In celebration of this the year of the dragon and of dragons in general, I’m going to post the long-promised pics of my dragon collection, along with a favorite quote.  I’ll try to post them on the 23rd of each month (Jan 23rd was the Chinese New Year) but I may be off a bit.  It’s a dragons perogative to be fashionably late.

This month’s offering is a pair of dangly dragon earrings that have heretofore had the good manners not to singe my ears.  I’m thinking I got them at a fantasy convention, but since I can’t remember which one, that might be totally wrong.  Maybe the dragons crawled into my suitcase while it skittered through baggage in some forgotten airport, and blurred my memory so I believed I’d bought them.  Who knows?  With dragons you can never be sure.

I’m pairing them with a quote from The Hobbit, because I’m farily certain Tolkien and Smaug were my first introduction to dragons.

“Bilbo was now beginning to feel really uncomfortable. Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an accountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug. In fact he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell.”

One of the ones I had to leave ’til next time was an excellent copper coin with a stamp/imprint from the mongol dynasty, set up under Ogedei Khan.  The inscription on it was very clear, and of course in the mongol/tartar script.  I am such a beginner at all this, but I’ve been looking at the coins and reading the history which is imprinted on them for so long, I was delighted with a chance to pick up a few.

What’s really cool is to sit and think of all the people’s hands who’ve handled the coin, all the years that have slipped by it.  It’s that kind of history that I want my stories to have, the kind that feels as tangible as ancient cash in the palm of my hand.

Of course, even with binoculars, it still looked more like a tiny splat of pea soup than a comet, or maybe a place where someone had smudged the erasor of their pencil across the night sky.  But I enjoyed imagining it as a hurtling ball of ice with a thick tail spread behind.

We located Comet Holmes using an interactive sky chart at Sky and Telescope.  I’m sure the folks over there have better viewing equipment than our small potatoes binoculars, but they couldn’t have gotten a bigger thrill.

Many of you can go take a look for yourselves.  Or, if your not so into shivering at fuzzy blobs and your brother-in-law permanently borrowing your telescope, you can go to Amazing Space and learn all kinds of comet legends and trivia while sitting snug inside.

Besides being the funniest scheme I’ve ever come across, it also reminding me that we shouldn’t neglect funky folklore in our fantasy worlds.  And remember what they say–truth is stranger than fiction.