May Day

Hooray, Hooray, for the first of May,
outdoor ____ing* starts today!

*Ask your parents, kiddies.



Today is May Day. First day of summer, if you require a calendar date to determine summer, rather than relying on what's going on in nature where you live. Don't give me any of that nonsense about the summer solstice marking the beginning of summer; even in England, which is far cooler on May Day than where I live, the summer solstice was always called Midsummer, not Summer's Beginning.


Anyway, just a brief check-in. Monday, when I found that message asking about Hogwarts scarves I just googled for a site that would have pictures of the process in question. The first site that came up was Deep Fried Kudzu. I liked the name well enough--really, isn't that one of the best blog names you've ever heard?--that I later went back to browse it a bit. I can not claim to have explored it thoroughly, but I want to recommend it anyway. It looks like a pretty darn good blog. There's a list of restaurants the author has enjoyed, recipes, pretty photos of home-y (home to me, anyway) places, and I saw links to several interesting things. Including this article about a North Alabama woman called Aunt Jenny.

...Aunt Jenny walked outside, pointed at her husband's killers and said to them that she knew every one of their faces and they would get what was coming to them. She then called her surviving sons to her side and made them place their hands on the lifeless bodies of their father and brother. She made them swear eternal vengeance for their deaths. Legend has it that all the men responsible for the death of Willis and John were sent to their graves by a Brooks boy. Some legends state that Aunt Jenny herself even killed a few of the men.

I enjoyed reading that passage more than a Christian woman probably ought to. It is rather fine drama, and I think you can make an argument that the behavior described is pragmatic, in that the best way to avoid being messed with in the future is to make people very, very sorry for having messed with you in the past; frankly, I would prefer for my country's leaders to adopt the tactic of making people very, very afraid to attack us.

As a hater of impertinent questions, I also liked the anecdote about Aunt Jenny on another site (sorry, I didn't save that link and I'm not looking for it now) that has her, upon being asked how she came by a roll of money she was carrying, saying she paid herself twenty dollars a week just to mind her own business.

Florence King said that there's nothing wrong with Women's Studies that studying the right women won't set right. Aunt Jenny sounds like one of those women.

Fringe--Anyone Tried This?

The recent message from Erin Eddington about fringe on the Hogwarts scarves reminds me of something I thought of a few days ago. I have never been much of a fringe person, so I'll likely never try this, but it occurred to me that it would be possible to make fringe in a way I've never seen done.

Take a crochet hook and slip stitch yarn to the edge of a shawl (or whatever) and make a chain twice as long as you want each piece of fringe to be. Then slip stitch to the edge of the shawl, right by where you began. Slip stitch over one or two stitches or spaces, then repeat the whole process.

I'm sure this would work, and I think it would be less likely to get ratty-looking, the way fringe on older items sometimes gets. There is nothing new under the sun, so no doubt someone out there has done this or seen it done. How did it work?

This Could Be Inspirational

...if I let it.

Thursday I saw a name on NRO that surprised me a good deal: Ursula K. LeGuin. I stopped reading her work back in the mid-'90s, because the increasing PC-ish content got on my nerves--and I was still a self-proclaimed liberal at the time, who would have agreed with much of it! Mrs. LeGuin's name was there because she was being interviewed about her new novel, Lavinia. In it she said that, not having touched Latin since she studied it in high school, she decided, in her seventies, to take it up again. And she did and she was able, "with difficulty", to read the Aeneid in the original.

Now that is awesome. And I mean that in the older sense of inspiring awe, not in some early mid-'80s slang way. Mrs. LeGuin impressed the heck out of me when she said that. The ability to learn second languages--something any child who isn't actually in the sub-basement of human intelligence levels can do without apparent effort--famously gets harder as we get older. And our memory gets less retentive in middle age, so that we have to work much harder to hold onto something new than we did in our youth. Not many people take up language study after they get old. Especially not a "dead" language with a reputation of being rather difficult.

Lately I've been focusing much too much on things I supposedly can't do or that are getting more difficult to do because I am old. At thirty-eight. Mrs. LeGuin makes me feel like a bit of a whinger (mental variety only; I have at least avoided annoying others with it.)

You'd think I would have learned my lesson from something that happened a few years ago: I came across something I'd written when I was twenty-nine, explaining that I could not start something that late in life because I would be at least thirty-two by the time I finished. Oh, the horror! I was thirty-four or thirty-five when I came across that and, guess what, I'd reached (and passed) the advanced old age of thirty-two even without doing that thing. The only choice had been between becoming a thirty-two year-old who had done that thing and becoming a thirty-two year old who had not done that thing.

