freedom than animals like dogs, whose fore limb movement is more restricted to the backward forward motion parallel to the

length of the body. There are also differences in the bear's posture, like walking flat footed versus walking on the digits, which some carnivores do, having more separated digits independently movable digits. Things like that, and these things make bear arms and bare four paws more versatile than like a dog's fore legs and four paws, which are built with more focus on running speed.

be eating a part of a dead whale. It might be eating honey, it might be eating the contents of a refrigerator. You know, it's going to depend and it needs to have the abilities to shift between these different sources of food.

What is definitely true, however, and what may have inspired this claim, is that male and female bears engage in extensive courtship rituals, lasting for days or even weeks at a time. And these courtship rituals, while the bears are sort of getting to know one another, they can include all kinds of things that could be mistaken for face

to face copulation. So this can include face to face wrestling and play fighting, which does sometimes look like embracing, as well as just lots of sniffing each other and nuzzling and body rubbing of various sorts. So bears go through extensive courtship rituals, and you could think how somebody seeing this from a distance could think that this was actually the act of mating.

bears are not usually interested in eating adult ants. Instead, when they go ant hunting, they are looking for what's called the ant brood, the plump little insect sausages that are the ant colonies young. This would be the larvae and the pewpe These are little grub like juveniles that are packed with protein and fat, and they are especially prized as a nutritious food source by black bears. And in fact, to come back to the subject of licking, have you ever seen a black bear's tongue, rob, I.

attacking ant broods inside nests. So the bear wants to get the ant larvae and the pupet inside the cavities of a rock crevice or a hollow log or a piece of wood. Might chew, you know, chew at a rotten log or piece of wood to get some holes in it, and then kind of stick the tongue in trying to get the ant brewed out. And so I was reading about black bears attacking ant colonies to get at the brood, and I came across a fascinating hypothesis about that on a fact page for the North American

Bear Center. This is relating to the chemical warfare that goes on during these black bear versus ant raids. And so the North American Bear Center page says, quote, when researchers experimentally put their faces next to the bears faces at logs, First of all, that's funny. The researchers jerked away from the acrid cloud of formic acid. Okay, so the ants are producing this formic acid to repel the

attacking bear that's trying to steal all their children. But then this goes on to say, quote, they stood amazed that the bears could keep working. Formic acid is probably and again I want to emphasize this is just a hypothesis. This is not proven. But they say formic acid is probably a reason bears sometimes bite into insulated snowmobile seats,

hot tub covers, and refrigerator walls. Huh, what's going on there? Well, they explain these items all produce formic acid when the formaldehyde in the insulation breaks down, making them smell like ant colonies.

beehives and try hard to get honeycombs. There is nothing they sees more eagerly than honey. This one I rule partially true. Hard to say, hard to actually rank the food sources or say, there's nothing that bears like more than honey, but honey is and especially energy dense food, and black bears and brown bears will aggressively pursue honey

resources in their environment. They are partially protected from beastings by their thick fur coat, though they will just also put up with a lot of stings on the face to get at the honeycomb, which it's worth emphasizing is rich with both the sugar dense honey and the fat and protein dense bee broods. So once again we're back

to the hymenopter and brood. Those insect young are like little arthropod sausages, but unlike the ant sausages, which are retrieved through a cloud of chemical warfare, these sausages come preloaded with their own thick sugar syrup. So it's like even better.

on the bear. First passage says the bear is said to get its name because the female shapes her newborn cub with her mouth or a giving it so to speak. It's beginning or sus ford is said that they produce a shapeless fetus, and that a piece of flesh is born. The mother forms the parts of the body by licking it. The shapelessness of the cub is the result of its premature birth. It is born only thirty days after conception, and as a result of this rapid fertility, it is

born unformed. And then later the entry says, repeating some of the same ideas it says among bears, the time of gestation is accelerated. Indeed, the thirtieth day sees the womb free of the cub. As a result of this rapid fertility, the cubs are created without form. The females produce tiny lumps of flesh, white in color, with no eyes. These they shape gradually, holding them meanwhile to their breasts, so that the cubs are warmed by the constant embrace

and draw out the spirit of life. So, to review the claims here, the bear's pregnancy lasts only thirty days. Newborn bear cubs are shapeless pieces of flesh, white in color, with no eyes. And then the mother licks the flesh lump into shape, giving it limbs, giving it a head, and all the other parts of the body, forming it

with her tongue like a sculptor mold clay. I think most of you can guess correctly that this is not true, but it is interesting to compare to reality because, while literally incorrect, it taps into the spirit of some true facts about bear birth, about dinning, and maternal care in several different bear species. So one of the ideas mentioned here is that the bear cubs are born as these limbless flesh lumps after a mere thirty day pregnancy. That

is not correct, but it does tap into something. So the total pregnancy time for a bear varies bear to bear in species to species, but generally it's going to be a lot longer than thirty days. Nevertheless, bears actually do have an interesting adaptation called delayed implantation, which means that a fertilized embryo will pause its development for months at a time, only implanting in the uterine, lining, and continuing growth if certain timing and metabolic conditions are met.

