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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
The catoblepas (from Latin catōblepas, ultimately from Greek καταβλέπω (katablépō) "to look downwards") is a legendary creature from Aethiopia, first described by Pliny the Elder and later by Claudius Aelianus.
One known description of the Catoblepas is said to resemble a cape buffalo, with its head always pointing downwards due to its great weight. Its stare or breath could kill people. The catoblepas is often thought to be based on real-life encounters with wildebeest, such that some dictionaries say that the word is synonymous with "gnu". Other depictions have it sporting the head of a hog and the body of a cape buffalo. It is sometimes known as an African version of a Gorgon.[1]
Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 8.32) described the catoblepas as a mid-sized creature, sluggish, with a heavy head and a face always turned to the ground. He thought its gaze, like that of the basilisk, was lethal, making the heaviness of its head quite fortunate.
Pomponius Mela (Chorographia, 3.98) echoes the description given by Pliny the Elder though also notes that the creature is fairly passive and not known to physically attack others.
Timotheus of Gaza (On Animals, 53) says that the catoblepas emits fire from its nostrils.
Claudius Aelianus (On the Nature of Animals, 7.6) provided a fuller description: the creature was a mid-sized herbivore, about the size of a domestic bull, with a heavy mane, narrow, bloodshot eyes, a scaly back and shaggy eyebrows. The head was so heavy that the beast could only look down. In his description, the animal's gaze was not lethal, but its breath was poison, since it ate only poisonous vegetation.
Constantine Manasses (2, 39) mentions the "fire-breathing katobleps".
The catoblepas is described in The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci:
It is found in Ethiopia near to the source Nigricapo. It is not a very large animal, is sluggish in all its parts, and its head is so large that it carries it with difficulty, in such wise that it always droops towards the ground; otherwise it would be a great pest to man, for any one on whom it fixes its eyes dies immediately.
In The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), Gustave Flaubert describes it as:
... a black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine. It wallows flat upon the ground, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.
In The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (c. 1570–1586), by Sir Philip Sidney, the "forsaken knight" that Amphilalus fights has a Catoblepas upon his crest:
So passed he over into the island, taking with him the two brothers of Anaxius; where he found the forsaken knight attired in his own livery, as black as sorrow itself could see itself in the blackest glass: his ornaments of the same hue, but formd into the figures of ravens which seemed to gape for carrion: only his reins were snakes, which finely wrapping themselves one within the other, their heads came together to the cheeks and bosses of the bit, where they might seem to bite at the horse, and the horse, as he champed the bit, to bite at them, and that the white foam was engendered by the poisonous fury of the combat. His impresa was a Catoblepta, which so long lies dead as the moon (whereto it hath so natural a sympathy) wants her light. The word signified, that the moon wanted not the light, but the poor beast wanted the moon's light.
The Catoblepas was listed in the Book of Imaginary Beings (1957) by Jorge Luis Borges. It is described as a black buffalo with a hog's head that is always looking down.
A catoblepas appears in A Spell for Chameleon (1977) by Piers Anthony. In the book, the catoblepas fights an argus and a harpy, all of which want to devour the protagonist, Bink. It is described as follows:
[Bink] sat up. One leg remained anchored-but now he had anchorage to rip out of the clutch of the demon weed. It didn't even hurt this time. He looked at the battling monsters-and saw the snakelike hair of the catoblepas twined around the head of the argus, gripping it by horns, ears, scales, and eyeballs-anything available. The body of the catoblepas was covered with reptilian scales, from its gorgon head to its cloven hooves, invulnerable to the attack of the argus. In overall shape it was like any quadruped, not all that remarkable; but that deadly writhing prehensile head hair-what a horror!
The catoblepas is mentioned in The Shattered World (1984) by Michael Reaves:
Troas cleared his throat impatiently and Beorn looked at him. On his robe was a stylized design of a catoblepas, stitched in silver thread in a rampant pose. Beorn thought it looked faintly ridiculous.
In Rick Riordan's 2013 The Heroes of Olympus book The House of Hades, the catoblepas appears with the name Katobleps (Ancient Greek κατῶβλεψ) in the form of creatures resembling cow monsters. They are shown to have a poisonous gaze and a poisonous breath.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The catoblepas (from Latin catōblepas, ultimately from Greek καταβλέπω (katablépō) "to look downwards") is a legendary creature from Aethiopia, first described by Pliny the Elder and later by Claudius Aelianus. One known description of the Catoblepas is said to resemble a cape buffalo, with its head always pointing downwards due to its great weight. Its stare or breath could kill people. The catoblepas is often thought to be based on real-life encounters with wildebeest, such that some dictionaries say that the word is synonymous with "gnu". Other depictions have it sporting the head of a hog and the body of a cape buffalo. It is sometimes known as an African version of a Gorgon.
Kōhei Horikoshi (堀越 耕平, Horikoshi Kōhei; born November 20, 1986) is a Japanese manga artist known for creating the manga series Oumagadoki Zoo, Barrage, and My Hero Academia, all of which have been serialized in Shueisha's shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump. His latter work had over 100 million copies in circulation by April 2024, making it one of the best-selling manga series of all time. Horikoshi is a graduate of Toho High School and Nagoya University of Arts and is a native of Aichi Prefecture. He was a former assistant for Yasuki Tanaka, creator of the manga series Summer Time Rendering, Hitomi no Catoblepas, and Kagijin. Horikoshi stated that his favorite manga series as a child were Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto. He was also influenced by manga artist Yuko Osada (Toto!: The Wonderful Adventure). Horikoshi is also a fan of American superhero comic books, particularly Marvel Comics.
The black wildebeest or white-tailed gnu (Connochaetes gnou) is one of the two closely related wildebeest species. It is a member of the genus Connochaetes and family Bovidae. It was first described in 1780 by Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann. The black wildebeest is typically 1.7–2.2 m (5 ft 7 in – 7 ft 3 in) in head-and-body length, and the typical weight is 110–180 kg (240–400 lb). Males stand about 1.11–1.21 m (3 ft 8 in – 4 ft 0 in) at the shoulder, while the height of the females is 1.06–1.16 m (3 ft 6 in – 3 ft 10 in). The black wildebeest is characterised by its white, long, horse-like tail. It also has a dark brown to black coat and long, dark-coloured hair between its forelegs and under its belly. The black wildebeest is an herbivore, and almost the whole diet consists of grasses. Water is an essential requirement. The three distinct social groups are the female herds, the bachelor herds, and the territorial bulls. They are fast runners and communicate using a variety of visual and vocal communications. The primary breeding season for the black wildebeest is from February to April. A single calf is usually born after a gestational period of about 8.5 months. The calf remains with its mother until her next calf is born a year later. The black wildebeest inhabits open plains, grasslands, and karoo shrublands. The natural populations of black wildebeest, endemic in the southern part of Africa, were almost completely exterminated in the 19th century, due to their reputation as pests and the value of their hides and meat, but the species has been reintroduced widely from captive specimens, both in private areas and nature reserves throughout most of Lesotho, Eswatini, and South Africa. The species has also been introduced outside its natural range in Namibia and Kenya.
The hippocampus, or hippocamp, (plural: hippocampi or hippocamps; Ancient Greek: ἱππόκαμπος hippókampos, from ἵππος, 'horse', and κάμπος, 'sea monster') is a mythological creature mentioned in Etruscan, Greek, Phoenician, Pictish and Roman mythologies, typically depicted as having the upper body of a horse with the lower body of a fish.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.