Something to think about as I grow closer to what I think of as Shirley Valentine age (forty-two).

Tax Freedom Day Song

This year I thought of April 23rd not just as Shakespeare's (probable) birthday and as England's St. George's Day , but as Tax Freedom Day. That is thanks to this song , which I found via The Corner Tuesday. I had heard of Tax Freedom Day, the day most Americans have earned enough money to pay their taxes for the year, before, but having a funny song about it makes it much more memorable. Checking back today, I was surprised at how few views this video has. It deserves to be more widely seen and talked about. Watch it and if you find it amusing or at least agree with me that it brings up a point worth talking about, pass the link on.

After that, you may want to read this article on some of the results of one of the things the U.S. government is choosing to do with the money it takes from you. (Incidentally, it is not the first time the author has written on this subject-- I remember this from early last year, when the situation was less bad than now--and, although I am only an occasional reader of his columns, I don't doubt you could find more examples of questionable government spending in his archive, if you are so inclined.) With government results like these, maybe more of us should be asking ourselves if we aren't better judges of what we ought to spend our money on than the government is.

Random Thoughts

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Everyone is unique. Ergo being unique doesn't make you special.

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Choosing a leader named Hostilius is probably just asking for trouble.

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Is it just me or is there something the teensiest bit ironic about concluding an online post in which you rant about the evils of capitalism with a sig that links your Etsy shop?

***

Don't cats and dogs ever get venereal diseases? I've never heard that it can happen, but it would be odd if it doesn't.

***

There are few bad situations that government intervention can't make worse.

***

To the women who complain about not being able to find a gentleman: Have you tried acting like a lady?

To the women who complain their husband "never" does anything special for them: When was the last time you did anything special for him?

***

I'm trying hard to think of something more stupid than deliberately humiliating (a la Nero) someone upon whose protection your safety depends, but I'm not coming up with anything.

***

You know, most people would be satisfied with being a bad president. Not Carter, though; he has to be a bad ex-president as well.

***

Names just don't come any better than Eric Bloodaxe.

***

What ever happened to the word "envy"? For most of my lifetime, everyone is "jealous" of everything and no one is envious of anything.

***

Note to would-be rioters: Damaging grocery stores is not the best way to lower costs in those stores. Riots and the fear of riots may have their place in the political arena--history evidences that--but adding to your local grocer's expenses won't help him lower prices.

***

Am I the only one with a desire to scratch out "gender" on forms so impertinent as to ask me mine and write in "sex" instead?

***

There seems to be an long list of things Americans today aren't supposed to say or to discuss. For all that some people (mostly conservatives and libertarians) complain about this, I haven't noticed the list getting any shorter.

***

If we can have all our "I wonder"s satisfied in an afterlife, then one interesting question is how many innovations have we lost due to the litigiousness of contemporary society.

***

You know, there is just no better way to show how vastly superior a person you are than to mock the purchasing power of those poorer than you. If you believe that, please go on doing it: the rest of us find it highly informative.


***

Isn't it funny how when you give something away for free, people--however grateful they may have been to begin with--soon start to regard it as their due and demand it as a right if it is cut off?

A Little Learning

There has never been a better time to be an auto-didact. Or to be into dilettantish dabbling. A few weeks ago I decided I ought to learn a little about Roman history. It has been almost too easy. So far I've watched some DVDs, done some reading online and off, and listened to some online audio.

I highly recommend The Roman Empire in the First Century, a PBS documentary from 2002, readily available on DVD from Netflix. This is an excellent introduction to its subject. It gives you the emperors and some stuff going on in Rome and its empire (including those pesky people in Judea), in enough detail to be interesting but not so much you feel as if you're being buffetted over the head with information. After watching this you will remember all the emperors covered, the order of their reign, and a little something about them. What more can you ask from a documentary?

There are a lot of other documentaries on various aspects of Roman history. There's no way I can watch them all, but I enjoyed Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story as light viewing. This 2003 BBC program takes the novel tack of inventing a fictional, but typical gladiator to follow as it teaches a bit about gladiator life and the building of the colosseum. (Mostly fictional, anyway; they imagine the life that might have existed for an actual fighter whose fight at the Colosseum's inaugural games was described in detail by a witness.) This works pretty well, although I found I wanted more information, especially about weapons and fighting. I did learn a couple of things, though--did you know that gladiators usually survived arena combats, because the sponsor had to reimburse the gladiators' master if any were killed due to a thumbs-down?--and the eye candy was nice. As a bonus feature, the DVD included another story-style documentary on The Last Days of Pompeii; nothing too new on it, but it did have some interesting information along the lines of boiling blood and brains and such. I've a couple more documentaries in my Netflix queue but I don't think I'll find anything better than The Roman Empire in the First Century. Something more than cursory on Roman battle tactics would be great, though.

