#MermaidMonday: Atargatis of Ashkelon

November 27, 2023

Atargatis, also known as Ataratheh and redubbed Derceto by Pliny the Elder, was a chief goddess in northern Syria, with evidence of her cult being discovered at Palmyria. She was a fertility goddess but also presided over her city at Aleppo, called Hierapolis by the Greek, where she was the baalat (the “mistress”) and presided over the welfare of her people: doves were sacred to her, as a testament to her role as love goddess, but she’s also connected to fishes and it’s said she turned into a fish herself. She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.

books and literature

S.S. Van Dine’s The Scarab Murder

S.S. Van Dine was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), an art critic, editor, and novelist from the US who created Philo Vance, apparently one of the defining amateur detectives of the Golden Age of detective fiction. The Vance series ran to twelve

November 8, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

Classic Science Fiction Stories

This is the third collection I read from these charming little light-blue books with the golden pages, and they’re uneven at best. Once again, as such, I have mixed feelings about this collection and I’ll have to proceed scientifically to give a rating, so here

November 7, 2026 9:00 am

architecture, engineering and construction

Artificial Integrity in the Age of Anxiety

In 1947, British-American poet W.H. Auden published The Age of Anxiety, a long poem subtitled “A Baroque Eclogue”. In a nutshell, four strangers meet in a bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan, on All Souls’ Night, so it’s even seasonal, in the middle of a

November 4, 2026 9:00 am