For example, in the North American black bear, mating typically happens in the spring or early summer, and then you will get a fertilized egg inside the body that will just kind of float in the uterus and it will temporarily halt or at least dramatically slow down its development.

Shortly after fertilization at the blasticist stage, and it doesn't implant and begin differentiated cell growth until late fall or the onset of wintertime, and only then if the mother has reached a sufficient body weight so that she will have the energy resources to survive and sustain a pregnancy and provide milk for offspring born over the winter in the mother's den. The actual period of embryonic development after the pause, again, it varies. It might be like, you know,

two months or something. Maybe maybe up to three months, so like two to three months or something, but the total time between mating and birth is a lot longer, might be more like six to nine months, though it is true, and I don't know if this is the reason for the initial claim that's repeated in the bestiary here. It is interesting that the actual time between the resumption of development here from the blastocyst stage until birth is quite short. It's still longer than thirty days, but it

happens pretty fast. Interesting, and I was just talking about black bears. A similar overall pattern occurs in brown bears, with a few different slight timing differences. Now coming to the idea of the flesh lump, of course, that's not literally correct. Newborn bears of all species do actually have limbs and heads and fully formed individual body parts. But the grain of truth in the flesh lump legend is that newborn bear cubs are highly altricial and extremely small

compared to adults of the same species. Rob, I've got a picture of some grizzly bear cubs for you to look at at here that are adorable, But they're also just so tiny compared to the adult. And they also look I don't know, you know, they're very cute. There's that signal of helplessness in what cuteness is. In a way, so animals that are highly altricial are at one end of a spectrum known as altriciality and precociality. This refers

to how independent an animal is after birth. If a newborn animal is independent, able to use its senses and move around and feed itself shortly after birth, that species is precocial. If the newborn is relatively helpless and needs a lot of parental care to survive, that species is altricial. And it's not a binary, it's a spectrum. You know, you can be somewhere along the spectrum toward one one end or the other. Megapode birds like brush turkeys are

known for being highly precocial. Almost immediately after hatching. The newborn chicks can run around and even fly a bit, They can feed themselves, and they can basically make it on their own. Bears are on the altricial end of the spectrum. They are highly altricial, with tiny, helpless newborns with extremely limited mobility and limited senses. Their eyes are closed for some time after birth, and so bear cubs

need a lot of maternal care to survive. This reality of altricial helplessness lends itself in a way to the idea of a newborn bear as a tiny, formless lump, and the way they look really helps with that as well, because while they are born with limbs and differentiated body parts, their skin and fur tends to be much paler than that of an adult of the same species. The bestiary

text says that they're born as white lumps. They're typically not white, but they might be more kind of a pale gray or a paler gray brown, so they're paler than the adults. Their eyes are closed, and they must nuzzle against their mother for warmth and for nursing. So even if you could somehow see them right after birth, which that takes place inside the mother's winter den, it's kind of hard to see that in nature without some

really special circumstances arising. If you could see them, they would not be up and roaming around on their own. They would be huddling close for warmth and trying to nurse. Some other realities probably contributing to the licking the formless lump myth. Mother bears do lick and then usually eat the birth membrane almost immediately after the cub is born. Mother bears of multiple species also do lick the cubs

right after birth. They've been observed licking the cubs themselves after parturition, and this is a common maternal behavior, not just in bears, but across lots of mammalian species. And I think we can infer some probable survival motivations that would drive the selection of this behavior. First of all, licking after birth helps clean the cubs fur of the wet residual amniotic fluid after birth. So why would this be important cleaning the amniotic fluid off of the fur

and skin. A big reason, probably the biggest reason is thermoregulation. Newborn bear cubs are incredibly tiny compared to adults. Like newborn brown bears are typically at most around a one to five hundredth of the body mass of their mother, and thus they have a very high surface area to body mass ratio. The smaller you are, the harder it is for your body to retain heat to keep the heat inside. So these babies, these baby bears lose heat