Along the fiction side of the DVD aisle, Netflix has the Complete Shakespeare Plays version of Julius Caesar available for instant download viewing, as well as rental. I watched this (admittedly while doing something else that took up too much of my attention) and found it a competent production. I may watch it again and dig out my old VHS of the Brando version and maybe another version of this play. I also plan to re-watch the 1974 television version of Antony & Cleopatra which I enjoyed a couple of years ago, and maybe rent another version for comparison. (Attention Star Trek fans: the 1974 one has Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus, or as my husband puts it in these situations, "Captain Picard is playing in the Holodeck again".) I think it goes without saying that Shakespeare, like other dramatists, never let historical fact get in the way of a good story, and that's assuming he had good information to start with; as with any Shakespeare history play, I recommend checking what Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare has to say if you find yourself wondering about something historical--Asimov's work has the advantages of being easily available and having the information you want all in one place.

As for other fiction DVDs, I've heard nothing but praise for it, so I'm planning to give HBO's Rome a go before long. Also in my queue is Shakespeare's Coriolanus, which I've never before seen, only read. For anyone who hasn't seen it already, I again recommend I, Claudius.

An increasing number of universities have lectures available online; there is a list available here. I am currently listening to a Berkeley course on the Roman Empire; I would be further along, but I paused to catch up my reading up to where the course is. I also just started listening to a BBC 4 history program called The Roman Way. (I don't know how much longer this program will be left up, so if you're interested you should try it now.)

As for reading, aside from a few webpages and a small account in a Penguin world history book, I've stuck to Will Durant's Caesar and Christ. And I can not recommend it highly enough. Why didn't I find this when I was a teenager? I know Durant is not without his critics, but the man can write--something that can not be said about every writer of history. The history just flows along, and reading it in bed at night, just before sleep and already sleepy, I've found myself so interested at the end of a section that I've said, "just one more section" and kept reading for another two or three sections. I picked this up thinking I'd only read the Caesar half, not the Christian half, but now I think I'll read it all; I had to force myself to stop near the end of the first century a couple of nights ago so that I can now catch up on my audio lectures. (I want to stagger the two, for memory reinforcement--never an issue when I was young, but alas age makes fools of us all.)

I am now sorry I did not decide to start my little history program with the Greeks so I could have enjoyed Durant's The Life of Greece first. Well, there's always later; and actually, I did back up in historical time and insert a couple of pre-Roman documentaries into my DVD viewing, because I found a couple that looked really good--The True Story of Alexander the Great and Last Stand of the 300; I recommend both, but especially the latter. But for now I'm sticking with the Romans, as they were only supposed to be a few weeks of dabbling before I finally started my long thought about episode of focused reading on the Middle Ages.

I am not sure what non-fiction reading other than Durant I'll do on the Romans. There is a great deal of Roman writing available online, either free for the googling or free if you happen to have university library access, but I'm a dabbler. I'll probably dip into a few library books and call it done. (For now; this could be a lifelong interest.)

As for fiction, I may pull out my Ovid. I have a thrift store paperback called Gods and Legions I haven't read yet. From the local library, I'll probably try Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. Some years back I read a couple of Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder novels, which are set in Cicero's day. (This was on the recommendation of Orson Scott Card, whose book recommendations have never steered me wrong; I strongly recommend his recommendations.) I note that Saylor has a new novel called Roma available at the local library that seems to be a sort of history of Rome herself, and, as the Gordianus novels proved enjoyable enough, I plan to try Roma.

My point here, other than to provide a few recommendations of enjoyable things, is that we in the industrialised world have tons of resources available. And so readily, easily, and cheaply available that it requires almost no effort at all to acquire a smattering of knowledge about subjects that are far removed from us in time and space. We take it for granted, but it is a wonderful thing. We did not have these resources in such abundance twenty years ago. Twenty-five years ago I was a teenager who would have given anything to have access to the internet, audio of foreign radio history programs and lectures at universities I could never afford to attend, DVD documentaries, the History Channel. I would have killed just to have had access to a good, let alone great, public library. A thrift store book section would have thrilled me. I had to make do with Mississippi public television and whatever books I happened across at garage sales. A teenager in my area fifteen or twenty years before didn't have that much. But a rural teenager today has the whole of the internet at his disposal. What a shame it would be to waste it on nothing but MySpace pranks and porn.

