Are The Gremlins Messing With Tales Of Their Origins?

It's clear that the term "Gremlin" came into use during the early 20th century, even though earlier lore about the broad category of fairies includes beings with particular affinities for technology, making, and handicrafts. And it looks like the term arose somewhere in the community of British military pilots and/or those with ties to that community. The term seems first to have appeared in print in an April 1929 number of "Aeroplane" published in Malta.

At first, gremlins concentrated their activities on aircraft, breaking components, interfering with good operations of vital systems, altering the equilibrium of aircraft in flight, and beglamouring or distracting the awareness of air crew. Later, gremlins extended their activities into a host of different technologies, so that we may talk about gremlins afflicting trains, bicycles, cars, ships, computers, and devices using a variety of other technologies.

Later, during WWII, the term and the notion of "gremlins" was disseminated widely through popular culture mass media. Roald Dahl, having heard of "gremlins" during his early R.A.F. war service, wrote a children's story, "The Gremlins." Dahl tells of gremlins appearing first during the Battle of Britain, but clearly some pilots knew of gremlins years before then,

The full text of Dahl's story with the accompanying Disney Studios artwork is available online at Roald Dahl Fans.com:

www.roalddahlfans.com/books/gremtext.php

In 2006, Dark Horse Books reprinted the book. More books featuring the Dahl/Disney gremlins are on the way.

www.darkhorse.com/Books/10-...remlins-HC

That story led to cartoon art from the Walt Disney studio, including a variety of unit insignia designs. For example, the Minnesota Civil Air Patrol had a Disney deigned patch with a gremlin as their mascot. So did the Women Airforce Service Pilots, whose patch featured the
female gremlin mascot,"fifinella."

www.incountry.us/cappatches/MN/mnwg.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wome...ice_Pilots

In addition, Warner Bros studio produced well-known animated cartoons featuring gremlins. Both Falling Hare (1943) and Russian Rhapsody (1944) were produced by Bob Clampett. I probably first learned of gremlins when I saw these cartoons on TV.

www.toonopedia.com/gremlins.htm

Plus, the large and active military organizations of WWII undoubtedly developed or elaborated lots of organization/office folklore all on their own. Look at the efflorescence of aircraft nose art during this period. And this Royal Air Force Journal article "The Gremlin Question" by Hubert Griffith provides plenty of information about gremlins, including a poem filled with details.

www.angelfire.com/id/100sqn...mlins.html

About the possible origins of the term, The Online Etymological Dictionary offers:

gremlin

"small imaginary creature blamed for mechanical failures," oral use in R.A.F. aviators' slang from Malta, Middle East and India said to date to 1923. First printed use perhaps in poem in journal "Aeroplane" April 10, 1929; certainly in use by 1941, and popularized in World War II and picked up by Americans (e.g. "New York Times" Magazine April 11, 1943). Possibly from a dial. survival of O.E. gremman "to anger, vex" + -lin of goblin; or from Ir. gruaimin "bad-tempered little fellow." Surfer slang for "young surfer, beach trouble-maker" is from 1961.

--Online Etymology Dictionary

Lycos iq offers:

Although today's word first emerged during World War II, evidence suggests a predecessor was in circulation among the RAF a bit earlier. In the 1920s it was used to refer to anyone saddled with a menial task but that sense never quite caught on. Charles Graves wrote in 'The Thin Blue Line' (1941) that the word referred to goblins that clambered out of Fremlin beer bottles, a popular beer among RAF pilots in India and the Middle East before World War II. Get it? Goblin + Fremlin = gremlin. No one has proposed a more convincing or authoritative explanation.

--at Lycosiq beta

From: www.yourdictionary.com/wotd/wotd.pl

Yes, this Lyco iq origin is persuasive, not conclusive. There is a rare English surname, "Fremlin." They were brewers before and during WWII. According to "The Directory of UK Real Ale Breweries," Fremlins Ltd was located in Maidstone, Kent.

www.quaffale.org.uk/php/brewery/739

This page from the Royal Engineers 37 Armoured Squadron web site provides some photos of the Fremlins Brewery building, beer labels, and coasters. Fremlins featured an elephant called "Noddy" in its graphics. To my eye, there's nothing about the graphics that would inspire gremlins as they're described.

www2.army.mod.uk/royalengi...itions.htm

Coining a new term by combining part of one that rhymes with the corresponding part of the other and maintaining the second word part is typical, a portmanteau word. "Frem" shifts to "Grem," keeping the "lin."

