QOTD

[randy_byers]

'A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.'

-- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Maybe he was Irish -- they were considered a "failed race" back in the day.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Here's the more detailed description that precedes my QOTD:

'When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed grey golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.'

Far worse than Irish, I'd say. There's something fishy about the whole thing.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

Yes, not so much Irish as fish. Probably an employee of Halibut-on.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Oh cod, that's such a bad joke!