Random Thoughts

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If I'm already "pre-approved", why do I have to fill out an application?

***

Carter may have pardoned the draft dodgers, but I haven't.

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"And if everyone else wanted to jump off a cliff, would you want to do it too?" is the stereotypical mother saying. With my mother it was more like, "Everyone else your age wants to jump off a cliff. Why don't you want to jump off a cliff? What's wrong with you?"

***

Shouldn't knockoffs of Dockers pants be called Knockers?

***

"You can't argue with results." Unless, of course, you are a Catholic theologian, in which case the results don't much matter if the intention or the method of achieving the results was bad.

***

A great bumpersticker would be "What have YOU done for Western civilization today?"

***


Every little girl should be told by her parents at least once that she's pretty, whether it is, strictly speaking, true or not.

***

We still use a traditional nurse's cap and white uniform when we want to convey the idea of "nurse" in a cartoony drawing or a Halloween costume, but most nurses haven't dressed like that for twenty years; regular cap use was on the wane even earlier. Soon we will have young people who do not understand why we have this convention of depicting nurses that way; maybe we do already.

***

In the whole of the history of English language usage, I don't think anyone has ever said, "I hope you're happy with yourself!" and meant it.

***

Is It Like the Turtles?

You know how some people say no one has free will, that everything we do is just the product of our upbringing and societal influences. And that the people who brought us up aren't responsible for their behavior either, because they also are the products of their upbringing. And the people who brought them up are just the products of their upbringing, and so on. Well, does it just keep on going and going, all the way back to the first recognizable human? Is there any point at which someone was responsible for his behavior, or is it just upbringing all the way down?

Ranma 1/2 Clerihews

WARNING: "Vogon Clerihews" would have made an equally apprpriate title.

I mentioned Ranma clerihews from when I had clerihews on the brain last week. I would have liked to go back and make one for all the major characters, but the mood is gone and as trying would only inflict more torturous attempts at English rhymes for Japanese names there seems little point and much cruelty. So here they are in all their incomplete "glory".

Saotome Ranma
Had to con Ma;
He found to avoid seppuku
There was little he wouldn't do.

Hibiki Ryoga
Seldom wore a toga.
Wandering around Japan
Left him a lonely man.

Tendo Soun
Is really quite prone
To nervous attacks
And needs to relax.

The life of Tendo Kasumi
May not be your cup o' tea,
But in the house of Soun
She's the sine qua non.

Tendo Nabiki
Could be a bit sneaky.
She had a million and ten
Ways to get yen.

Happosai
Is quite a guy;
He's filled several shanties
With schoolgirl's panties.

Grandmother Cologne
Seems hardly half-grown,
But her mighty fighting technique
Bests all but the old freak.*


*Yes, I know Ranma once beat her, but he could only do it by--I'm trying to avoid spoilers--doing something drastic that took her completely by surprise. He won't be able to get away with that again, and I think it'll be a few years before he can best her otherwise. Ranma will surely reach that point, but in the meantime, age and treachery (not to mention three hundred years of training) beat youth and enthusiasm, and Cologne remains second only to Happosai. But if you disagree, here's alternate lines for you: "...But her fighting skills/Can give you the chills." Oh, and I'm going by the anime here; I've not read all of the manga.


11/4 ETA: While I was typing this up the other day, I had another spasm which I'm now including to show what letting clerihews enter your mind even for a moment can do to you.

Omar Khayyam
Refused to try yams,
But he professed a great like
For properly grilled pike.


Somebody please stop me.

Overdue Random Thoughts (and a Neologism!)

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The National Abortion Rights Action League changing its name to NARAL Pro-choice America was like Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its name to KFC so noone would know it serves fried food.

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Just once in a movie I'd like the token female scientist to be a middle-aged, non-hot woman. You know, someone who looks as if she might actually be old enough to have had time to earn all those degrees and do all the research the film claims she has.

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If you're whinging about it all the time, you're not really "leading a life of quiet desperation."

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Why do so many people refer to "two twins"? I'm not aware of any naturally occurring sets of three twins, so until the geneticists give us that much longed for item of engineered humanity, you might as well save a syllable.

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Getting bored watching the trailer is second only to their having changed directors twice on the list of bad signs about an upcoming movie.

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Word of warning to the young folk: Whoever said "Life is one long lesson in humility" was really, REALLY not kidding.

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Of all the questions that were answered in Deathly Hallows, one question was only made more, ah, questionable: What is the deal with Aberforth and goats?

***

Better Pickwickian than Pecksniffian.