Interestingly, "gremlin" inspired another portmanteau word which has itself become recognized in popular culture--"Femlin."

The Femlin is a character used on the Party Jokes page of Playboy magazine.

Femlins were created by LeRoy Neiman in 1955 when publisher/editor Hugh Hefner decided the Party Jokes page needed a visual element. The name is a portmanteau of "female" and "gremlin." They are portrayed as mischievous black and white female sprites, apparently ten to twelve inches tall, wearing only opera gloves, stockings and heels. They are usually drawn in two or three panel vignettes, interacting with various life-sized items such as shoes, jewelry, neckties, and so forth.

Femlins have appeared on the Party Jokes page in every issue since their creation, and were featured on the magazine's cover numerous times, either as drawn by Neiman or in photographed tableaus which utilized sculpted clay models.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femlin

So what have I got here?

Gremlins were first recognized by name early in the 20th Century by British airmen as unusual beings who did things to hinder aircraft operations and flight. The term may have come from an Old English dialect survival or an Irish word. Or the term may have been coined as a portmanteau word tying together the name of a popular brewery and a diminutive. (For no particular reason, except that I like good beers, I favor this origin story.)

The functions that gremlins perform, however, involving handicrafts, technology, and trick-playing reach back further into old lore. Elves, pixies, sprites, dwarves, goblins, imps, and other mythological beings took an interest in human technologies and makings. So while gremlins fiddling with aircraft strikes us as a new activity, maybe its more our human new activity that called forth the gremlins and gave us that term. And a little later, a popcult term for a sexy magazine mascot.

Maybe gremlins are beings we earlier called other names.

Android Babes In Robot (Sex?!?)Toyland!

Japan is fascinated by robots and robotics, and the nation is a leading manufacturer of both industrial and recreational robots. So they developed a girlfriend-who-is-a-busty-little-robot/busty-little-robot-who-is-your-girlfriend.

EMA--Eternal Maiden Actualization--from Sega.

uk.reuters.com/article/te...62420080618

"She's very lovable and though she's not a human, she can act like a real girlfriend."

I have a few small toy robots and remote control toys (proto robots) that I got back in the 80s, when the robot craze had one of its peaks. At the time, I worked for a cutting edge comics retailer. One of my jobs was to buy Japanese robot toys--mecha figures, transforming figures,
a few "cute" figures, some monster figures.

I look at this little robot as continuing the Japanese fascination with recreational robots, toys that can tickle a playful fancy. Its design and repertoire of actions link up with several decades of popular culture entertainment (comics, animations) in Japan centered on robots. Plus a Japanese pop culture fascination with the theme of "cuteness."

As the article suggests, these little robots are mostly aimed at fans of robot characters/toys and collectors of gadgets.

Of course, the robot girlfriend also intersects the half-underground erotic robotic movement that flowered sorta in parallel to the fannish, sci-fi comic, book, toy movement. Robot girlfriends are EroBoto Action figures! HOT! NUDE! ANDROIDS!

Additional links to Erotic Robots resources:

Fogonazos--Fotos of robot eroticism in the movies and comics. Lots of "Forbidden Planet" plus nude girls hugging Daleks (Daleks are semi-robotic.)

fogonazos.blogspot.com/2006/1...26.html

Abortion, Robots, and The Labia Majora--posted on Susie Bright's Journal. Who else would know lots about Robot Erotica? Read the blog post. Click the links. Lust and learn...

susiebright.blogs.com/susie_b...ots.html

Sorayama: Robots & Gynoids--The artist who made shiny metal babe bots so popular!

www.sorayama.net/categories.html

Real Dolls--the body part of the Erotic Robot. Awaiting the robotic works to re-animate the flesh-like doll.

www.realdoll.com/cgi-bin/snav.rd


grafik from: blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/ automaton/robot_love.jpg

Nasty & Forbidden--Sardinian Cheese!

Hey! I've always liked goat cheese, but this is X-treme!!!

