Websites revisited: we are all mollusks now
One day in 2008, I was having lunch with a friend at a Chinese restaurant. On each table was a paper place mat which featured details of the Chinese zodiac.
I noted that the animals that feature on it are all vertebrates: rat, ox, tiger etc. It’s a similar situation with Western astrology (and the ‘tropical’ zodiac). If the constellation and star sign is named after an animal in any way, they are mostly vertebrates. The only exceptions being Cancer (the crab), Scorpio (the scorpion), and Libra (not an animal, just a pair of scales).
This led me to ponder an idea of an invertebrate-based zodiac. This only seemed fair because the vast majority, maybe as high as 97%, of all animal species are invertebrates.
Later that day I had already dreamed up something that I planned to be a one-off bit of fun: the Molluskan Zodiac (or ‘Molluscan’ if you wish…I was living in America when I came up with the idea). This is what I created:
The original Molluskan Zodiac (click to enlarge)
I chose 10 mollusks, wrote some blurb about each one and identified the typical likes and dislikes of people that align to these signs of the Molluskan Zodiac. At this point, I deliberately wanted to subvert standard zodiacs in two important ways:
The date ranges for each sign would not be equal. One of them spans just a single day. This led me to my second innovation…
Not all signs are going to be treated equally. I favoured the Octopus (my own sign) and made the Slug a particularly unlucky creature (sorry if you were born on July 26th). This is what my entry said about the slug:
Davy Jones was said to have been born on this day and therefore slugs are deemed to be the most ill-fated mollusk of all. Doomed to live a lonely life, slugs will heap misery and suffering on others.
I printed this out to show some friends, including my friend who I had dined with, and that was to be that.
The zodiac goes online
But it turns out that I wasn’t finished with the zodiac. It became an itch that I wanted to scratch. And so I wrote a Perl script that could take a large set of pre-written sentences for each sign of the zodiac and then generate a pseudo-random set of weekly horoscopes.
The random aspect of this was to first combine three sentences or paragraphs in a random order to form a weekly outlook for each sign. Then the script randomly chooses different options for some sentences (e.g. days of week, colours, names of famous people etc.).
What this has meant is that almost every week since September 8 2008, I have published a new set of horoscopes on a dedicated Blogger-hosted blog:
https://zodiac.keithbradnam.com
In the first few years of the zodiac, I refined the Perl script to add more complexities to the horoscopes but it hasn’t been changed in over a decade now. Every Sunday night I run my script to produce another set of horoscopes and post them to the website.
A biological error
In the very early days of the zodiac — just a few weeks after starting my posts — someone pointed out the minor issue that barnacles are not, in fact, mollusks. Oops! My bad. As a biologist, and as someone who once dissected a barnacle during my Ecology degree, this error is particularly embarrassing. Barnacles are crustaceans (obviously!).
So how did I address this glaring inconsistency? By writing something that I’m more proud of than anything else that I’ve ever written. This appeared as its own post on the blog, but I will reproduce it here in full:
We are all mollusks now
A number of readers have written to me to point out something that - on the face of it - appears as a gross factual error in the Molluskan Zodiac. Namely, that the Barnacle is not actually a mollusk at all. Now, I fully appreciate that in today’s enlightened world of scientific discovery, we have seen great advances in our understanding of the fields of taxonomy and systematics. These disciplines have undergone a revolution due to the development of molecular phylogenetic techniques, and we can now describe with much greater certainty the relationships and kinship of any set of species that you might wish to compare.
And so I do accept that from a certain viewpoint, it is true that the Barnacle is not a mollusk at all and is perhaps more suitably classified as a crustacean. However, I feel safe in proclaiming that while some people of a scientific persuasion might wish to use such classification systems in order to label our beloved Barnacles as crustaceans, that this is a side-issue and of no relevance to the Molluskan Zodiac.
Take a second to realize that our present-day understanding of molluskan divination has been distilled from many centuries of nautical folk-lore, from sailors swapping tales over a shot of rum, from fishing families that passed on the knowledge that had often helped them to a bountiful harvest. Did the founding fathers of the Molluskan Zodiac have access to DNA sequencing technology? Did they have access to such learned materials as the Journal of Molluskan Studies? The answer to these questions is clearly 'no'. The reality is that throughout history, sailors, fishermen, and other sea-goers would have seen the shelled form of the blessed Barnacle and assumed that - on the basis of morphology - this humble, yet proud creature is for all intents and purposes...a mollusk.
When the rain is lashing down amid stormy seas, let us not debate whether small-subunit rRNA sequencing places the Barnacle apart from other mollusks on nature's grand ladder. Let us not see the Barnacle as black and the Oyster as white. Instead let us see the shelled inhabitants of the seas as a broad canvas painted in many shades of grey.
It may be true that had our forefathers had access to advanced phylogenetic techniques, that we may now be talking today about the fate and fortunes of the abalone or the cockle instead of the humble Barnacle. What is important, and what will remain important is that the stoic Barnacle is here to stay and will forever guide the lives of those people born between December 2nd and February 19th. Finally, let me refer people to some text from a 'lost verse' of Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that makes it clear what many of us already know in our hearts to be true:
When the sails are rent asunder
As Poseidon waits for thee
Do not talk down upon yonder Barnacle
For we are all mollusks now
Why keep doing this?
I’ve been posting these horoscopes for almost two decades now. I don’t need to do it (obviously). Every year or two I might make a social media post to alert people of its existence but it doesn’t exactly get a lot of promotion.
But it is quirky and odd and somewhat pointless. I like to imagine that no one else has ever dared dream up a fictional zodiac based on mollusks (and then used a Perl script to create random horoscopes on a website each week).
Another reason for keeping this site up is that it keeps me connected to a different style of blogging platform. It can be useful to keep an eye out for what different platforms are doing.
According to Blogger’s built-in analytics tools, the blog has now been viewed over one and a half million times. This makes me feel like Blogger has a bit of an issue with analytics and a quick search online shows that Blogger does seem to suffer from spurious bot traffic.
I like the idea that a one-off lunchtime joke has led to a website that has been regularly updated for almost two decades! Maybe it is time to see what our friendly mollusks have divined for your week ahead. Find out on the Molluskan Zodiac!
