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Hey all in human land. Sparkin here.

I just did a before bed fly over, sorry, not over human lands, just within the protective shield dome that covers all of New Dragon Land However, I did see something you may want to know about.

There are a horde, herd, gaggle, pack, oh . . . I do not know what you humans call it. There is a group--that works--of cyclops now living in the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix, Arizona. Their main village is near Goblin Mountain, which is also in the Superstition Mountains. However, you may have even seen one, because a few of them have put on "glamour" and venture into the valley to spy on you all.

What is "glamour", you might be asking right about now? Well, it is the simplest, and easiest of all magics that any good or evil magic folk can use to disguise what they look like. Kind of like a shape-shifter. Glamour can make you look like whatever you want. A cyclops just shrinks his size from the usual 12 to 20 feet, yes, kind of like giants, and yes, giants are real too. They also use the illusion that they have two eyes and two eyebrows. This is good because this makes them see double, which is your only clue that the person you are looking at is really a cyclops. They tend to bump into things, and often go cross-eyed.

Be very chary of anyone that tends to be extra clumsy and crosses their eyes quite often. They most likely won't bother you, because their job is to observe humans and to find out what is going on your world. But make no mistake, they are D-A-N-G-E-R-O-U-S!

If you do come across one of them, please let me know. How do you do that? You leave a comment here on this blog.

That is it for tonight. Time to climb into my spun gold cloud bed. I hope I wake up with my dull grey scales polished this time. That is what the gold is supposed to do, but alas, it does not seem to work on me.

Someday . . . someday . . . I will shine.  

Today, we're looking at the less fashionable side of this partnership and focussing our attention on the creatures that mortals feared and heroes vanquished. Does your gaze turn others to stone? Do you prefer ignorance or vengeance? Have any wings? Take this short quiz to find out which mythological creature or being you would have been in the ancient world.

The post Which mythological creature are you? [Quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

Enter to win autographed copies of Do Not Open: The Story of Pandora's Box & The One-Eyed People Eater: The Story of Cyclops, by Joan Holub. Giveaway begins March 4, 2014, at 12:01 A.M. PST and ends April 3, 2014, at 11:59 P.M. PST.

the perfect excuse to pull this guy out of the archives... limited edition prints available too Thundercloud Marionette

Thanks to a colleage at Culture Libre for letting me know about a free conference in Montréal by Brazil’s culture minister, and musician, Gilberto Gil. The conference, entitled Digital Culture: Re-inventing America’s New World Dream, will:

explore innovative policies and practices at the cutting edge of issues like copyright, digital culture and Internet rights. (…) Gil recently hosted the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro (November 2007) where he called for the establishment of an international Internet Bill of Rights. ‘As a creator of music, he is widely known as a central player in the search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works, Internet rights, free and open source software, and digital culture,’ (…)

Friday, 15 February, at 6 p.m. at the Hotel Omni Mt-Royal (map).