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I wonder if a human who had never heard wolf sounds would, when hearing them at night out in the wilderness, find them frightening. How much is real eeriness and how much is our conditioned expectation?

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Think about the line about there coming a time when people will no longer tolerate sound doctrine, preferring instead teachers who tickle their ears, the next time you hear someone saying they can't believe the Church still teaches all that old-fashioned stuff.

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Your neologism for the day: "dexternormative". Damn all those right-handed people acting as if it's normal to be right-handed!

Take That, Yankees

A while back I saw a meme asking for five foods you're embarrassed you like to eat. I thought and thought and could only come up with three foods that sorta, kinda met that definition. But I can come up with all kinds of foods that other people seem to think I should be embarrassed to eat, and that list is made possible just by looking to people who live in other regions of the US, not by selecting for vegans or health nuts or local foodists or what-have-yous. Well, here's a small bit of vindication for one of those food items:

"A new study by a group of Huntsville researchers found that boiled peanuts
bring out up to four times more chemicals that help protect against disease than
raw, dry or oil-roasted nuts."

Auntie Suzanne was once informed--by some Yankee, no doubt--on irc that it is "wrong" to eat peanuts boiled. The only acceptable method for peanut preparation, according to this person who'd never heard of such a thing before I mentioned it to him, was roasting. I can't tell you how glad we Southerners are to have our ignorant, backward ways corrected by the more enlightened folk who dwell in the the only parts of the country that understand tolerance and the value of diversity. How glad I am to have been saved from the degrading and terrible experience of driving along on a cool autumn day, spotting a farmer beside the road with a large pot and a hand-lettered sign that says "BOILED PEANUTS", stopping and buying a bag (or two) of hot, wet peanuts, and continuing along our way, cracking open the shells with my fingers or teeth, tilting back the shell to drink the warm, salty liquid within, and eating the tender, delicious flesh of each peanut contained within the shell, savoring the taste, then doing it again and yet again, marvelling how each peanut is slightly different in shape, size, or number of nuts and how the shell is so soft, thick, and plushy when the peanut was immature and the nuts must be teased out with a pointed tongue or exploring finger , yet hard, thin, and easily cracked open to reveal its treasure when it is fully mature, and how such a dirty-looking, unpromising outside can hold such sweet delights inside and...Well, just thank goodness I've been saved from all that. That half-eaten bag of boiled peanuts currently sitting in my refrigerator? That's Uncle Pookie's. He's the one who refuses to learn.

A Birthday That Isn't

Today would have been Sylvia Plath's seventy-fifth birthday. Well, it could have been and might have been, if she hadn't...you know.



Little Sylvia Plath
Was filled with wrath.
When she needed a muse
She looked to Ted Hughes.



For some reason--presumably my cold--I got a case of clerihews on the brain yesterday evening. Tricky stuff to shake off. So here's some more:



Miss Sylvia Plath
Loved a hot bath.
She got wet behind the ears
Listening to the music of the spheres.



A Scorpio, Plath,
Chose the poetic path,
Forgetting babies and rhymes
Only mix some o' th' times.

Sylvia Plath
Had no head for math,
And she wrote many verses
On her aversion to nurses.



Sylvia Plath
Got lost on the path;
When her soul for poems she decided to dredge,
She ended up stopped at "Edge".



Given the limited number of rhymes for Plath, I figured I was perilously close to having her outgrabe a mome rath and managed to stop there. (Well, with the Plath ones anyway--ask me about the Ranma 1/2 ones, I dare ya--and actually I'm leaving out one on grounds it violated good taste.) Feel free to add your Plath clerihews and hate mail to the comments box.

Life in the Undergrowth

David Attenborough
Was very thorough.
In his documentary on bugs
He included erotica for slugs.



Seriously. It's very cool and, fortunately, readily available from Netflix and Amazon. I have new respect for aunts, new sympathy for the tragedy that is the queen bee's life, new appreciation for termite engineering, and new something or other for something or other. (Sorry for petering out there, but my mind is fuzzy--and various parts of my face drippy--with a cold.)

Pointless Personality Quizzes

Or, what do Katherine Parr, midnight, and Guy Smiley have in common?





Which of Henry VIII's wives are you?this quiz was made by lori/'>http://www.spookbot.com">Lori Fury



You are Midnight

You Are Midnight

You are more than a little eccentric, and you're apt to keep very unusual habits. Whether you're a nightowl, living in a commune, or taking a vow of silence - you like to experiment with your lifestyle. Expressing your individuality is important to you, and you often lie awake in bed thinking about the world and your place in it. You enjoy staying home, but that doesn't mean you're a hermit. You also appreciate quality time with family and close friends.