much faster than an adult bear. Also, they're usually born in winter during cold weather. Also, they have much less heat insulation in the form of subcutaneous fat and body fur. They've got a lot less fur when they're born than adults have. So newborn bears are at great risk of hypothermia from the moment that they're born. Being coated in amniotic fluid obviously makes that risk a lot worse. By keeping the fur wet and matted down, it makes the bear,

the bear cub subject to evaporative cooling. You know, when you're wet that the the evaporation steals energy from the surface of your body. And to the extent that the newborn bear has any fur, this very some of the different bear species, but they're not going to have a lot of fur, but what fur they have is going to be matted down and matted down and wet, and when it's matted and wet, it's not really going to

work very well as insulation against the cold. So by licking the newborn clean, the mother is actually increasing the cub's ability the cub's ability to retain body heat. A second big thing that I see mentioned in the literature about mother bears licking their newborns is in addition to cleaning cleaning the body, licking of the perenneal or anogenital region is important because that is thought to help stimulate

the cubs to urinate and defecate. In some cases, newborn bears apparently can't poop or pee without external stimulation of the ans and genitals, and at the very least, the licking seems to make that easier. So the mother will lick the nether regions to make the cubs poop and pee, and then we'll often eat the feces after the cubs poop and the den. I thought that was interesting, so I was investigating, like, why eat the poop? This seems

to be often explained as a den hygiene behavior. I can't prove this, but I wonder if a reason for this is that it would help prevent the den from having an excess of smells that would attract predators.

study about maternal licking behaviors in mammals in general. Actually this was more about not just licking but general postparturition maternal bonding behaviors, and one of the things that was looking at was licking. And this study reported in the context of rodents that the presence of predator smells. If you pipe in some smells of a predator, that actually increased licking behavior in mother with newborns.

connection between mother bear and offspring in some animal. In some animals, maternal licking might stimulate autonomic survival functions like breathing and blood flow. So maybe something like that is going on here. But what's absolutely clear is that the

mother bear does lick the baby bear. At least part of this seems to be related to stimulating urination and defecation, and a big part of it, I think it's fair to say, is motivated by cleaning the baby bear to help it thermoregulate, help it retain heat.

Wild female bears were outfitted with radio callers and their dens located as they prepared for hibernation in the fall. Cameras were installed in the dens and events in the den recorded until they and their cubs finally abandoned their dens in the spring. So this is amazing. They actually were able to get cameras into wild dens so they could see what the bears were doing in the dens in the wild. This is something that normally is really hard to see. Obviously, you can study captive bears, but

captivity might alter the bear's behavior. It often does, so this study looked at a bunch of different things, but I was interested in the licking behaviors observed. So one thing they documented was the licking of cubs right after birth, started almost immediately, and it does seem to be related to a period where the mothers are trying to warm

and stimulate their newborns. So, to read from the author's results, quote activities were sufficiently visible for three litters born in twenty ten Lily, twenty eleven Lily, and twenty twelve Jewel. These are bear names to determine that the mothers began licking embryonic membranes from the first born cubs within nine

sixteen and eighty five seconds of parturition. On the twenty second of January twenty two twelve, when it was negative eight degrees celsius outside, Jewel licked her first born seventy seven times per minute for six point five minutes before assuming the ventrally recumbent warming position and placing the cub under her sparsely furred chest and belly. In that position, with her head tucked under her chest and her crown against the den floor, she continued licking the cubs dry

while warming them with her breath. So this seems to me to be associated with a licking, clean, drying, and warming behavior after birth, where the mother bear is trying to make sure that the cub is sufficiently kept warm and it's also adorable. The idea of warming her warming the cub with her breath.

like actually totally different. This is not like licking of newborn cubs. But they say, in our quote previous studies in northeastern Minnesota, we have seen cubs, juveniles, and adults touch tongues and engage in reciprocal tongue licking in apparent signs of friendship, but we have not seen these behaviors reported for bears in dens. Reciprocal tongue looking involves bears simultaneously touching and or entwining tongues as they lick each

other in and around the mouth. And then they say the webcams revealed Lily's licking Hope's mouth without Hope reciprocating when Hope was thirty nine, forty one and fifty one days old. However, on March seventeenth, twenty ten, fifty four day old Hope vocalized the pulsing home of suckling for twenty four seconds during a thirty seven second session of reciprocal tongue licking. So, first, mom is trying to do

reciprocal tongue licking with the cub. First few times the cub does not lick back, but then finally the cub does start. They they're now reciprocal tongue licking, and it mentions a couple other examples too. But I don't know, I thought that was interesting. That seems to be maybe another just social bonding thing. I don't know if there's an established reason why they're licking each other's tongues other than just some form of play or bonding.

