This is commentary. And this is really good.
The Sea Organ is an "experimental musical instrument which plays music by way of sea waves and tubes located underneath a set of large marble steps." Built by Nikola Basic "as apart of the project to redesign the new city coast (Nova riva)" of Zadar, Croatia, which had been destroyed during WWII.
"The waves interact with the organ in order to create somewhat random by harmonic sounds."
"White marble steps leading down to the water were built later. Concealed under these steps... is a system of polyethylene tubes and a resonating cavity which turns the site into a large musical instrument, played by the wind and the sea."
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"Near the center of our galaxy, however, where carbon is more plentiful than oxygen, planet formation is very different... The morning sky on a carbon world would be anything but crystal clear and blue. Picture a yellow haze with black clouds of soot. As you descend farther into the atmosphere you find seas made of compounds like crude oil and tar. The surface of the planet bubbles with foul smelling methane pits and black ooze... It's raining gasoline and asphalt... You also find high quantities of diamond."
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"On Neptune, one can find constant jet steam winds that whip around the planet... past the north edge of the planet's Great Dark Spot, an Earth-size hurricane, at a staggering 1,500 miles per hour. That is more than double the speed needed to break the sound barrier... It remains a mystery as to how it gets the energy to drive the fastest planetary winds seen in the solar system, despite it being so far from the sun... and having relatively weak internal heat."
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"This gas giant is over 150 times as massive as Earth and made mostly of hydrogen and helium... Bellerophon roasts in the light of its star at over 1800 degrees F (1000 degrees C). Bellerophon's star is over 100 times closer to it than the Sun is to Earth... As the hot air rises, cool air rushes down to replace it creating 1000 km per hour winds. The heat also ensures that no water vapor exists... Such intense heat enables the iron composing the planet to be vaporized. As the vapor rises it forms iron vapor clouds, similar in concept to water vapor clouds here on Earth. The difference though, is that these clouds will then proceed to rain a relentless fury of molten iron down upon the planet."
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"On Mars a dust storm can develop in a matter of hours and envelope [sic] the entire planet within a few days. They are the largest and most violent dust storms in our solar system. The Martian dust vortices... [reach] the height of Mount Everest with winds in excess of 300 kilometers per hour. After developing, it can take months for a dust storm on Mars to completely expend itself."
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"Jupiter's atmosphere brews storms twice as wide as the Earth itself. These goliaths generate 400 mph winds and titanic lightning bolts 100 times brighter than the ones on Earth. Lurking underneath.. is a 25,000 mile deep ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen... In Jupiter's outer layers, hydrogen is a gas just like on Earth. But as you go deeper, the atmospheric pressure skyrockets. Eventually the pressure becomes so great that it actually squeezes the electrons out of the hydrogen atoms. Under such extreme conditions, the hydrogen transforms into a liquid metal, conducting electricity as well as heat. Also, like a mirror, it reflects light. So if you were immersed in it... you wouldn't be able to see anything."
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Ice on Pluto is pinkish-brown rather than white, "due to interactions with gamma rays from deep space and the distant Sun."
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Edward Mordake, or Edward Mordrake, is a possibly fictitious figure who was supposed to have suffered from diprosopus, possessing an extra face on his head. The face could not eat or speak but could laugh and cry. Mordake say that his "demon face" whispered to him at night and begged doctors to remove it, but no one would do so. He killed himself at 23, through poison, and in a letter requested that the "demon face" be destroyed before burial, "let it continues its dreadful whisperings in my grave" and asked to be "interred in a waste place, without stone or legend to mark his grave."
According to the stories he was an heir to an English peerage. "He lived in complete seclusion, refusing the visits even of the members of his own family," and was a "young man of fine attainments, a profound scholar, and a musician of rare ability. His figure was remarkable for its grace."
The face was that of a girl, "lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil," and exhibited "every sign intelligence, of a malignant sort, however. It would be seen to smile and sneer while Mordake was weeping. The eyes could follow the movements of the spectator, and the lips would gibber without ceasing. No voice was audible." Said Mordake, according to the lore, his devil twin "never sleeps, but talks to me forever of such things as they only speak of in Hell. No imagination can conceive the dreadful temptations it sets before me. For some unforgiven wickedness of my forefathers I am knit to this fiend."
His physicians were named Manvers and Treadwell.
There are many things that we could do with this, oh yes. A Lovecraftian connection occurs instantly. Perhaps a story focusing on the young Mordake, or someone looking into his death. Alternately, we could suppose that the face was not destroyed, and the body has been discovered, and exhumed, and it is now whispering to someone else.
I think that a doctor of lives eternal would be interested in this long-preserved face, and perhaps graft it to someone else as part of an experiment.
Or maybe it has happened to someone else.
Or maybe the story is about "Poor Edward" after all, but after his death. After all, as Tom Waits is so kind to remind us, suicides go to Hell.
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"Often occurs in combination with other congenital disorders, particularly anencephaly, neural tube defect and cardiac malformations... The brain may show abnormalities ranging from partial to complete duplication of brain structures, and/or underdevelopment of brain tissues."
"Cats with the condition are known as Janus cats."
Cats... Cats... Something about cats... Well, if we've got Mordake inspiring a Lovecraftian thingmabob, then a Janus cat would fit right in.
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"SHH governs the width of facial features. In excess it leads to widening of facial features and to duplication of facial features. The greater the widening, the more structures are duplicated, often in a mirror image form... Inadequate amounts of that protein lead to opposite conditions such as cyclopia where facial featues are insufficiently developed."
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Lali Singh was a recent sufferer of diprosopus, born March 10, 2008 in a village near Delhi. "She may have been the only known living individual with complete facial duplication. Her facial features included two pairs of eyes, two noses, and two mouths (but only one pair of ears)... She was seen as the reincarnation of the goddess Durga, who has three eyes. It was also thought that Lali was an incarnation of the Hindu god Ganesh."
"Lali's two middle eyes suffered from corneal opacity due to abnormal anatomy of the facial muscles, which prevented her from properly closing those eyes... A cleft palate caused difficulty feeding her under village conditions. A poor diet of bottle-fed sugar solution and diluted milk, allowed to drip down her throat as she could not suck properly because of the cleft palate, weakened her condition, and vomiting and infection started."
"She was buried in her village, as is usual in Hinduism with children who die very young. Later a temple was built at the village in her memory."
Are we still going with the Lovecraft thing? I'm in the middle of drawing up a conception of Cthulhu as a three-faced wolf. Perhaps a story about such a cult, which has come across a child with what at least appears to be an incredibly extreme condition of diprosopus, with three faces instead of two (or some other aspect which causes the cult to rule that there are three faces, despite them not being distinctly separate).
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Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus means "Let there be justice, though the world perish." It was the motto of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, and was also used by Immanuel Kant.
A similar sentiment was expressed in fiat justitia, pereat mundus, which Kant translated as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it."
And then there is fiat justitia ruat caelum, meaning "Let justice be done though the heavens fall," stating that "justice must be realized regardless of consequences." "According to the 19-century abolitionist politican Charles Sumner, it does not come from any classical source."
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