Two Things I Find It Difficult To Believe Exist But Somehow They Do

by Mallory Ortberg · November 26, 2014

The trick to absorbing a great deal of useless information is to never close your Wikipedia tabs entirely. Always leave at least two up so you can begin a new k-hole at a moment’s notice.

Difficult-To-Believe Item The First

Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 3.47.21 PM

That’s amazing. WHAT IS THE WOLF DOING OUT THERE. HOW DO YOU KNOW HE’S THERE IF THE DOOR IS CLOSED. WHAT DOES HE DO AFTER THE HOUR OF THE WOLF IS OVER.

Difficult-To-Believe Item The Second

Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 3.51.06 PM

I have no words.

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.


68 Comments

  1. veryfinestlions +98

    I’m very pleased that it’s *the* wolf. It’s not that there are wolves outside people’s doors or anything. No, it’s The Wolf, the one universal wolf that follows us all and will get every last one of us one day.

    2. veryfinestlions +60

      I want to stress that I don’t mean that as a metaphor for the inevitability of death or anything. I mean an actual wolf, but just the same one for everybody. Sort of like Santa Claus but for devourment instead of presents?

      1. projectbeks +49

        Maybe he just wants a good scritch behind the ears, and nobody’s ever taken him up on that.

    3. 1sic1 +28

      It may also hint at what he does after the hour of the wolf is over: like Santa, he has other houses, in other time zones, to visit.

    2. winterbymorning +24

      Imagine what tiny sandals the North American house hippo would wear! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLG2JP0P5JE

      I remember being utterly enchanted by that commercial as a kid – even though I was old enough to know better – and it was always so jarring when the condescending female voice would say, “But you knew it couldn’t be true, didn’t you?” LEAVE ME ALONE, I WANT TO BELIEVE THAT TINY HIPPOS LIVE IN MY CLOSET.

  4. evieskye +17

    And now to the tune of Season of the Witch by Donovan:

    When I look out my window
    Many wolves I see
    … It’s strange. So strange
    …Must be the hour of the wolf
    Must be the hour of the wolf

    1. Amelia +25

      I especially enjoy the clarification that people aren’t particularly afraid of the vampire pumpkins.

    3. 1sic1 +23

      “Vampires of ground fruit origin are believed to have the same shape and appearance as the original plant.”

      D’awww. Little round stripey vampies.

  6. MayKatieMae +19

    Hmm so that’s why there are so many coyotes showing up on my backyard game camera all the time. The Hour of the Coyote seems to be “all night and many hours during the day” though

  7. projectbeks +11

    Things that are keeping me sane/not sad today: Listening to Haim on repeat, and Mallory phoning it in on The Toast. I’m camping out here and in the latin doo-wop article (and maybe later in the open thread) for the rest of the day.

    1. alicia +10

      I was looking for the open thread earlier but then realized it isn’t Friday. It FEELS like Friday though. It’s Friday-ish.

      1. projectbeks +20

        OMG It’s not Friday. It’s not Friday. Wow.

        Add this to the list of things I can’t believe. Blerg.

        1. headfullofhoney +9

          IT. IS. NOT. FRIDAY.

          The Universe really needs to calm down with the horrors atop horrors, because by Monday night I was already finished with this week.

  8. pomegranateparables +10

    I was disappointed to find that people did not really ride hippos (at least, not the sort I have in mind).

  9. jekyllian +8

    i feel like i’ve heard of the hour of the wolf before, but maybe that’s just my latent witchy knowledge?

    1. Räven +7

      There’s an Ingmar Bergman film by that name – in it, he claims it is the hour when most people die. It was MUCH scarier than Persona.

    1. GoatseFanfic +37

      I think it’s a migrating hour. You don’t know exactly when that wolf’s gonna show up, but when he does you better be ready to not need anything on the front porch for the next sixty minutes.

  12. pseudomona +34

    Oh man I wish I hadn’t looked into that more. I had this beautiful mental image of dressage hippos.

    2. californianinkansas +2

      Thinks to self: “Will not make obvious joke about Dressage Queens… Will not make a joke about DQs…”

  13. gavinbyrnes +14

    ASOIAF refers to “the hour of the wolf” on multiple occasions – good to have it narrowed down to between 3 and 5.

  15. rusty_spatula +23

    “For other uses, see Hour of the Wolf (disambiguation).”