What Time Of Day Are You?

What Sesame Street Character Are You?

Your Score: Guy Smiley

You scored 75% Organization, 65% abstract, and 33% extroverted!

This test measured 3 variables.

First, this test measured how organized you are. Some muppets like Cookie Monster make big messes, while others like Bert are quite anal about things being clean.

Second, this test measured if you prefer a concrete or an abstract viewpoint. For the purposes of this test, concrete people are considered to gravitate more to mathematical and logical approaches, whereas abstract people are more the dreamers and artistic type.

Third, this test measured if you are more of an introvert or an extrovert. By definition, an introvert concentrates more on herself and an extrovert focuses more on others. In this test an introvert was somebody that either tends to spend more time alone or thinks more about herself.

You are very organized, more abstract, and more introverted.

Here is why are you Guy Smiley.

You are both very organized. You almost always know where your belongings are and you prefer things neat. You may even enjoy cleaning and find it therapeutic. Guy Smiley uses his organization to assure that his gameshow runs smoothly and that he is always dressed appropriately.

You both are abstract thinkers. Guy Smiley uses his imagination to come up with ridiculous game shows. You definitely are not afraid to take chances in life. You only live once. You may notice others around you playing it safe, but you are more concerned with not compromising your desires, and getting everything you can out of life. This is a very romantic approach to life, but hopefully you are also grounded enough to get by.

You are both introverted. At first glance Guy Smiley may appear to be an extrovert given he hosts a popular show. But in reality he struggles to relate with other people. His prizes tend to just be Guy Smiley merchandise. For whatever reason you are a bit uncomfortable in social settings.. You may have one or two people that you are close with. You'd rather do things by yourself and you dislike working in groups where things are always so inefficient.

The other possible characters are
Oscar the Grouch
Bert
Snuffleupagus
Ernie
Elmo
Kermit the Frog
Grover
Cookie Monster
Big Bird
The Count

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Link: The Your SESAME STREET Persona Test written by greencowsgomoo on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

I can honestly say that I did not expect to score as Guy Smiley; if I'd thought about it beforehand, I'd probably have guessed Oscar. The Midnight thing shouldn't surprise anyone, and while being the "Died" of the "Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived" rhyme might seem more appropriate to midnight, I guess I can see being the "survived".

Actually, as far as that handsome rogue thing goes, I've always rated intelligence and the ability to carry on a conversation--especially wide-ranging ones--much more highly than appearance. And I much prefer a tall, husky man of non-handsome appearance to a short yet good-looking man. But do I have an appreciative eye for nice-looking manflesh? Yes I do. That is why it can be so much fun to have a gay male friend: it's so nice to be able to talk about good-looking men to someone. It's something heterosexual men just aren't good at, presumably due to having no interest in the matter.

Good Riddance to Summer

Pretty much every year of my life--maybe every year--there has come a day in, oh, September or October when I've woken to the palpable fact of there being a new feel to the air that morning. Something that I can not quite describe, even to myself, would be different. When I was a child this was usually accompanied by the sound of someone cutting firewood with a chainsaw in the distance, and when I would swing my feet to the floor there would be a faint coolness there. And I would know that it was Fall.

Gentle Reader, that day was today. Well, yesterday, technically, as I'm up after midnight, but oh goodness, it isn't half lovely. For you see, it means I have survived summer. Hideous, hideous summer. Summer, with its blazing sun and its humidity and its sweatiness and its "not even mad dogs and Englishmen" feel. Fall has always been my favorite season, because in addition to its own charms, it means summer is over and not to be thought of for months. Oh, I know, Mississippi weather is apt to zap us with some more unpleasantly hot days after I wake up to the first fall day, but it can't take away the wondrousness of that first day of fall feeling or the knowledge that all is working to the good weatherwise now--the hot days won't be as hot and there will be fewer of them. (Of course it's still hurricane season, but let's not quibble; hurricanes hitting are rare and sweatiness is daily.)

I got to enjoy delicious fall air all day. The temp only got up to around 84 degrees F; it was cool enough in the morning to actually need a top sheet. This year I even got the chainsaw sound. Admittedly a chainsaw that seems to be operating no more than a hundred yards away from one's bed loses something that the chainsaw so far in the distance you couldn't even guess what neighbor might be using it has, especially when that nearby chainsaw is soon joined by a neighbor cutting grass, but nothing can take away the wondrousness of the first fall day. Even an idle thought of, "Whatever happened to that old Bible Belt 'don't do yard work on Sunday' thing?" floats away like gossamer, leaving only good will and continued luxuriating in the air.