But he has some interesting little bits about this. He does briefly refer to this idea that we've been discussing about, the bear licking this this this mass into form, and he notes the Franco, German and otherwise Northern European proverbial expression an unlicked bear, which was apparently used historically to describe an unrefined person, like, oh, look at there, whatever they're doing, you know, in breach of etiquette, that person's

an unlicked bear. Also, the idea licked into shape apparently also stems from this idea as well, which is which is one that certainly I'm more familiar with. Loked into shape. That's I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about the bear doing electually. All right, I want to return to a couple of animals that we've already talked about and get into some various beliefs and traditions surrounding them, Starting first with cows, as we discussed in our previous licking episodes.

Cows are big liquors, and when they lick humans, it's sometimes perceived as auspicious or even some manner of good luck. This seems to especially be true in cultures where cattle enjoy sacred status. There's a particular account of how the cattle gathered around fifteenth and sixteenth century Hindu saint Chaitanya Mahapruvu, founder of the Godhea Vishnuism Hindu religious movement, and licked

his body as an act of love. Accounts of cows licking Krishna are also important, I understand in the Hadi Krishna movement or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which is itself a modern expression of Godia Vishnuism. Now, in mentioning cowlix, I'm sure a number of you also were instantly reminded that, hey, that's what we call this weird part in our hair that may be difficult to comb

into shape. I have one of these. This is one of the prime reasons I eventually gave up on combing my hair and keep up a more sort of I don't know, ruffled style, if you will, because the cowlick itself is so difficult to manage. The cowlick, of course, is just a pattern of follicle disruption on the human scalp.

other cultures. I was seeing threads where people of Korean descent were talking about this as well, where another case in which two hair licks meant that the child would go on to have two marriages in their life, and if you had more than two, it might mean more than two marriages. So I would be very interested to hear from listeners out there if you have some insight on these, you know, you know, I think generally light hearted interpretations of what a cow lick might mean for someone,

you know, especially as scene in a child. Now, I want to turn from here to Norse traditions, because there is some very important cosmic cow licking that goes on there, as detailed in the twelve to twenty work The pros at A, two entities emerged from the melting of the primordial ice in Neffelheim. The first was, of course, the giant Yemir, but the second was the giant cow Uhumla, and her milk is said to have sustained Yemir. The quote translated, of course, is four milk streams ran from

her teats, and she fed Yeamer. But then, while how's she going to produce this milk, she has to consume something herself. And what she does is she the frost covered salt stones or the salty rhymestones for her own nourishment.

And as she licks them, something interesting happens. Depending on the actual translation, and I think how you interpret it, the rough action of her tongue against the salt stones either uncovers a man, first his hair and then the rest of him, a man perhaps already within the salt stone, kind of like reaching the center of a TUTSI roll pop. Yes, Or she licks the salt stone into the shape of a man, forming the man out of the stone, kind of carving him out of the stone with her tongue,

or something akin to what we were talking about with the bear. The licking by the mammalian mother brings form to the formless, And I think the latter is the more popular interpretation. Yeah.

the slayers of Yamir. And the earth, of course is going to be born out of this dead giant's bones. So again interesting once more that we have this idea of a mother's licking of a newborn, giving life and perhaps echoing the ideas concerning the bear forming the birth mass into a cup or calf. And I included an illustration of from the pros here, and you can, folks can look this up if you look up the cow in question Odumla on say Wikipedia, you can see this

illustration of the big cow. You see the big tongue there, you see the four streams of milk. And I believe we see the figure being licked from the stone here from the salt stone.

of dogs. I believe we talked a little bit about dogs licking and also about the idea that a dog's lick would have a healing power to it, and yeah, this was a widespread idea in the ancient world, and we discussed it's it's use in some ma interpretations, and so we have another another chapter of that here to discuss specifically, I want to talk about dog related rituals attributed to the Hittites, an ancient Anatolian Bronze Age empire in what is now Turkey, and there's some bleed over

into some related groups as well. Of note here there's a fair amount of scholarly discussion about the relationship between actual historic Hittites and the people described as Hittites in the Bible.

