Really loved the Lovecraft quote: prescient given the recent discoveries regarding quantum mechanics and the really Large Hadron Collider or CERN to say nothing of DMT research.

Perhaps of interest is this list of Lovecraft phobias from Luc Sante‘s New York Review of Books “The Heroic Nerd” article (https://www.mhpbooks.com/what-h-p-lovecraft-was-afraid-of/:

"[Lovecraft] was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering–the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list."

Missing of course is a direct mention of sphenisciphobia.

Sphenisciphobia is the fear of penguins (or anything that is penguin like).

Stranger still: he was born on this day in 1890.