Take note, folks, this is about as good-tempered as I get all year.

Chesterton on Hobbies

I read G. K. Chesterton's autobiography a few weeks ago and was struck by, among other things (it is Chesterton after all), his comments early in the book on hobbies.

Chesterton talks about his father, who was known outside the home as a reliable, ordinary businessmen but wh was at home a man of many talents and loads of hobbies. ("It was a very good first lesson in what is also the last lesson of life; that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside.") This leads him to talk about hobbies:

"A hobby is not a holiday. It is not merely a momentary relaxation
necessary to the renewal of work; and in this respect it must be sharply
distinguished from much that is called sport....It is not merely taking
exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the
mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing."

[emphasis in that last sentence mine]

The outside world limits us; our hobbies expand us. Our hobbies let us use the rest of our mind, the parts that our job usually doesn't, that the world--perhaps especially the modern world--doesn't care if we have or not.

Chesterton also says that seeing his father at work on his hobbies, and especially on Chesterton's beloved toy theater, made a great difference in his life--not least that he learned to love seeing human hands engaged in doing and making. If the father had been only a businessman, he would have seemed smaller in his son's eyes.

"And this experience has made me profoundly sceptical of all the modern talk
about the necessary dullness of domesticity; and the degrading drudgery that
only has to make puddings and pies. Only to make things! There is no greater
thing to be said of God Himself than that He makes things."

And being Chesterton, of course he has more to say and it is interesting. The next few pages move into buying things versus making them, how children play, moral/moralizing literature and adult cynicism, wondrous reality and imaginative play, and a great deal more. This is the second chapter of the autobiography and quite the best one in it; read it for yourself if you have the chance. Some craftster types might like another line: "I wish we did not have to fritter away on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting coloured tinsel upon them." I've loved books and stories too much to quite agree, but I'm on board with the general point; considering Chesterton was himself a great reader, I don't think he'd have wholly given up literature for his cardboard figures, although I can't say for the production of literature.


Anyhow, can there be any doubt that if Chesterton were writing today he'd have something to say about this news item on a new surgical technique which "whittles" thumbs down to better fit i-Phones and other handheld devices. We do not fit the machines that are supposed to serve us, so we alter ourselves to fit the machine, rather than altering the machine. It's like women who, rather than having clothes made to fit their bodies, agonize year after year, trying to make their bodies fit the clothes. Or worse, and more precisely, the women we read about a year or so ago who were having surgery on their toes so they could wear fashionable pointy-toed high heels. Oh what a brave new world we are making.

Update: The news item I linked above is apparently false. I was not familiar with the source and was taken in. My apologies. However, as the other examples I mentioned are true, I believe my larger point stands.

(Catholic) Quote of the Quarter

"Milque-toast Catholicism does not produce milque-toast Catholics, it produces non-Catholics."

(Thomas E. Woods, EWTN Live, May 2007)



Oh so true. But never let it be said that I'm friendly only to Catholics. Here's a secular quote everyone can enjoy:

"Lemme tell ya something, Webster. Grammar am for people who can't think for myself. Understanded me?" (Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy)

Visualize World Papercuts

One periodically hears of leftists starting a drive to send a 1000 (origami) cranes to Congress or the White House or whoever, which activity will no doubt promote peace, pascifism, faux-pascifism, environmental consciousness, or global healing in ways that are unclear to me. And I say good luck to them; a little harmless eccentricity never hurt anybody and, besides, origami cranes are kind of pretty. Maybe the congressional pages take them home as free Christmas--sorry, Holiday--tree ornaments? Or play some crane version of desktop football with them. But I digress. Because what I was actually wondering about, before I started visualizing Congressmen clustered around a men's room sink having paper crane races, is what message mailing an origami Cthulu to a politician sends? The old "Vote Cthulu" buttons had it that he was the choice for when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. Sooo...that means this "send a 1000 pieces of folded paper" campaign will be by conservatives to Republicans? Gentlemen (and ladies), start your folding.

(Hat tip to Jimmy Akin for the link)

Forgotten Tidbit

I meant to post this with my "Crafty Tidbits" post earlier today, but I forgot.

Isn't it funny how the tiny bits of the past get forgotten, waiting for something to recall them abruptly to mind if it is part of our past or gone utterly until we find a chance reference if it happened before we were born. (Assuming any reference exists.) A couple of months ago I finally got around to reading The Annotated Lolita. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the writing was and I decided to risk the 1990s film; I'd seen the '60s film and just assumed the remake would be worse, as remakes usually are. The '90s Lolita turned out to be as good as the first film, if not somewhat better. It was certainly better in the sets.