The story about deadliest foodstuffs is on the Forbes Traveler web site. I guess that some extreme eats types will now go to Sardinia...for the cheese! Heaven forfend that it get on the menu at the neighborhood casual dining retaurants--all your can eat forbidden cheese! ;-P

<<World's Deadliest Delicacies>>

Italy: CASU MARZU

<<One of the world’s few illegal cheeses, Casu Marzu looks scary, has an almost un-acquirable taste and may have catastrophic, long-term health results. The Sardinian delicacy is made from rotten goat’s milk and served coursing with live maggots. If you can handle the idea and tactile sensation of eating live larvae, you’re rewarded with a strong sour taste that can reportedly stay with you all day. Unfortunately, the human body has difficulty processing maggots, and in some extreme cases the little guys bore through the small intestine, causing bleeding, vomiting and other cheerful moments.>>

www.forbestraveler.com/food-d...10.html

Musing They're My Food Classifications--And I'm Sticking To Them! Rose,

Pitch
less curious about cross cultural dining experiences for cross culture's sake as he ages

Comment On Blogickal's The Holy O

[I'm posting this comment here because of glitches in the comments on Blogicakal.]

Even though Feri is, in principle, a sex positive Neo-Pagan Craft Trad, it is also, on the ground, a constellation of human practitioners. Some of whom are more sex-positive, some of whom are less sex-positive, any one of whom may act in a sex-positive manner one day and a sex-negative manner another day.

I think that each practitioner emerges from a sex-negative culture and finds her or his way into a sex-positive realm that seems both enchanted and enchanting--because it is so different in the living of it. But this way crosses through many varied experiences and understandings and refleactions and visions. Only some, perhaps even a few, of these may grow from Feri practice. Others may come from the rough and tumble of relationships and not-relationships. Others may come from sources of guidance involving other Trads and spiritualities. And other may come from finding that your bliss is yours.

If Only There Was A Culture Left To Poach!

In the little part of the world where I grew up--North San Francisco Bay Area--there was once not so long ago, maybe 150 years or so ago, some Native Americans with religions of their own, just as good--or maybe even better--than Christianity and cultures that suited the land. Groups of Coastal Miwok, Suisunes, other Patwins, and Karkins.

Between the Franciscan missions, the Spanish/Mexican governors, the Gold Rush, statehood and its politics, smallpox, and good old greed for land, you'd never have a clue. The few from these small Native American groups who didn't die were shipped off or ran far from the new and European civilization. Nobody was left to ask about their indigenous religion or their indigenous culture.

I couldn't have poached it, no matter how much I tried.

The only Native American from my little part of the world I ever met was a bronze statue of the Suisune Chief Solano, Sem-Yato.

A photograph of the statue, sculpted by William Gordon Huff, may be viewed on CaliSphere:

content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb3f59n88k/


Solano County Seal from:
www.abag.ca.gov/bayarea/gr...no/seal.gif

Is My--Or Anybody Else's--Metapantheon Cultural Poaching?

Look at my blog post about Metapantheon. My personal metapantheon includes Deities and figures from quite a few pantheons. Some represent disparate historical cultures, others literary
sources or pop culture upwellings or occultural discoveries. It's a true post modern assemblage, not a legacy of continuous tradition passed on to me by my ancestors. I put it together. It speaks for me. And it's probably an assemblage unique to my practice and my world view. A work of
Neo-Pagan occultural art.

And it's crossed my mind more than once that this sort of assemblage relies on cultural poaching.
It mashes up cultural elements, subsystems, and realms that probably would not happen within the domain of any particular historical culture. Or only in the course of culture contact and acculturation.

That's for the historical cultural sources. It's a little tougher for me to say that borrowing from literary sources or the heaps and harmonies and holocausts and and hordes of pop culture that englobe me across so many media and modalities is poaching much of anything. Yes, we have copyrights, trademarks, and intellectual properties by the digital millennium. But the fannish adaptation is to pay homage more than steal outright.

When I get down to it, that's how I see my personal metapantheon. It's a fannish homage to the multi-layered and inter-connected culture I live in and live through and live around. It's the sort of culture where everything makes sense and nothing makes sense and this current makes sense for a moment then that impulse makes sense for another moment and this impulse is skewed from that one only they converge without dissonance over here and everybody has to believe five impossible things just to get to work.

Fannish because I gotta have some enthusiasms to survive and prosper, express what inspires me and do my best to smother what alienates me. Fannish because the many ways things fall together or do not is often funny, occasionally ha-ha but more likely according to other dimensions of incongruity and contrast. Fannish because there's a continuing series of new events, issues, matters, interests, discoveries, knowledge, forms, formlessness, models, episodes, tales, lore, tunes, gossip, technologies, rules of thumb, identities, mysteries, versions, angles of view, summits, nadirs, discourses, panels, paginations, storyboards, scenes, styles, and who knows what more on the horizon or sinking beneath it.