    THERE ARE OTHER USES?
    /loses another 90 minutes to wikipedia

    1. floridagal1 +2

      Soooo glad I’m not in the Southwest right now. Naagloshi are freaking terrifying, and I don’t think have an equivalent in the Ozarks?? AT LEAST I HOPE NOT

      1. middlemarch +7

        What’s even better is that I got to hear a pack of coyotes killing something in the alleyway behind my parents’ house around midnight last night. NOPE, NO SKIN-WALKER FEARS HERE.

  17. twoburgers +29

    I’m keeping myself sane by constantly refreshing The Toast, and I just read an 11-page Kindle free short story called “Taken by the Haunted HDMI Cable,” which, yes, is about a young woman who moves into a supposedly haunted house and then gets it on with a sentient HDMI cable. Thank goodness for the infinite wonders of the free erotica available for the Kindle.

    3. Kelsea +6

      Thanks for “Taken by the Haunted HDMI Cable” – I recently started a tumblr for really weird erotic literature that I have to look at as a part of my job, and I think that one’s weird enough to make the cut. It’s wtferotica.tumblr.com, if anyone’s interested.

  18. downfalltonight +32

    I am going to be annoying and informative: I thought it was different hours, from the French expression, “Entre chien et loup”, meaning between dog and wolf, because it’s the hours of the evening and early morning where you cannot tell a dog from a wolf due to the low light. It’s basically Schrodinger’s dog-wolf.

    1. Calembredaine +10

      Ah yes! I was going to say that “the hour of the wolf” is a very common expression in my language and I had never stopped to consider how weird it actually is until Mallory asked such apt questions (and I guess definite articles are way less common in English so it may sound even weirder to English speakers). I totally agree, “l’heure du loup” meant nightfall or dawn for me too – I mean the phrase screams liminality, but that’s probably because, like you, I associated it with “entre chien et loup”. I’m just realizing that French is kind of obessed with wolves. I hate that damn language sometimes but that’s pretty cool. (I guess we have Perrault and the Beast of Gévaudan to thank)

      1. floridagal1 +2

        ok but they are pretty cool! (in a terrifying sort of way, for the beast of Gévaudan. Way scarier than the Hound of the Baskervilles because its real!)

        1. Calembredaine

          Oh yeah, definitely! Far from me the idea of thanking an unknowable backcountry hell beast for its linguistic & cultural significance ironically 😀

    1. californianinkansas +2

      Oingo Boingo reference! *happy clap*
      I listened to that song on my iPod today at work. 🙂

  21. Rosie +4

    For Mallory and anyone else wanting a distraction from news today, you might appreciate this detailed, vigorous lecture given by softly-spoken Scottish author Ali Smith about goats in the life of Virginia Woolf, and her competitive friendship with Katherine Mansfield: https://soundcloud.com/npglondon/getting-virginia…

    Ali Smith speaks fast, pulling together lots of different quotes and allusions from books and letters – I just played the whole thing through and now I feel diverted. And slightly more positive.

  23. floridagal

    ok but they are pretty cool! (in a terrifying sort of way, for the beast of Gévaudan. Way scarier than the Hound of the Baskervilles because its real!)

  25. KnitWonPearlWon

    Er, did he mean hippocampus perhaps? Because that would be sweet, sweet irony as the hippocampus is responsible for the formation of new memories.
    But in other horse related news, the hippocampus is so named because it looks like a seahorse (hippo=horse, kampos=seamonster).

  26. HarpersGhost +2

    *starts displaying geek card*

    The Hour of the Wolf is talked about by Ivanova in Babylon 5. In the scene where Bad Things Have Happened and so she’s staying up all night, that her (Russian) father told her that during the Hour of the Wolf, you need to take a shot of vodka to keep the wolf at bay. And then you take 3 small sips of vodka …. just in case she has cubs.

    (damn I love that show.)

  27. robotneedslove

    Haha he did and yes that is the irony to which I refer.

    I do very much enjoy that hippocampus news!

  28. Touchstone +3

    In Denmark “the hour of the wolf” is a fairly common way to say “the late hours”, meaning alternately a) “the terrible hours of bleak darkness before the dawn” or b) “that stressful late afternoon time when everyone’s off from work and out to get their groceries and pick their cranky children up from kindergarten”, because obviously the two are about equally horrifying. But apparently we stole it from Sweden via Ingmar Bergman.