An older nineteen ninety two were titled The Puppy in Hittie Ritual by Billy Jean Collins, published by the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, as well as the more recent Puppy Sacrifice in Sinophagi from early Philistine tel Nickney Ekron, contextualized by livtov at All, published in the journal Jamas in twenty eighteen.

by you know, for the king and queen, by the king and Queen's you know, you know, wizards or priests, but rather something that would be the part of non elite domestic.

this comes back again. This is a culture that prized dogs, but a puppy is untrained, they're around, they're easy to acquire. And this also ties into some of these prevailing eyes ideas that were present in the ancient world. Who've always that we've already referred to that dogs have some sort

of a healing property to them. So the basic idea here is that in specific cases of ritual is that the puppy would serve as a sacrifice in a transfer ritual by which the dog would lick the afflicted human and in doing so absorb that affliction, and then the dog would be ritually sacrificed. So again the tradition here's a link to others who had discussed before the idea that dogs heal via their licking. The ancient Greeks believed in this, and also, according to Collins, would engage in

a kind of transfer ritual of their own. The dog would lick an afflicted individual, absorb the illness, and then the dog would be killed and examined to determine the nature of the human malady. So in the Greek case, not a situation all right, we've driven the illness into the dog, and now we must kill the dog. But rather we've driven the illness into to the dog, and now let us examine the dog to see what the

sickness is, so we can then treat the human. Collins also points out that among the Spartans, dogs were sacrificed by the cult of their god of War, and that it was thought that the lick of a dog could cure blindness, and perhaps related, Hippocrates suggested dog meat as being good for the eyes. Like you having ailments, will

cook up some dog meat that will help. Plenty the Elder also wrote of such uses for the puppy, specifically that a blind puppy, and this is playing off the observation that dogs are born blind much like bears are born blind. As we've discussed, you know, their eyes are not, you know, fully operational and open and so forth, and then by this view, are kind of healed by their

or given sight via their mother's licking. Plenty rights that you could take a blind puppy press it to a sick person's abdomen for three during which the puppy would absorb the illness of the individual and die of said illness. Again, nobody wants the idea of struggling up to a puppy until it dies, but this was one idea that was explored in the ancient world. By the way, Plenty is full of eye wisdom elsewhere in the natural history as well.

Here's a quote in translation. It is said that goats can see by night as well as they can in the daytime, and that consequently a diet of goat's liver restores twilight's sight to persons suffering from what is called night blindness.

the dog. And I love how this pre germ theory folk ritual actually seems to invert the way that an illness might conceivably be transferred between two participants.

much a ritualistic invocation to it. As the puppy then licks the different parts of the human body and brings about healing via transference. Wow. Yeah, And I'm not. I'm not certain that in this particular ritual the dog's death is inherently implied. Elsewhere in Hittite rituals and ideas presented that the dead puppy of some sort of transfer like this could be buried, and in doing so, you are

burying the illness as well. I don't know about you, Joe, but in thinking about this, I was reminded of a topic we've discussed on the show before, the story of Jesus casting the demon Legion into the pigs and then the pigs dying very much an act of transference.

that does not involve a dead dog. We're going to end on a nice light note here, but this practice is a practice by which a tallow puppy, so kind of like a soap or a candle puppy, was placed in the King and Queen's bedchamber at night to keep evil at bay in the same way that the adult guard dogs, or I think the term that she uses the dogs of the table, and I think this is also referred to in the writings of Homer as well, the dogs of the table being the dogs that hang

around you and eat food scraps that you throw out from under the table. They're also your protectors, but I guess they are not allowed to sleep with you, or they're not in the bedchamber, or maybe they's just a sleep and kind of lousy, or they can't protect against supernatural threats, and therefore you need this magical tallow puppy, the soap puppy that's gonna keep the enemy at bay at night.

Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. I didn't even get to my film notes. I had some notes about angels licking people's eyeballs and the prophecy three to learn their history, something that I think has no real counterpart in actual folklore and mythology.

likely a connection there. I also had some notes about the other prophecy movie, the nineteen seventy five Bear movie, in which the mutant bear is essentially a partially formless mass, and I had some notes there where I was probably reading too much into all of this, where it's like, is it the idea that instead of the environment is not nurtured by humans, it is polluted by humans, resulting

in mutant bears. There are also some mutant bear cubs in that film as well, But like I say, I'm probably reaching with all of that.