Besides, so much of the sorts of things that make up my metapantheon were already within my own culture before I was born. I didn't have to mount much bigger an expedition than to get to school, the public library, turn on the TV or the radio, listen to a folksong or a concert, walk down the street, or talk with other people to learn about most of what's in my metapantheon.

Culture went global a long time ago. Culture got more global in my lifetime. If it's cultural poaching, we're all of us cultural poachers.

The Cthulhu Mythos Is Me!

Ia! Ia! I took the Quiz Farm quiz:

Which Cthulhu Mythos character/God are you?

You scored as a Nyarlathotep

You are Nyarlathotep! You are different from others in a dark way... You like to get your own way and go about getting it by manipulating people. You like to disguise your self to go about your duties and sometimes you are even mistaken for the devil.....

Nyarlathotep--100%
Yog-Sothoth--90%
Shub Niggurath--70%
Azathoth--65%
Nodens--60%
Hastur--55%
Cthulhu--50%

quizfarm.com/test.php

I Will Never Imagine Ancient Egypt The Same Way Again!

Over at Entertainmentwise I stumbled across this little bit of celebrity interview/publicity seeking. Honestly, I find it blissfully Pagan, nurturing of my practice, a wonderful poetic description of a deep and dark mystery, suggestive of connections with forces of life and death, and something that, 20 years ago, mostly cutting edge lesbian artitsts were daring to expose.

Speaking to Allure magazine, the Underworld actress reveals: “I've only ever had about three boyfriends. Only a handful of people have seen into the Pharaoh's Tomb!"

www.entertainmentwise.com/news/...y-tw*t

A tip of the beret to Kate Beckinsale, who has transformed my appreciation of Ancient Egypt. In a very good Starry Wisdom way.

Even so, I still find Denise Levertov's poem "Hypocite Women" more powerful in its description, and more Pagan!

"No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,
caves of the Moon ..."

www.poetryfoundation.org/archi...m.html


Note: grafik of Nut and Geb from KingTutOne.com

Getting Behinder The Web Worlds

I like computers. I like using computers. I like that computers are now communication tools, because I also like the publish it yourself/small press movement.

But I am getting so behinder the worlds of the webs.

Only a few days ago did it fall together that aggregators worked for blogs. A Homer moment! Doh!

So I've been adding a bunch of Pagan and Pagan friendly blogs together on an aggregator so that I could the more easily keep up on that orbit of the blogosphere. And I'm stumbling across more blogs.

It's being an insubstantial concrete experience of de-cyber-ment. Trying to get less behinder and getting more...

Metapantheon

Here's a term that I've used for several years in discussing Neo-Paganism and its postmodern tendencies to aggregate deities creatively and usefully from a range of disparate sources.

If you're a Neo-Pagan, chances are that you work with deities or figures from more than one pantheon. These pantheons may originate with a historical culture, a literary source, or with recent and novel inspiration--Greek, Celtic, Norse, Mayan, Iroquois, Sioux, Hindu, Polynesian, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Star Wars, Harry Potter, a local landmark, peculiarities of technology and how we use it, filk, subcultures with interesting slants on the world, poetic inspiration, and a host of others.

But not with each and every deity or figure from each and every one of these pantheons.

Neo-Pagan practitioners (like me) collect together a small roster of individual deities and figures from several pantheons that we work with--our personal metapantheon.

Mine, for instance, includes: Kali, Shiva, Ganesha, Nimue, Morgan Le Fay, Cernunnos, Lugh, Hecate, Aphrodite, Gawain, the Green Man, the Faery Queen of the Border Ballads, the Queen of Night, the Muses, Titivillus patron demon of calligraphers, Coyote, Raven, Odin the Wanderer, Hiiaka, Pele, Ku, Krishna, Radha, a bunch of local mountain spirits probably known to some Native American tribes, Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Wile E. Coyote, figures that associate themselves for me with Devil Duckies, tree presences much like Tolkien's Ents, spirits who've found new opportunities for perplexity in the sport of mountain biking, figures something like the Shadows from Babylon 5, and some others.

They all work pretty well together for me, and I expect that more will join as time goes by.

I also use this term metapantheon to mean the sum total of all the pantheons Neo-Pagans work with. Or to refer to any subset of this agglomerate of pantheons that a Neo-Pagan group, trad, or organization works with.