Well, when one of the closets in the Haze woman's house was opened and there was one of those bits of unimportant history that gets forgotten: braided coathangers. We had these when I was a kid, and so did my grandmother's house; heck, my grandmother's probably the one who made them. I got such a nostalgic kick out of seeing them, yet I'd totally forgotten their existence until I saw them. I think there were also some knitted discloths hanging in the kitchen, but they may have been potholders. There's also cool '40s clothes to look at, and Jeremy Irons isn't so bad to look at either.

Anyway, I recommend both the Lolita films and the book, which I plan to reread, but in the unlikely event that anyone decides to watch the second film based on my recommendation, maybe I should point out there's full frontal male nudity in one scene. I'm not offended by nudity myself and this isn't gratuitous, as Clare Quilty's penis flapping about as he runs down the hallway serves only to underscore the pathetic state his life has become, but some people are offended by nudity so I thought I'd mention it.

HP and Religious & Cultural Illiteracy

I don't want to go on and on about Harry Potter, but this morning's Corner had a post with links to HP articles. One warns James Dobson and others are picking the wrong fight and should save their fire for genuine attacks on Christianity. (I've said much the same.) Another talks about Christian references in HP and his failure to convince some American evangelicals of their existence. I could quibble with a couple of his not-central-to-the-main-point claims, but why bother? His column is more worth its space than my quibbles would be, and I'd rather remark on a sad observation he makes:

...I think the problem is that so much of the religious
right failed to see the Christianity in the Potter novels because it knows so
little Christianity itself. Yes, there are a few ‘memory verses’ from Saint
Paul, and various evangelical habits like the ‘sinner’s prayer’ and the alter
call. However the gospel stories themselves, the various metaphors and figures
of the Law and the Prophets, and their echoes down through the past two
millennia of Christian literature and art are largely unknown to vast swaths of
American Christendom, including its leaders.

Let's right up front get rid of any notion that what the author is referring to is a phenomenon of evangelical Protestants only. Catholics are every bit as guilty of being ignorant of Christian heritage, and as our Christian heritage forms the bulk of our Western heritage, one could argue secularists are guilty as well.


People used to grow up hearing the Bible, even if they weren't particularly religious, and we also lived in a culture where it was okay to mention religious themes in conversation or artistic expression and so people gained some familiarity almost through their skin. That is gone. We don't know the Bible and we don't know expressions originating there.


For example, John Derbyshire once mentioned using the expression "being expected to make bricks without straw" and having not one of the group of educated Americans he was talking with know the term. As another example, I once referred to Isaac and Ishmael and the lifelong churchgoer I was talking to asked who they were. Kathleen Norris has written about her hymnal changing the term "my Ebenezer" to "my greatest treasure", presumably because people nowadays aren't expected to know what Ebenezer refers to. And lest it seem I'm only picking on other people, back in the nineties I had to ask someone where the phrase "through a glass darkly" came from. I wasn't a Christian, but considering what our Western heritage is, that is no excuse. I didn't know any Ebenezer other than Scrooge, either, and while I assumed it came from the Bible like so many old-fashioned names, I didn't know who the Hezekiah my busdriver was named for was.


And taking my examples away from the Bible itself, I can remember as an older child reading a magazine my mother sometimes got at church (I read everything...well, except the Bible) and seeing an article in which the author mentioned attending Handel's Messiah. I'd never heard of the Messiah, I'm not sure I'd ever heard the term messiah, and I don't think I was aware of any classical music having been informed by Christianity. Yet I was more culturally literate and well-read than any of my classmates. And, at least through the elementary school years, my religious education was the equal of any of theirs. I may have read lots of novels and plays and recognized lots of paintings and sculpture, but there was any number of things I didn't know about the Christianity I'd supposedly been raised in and even when I recognized something came from the Bible or was a religious concept I often couldn't tell you what the reference was or define the concept.

Is any of this important? Well, when as a teenager I was told by various sources that Christianity hates life and regards the natural world as evil, I believed it because I was too ignorant to know otherwise. That mental path--or chute--was already well-greased by years of media depictions of Christians as ignorant hicks who were apt to be bigots as well and I'd already long since rejected Christianity, but that one particular lie which I did not have the knowledge to refute, more than anything else, resulted in my becoming a pagan. So is it important for people to know what Christianity teaches? If you're a Christian parent who doesn't want your teenager to leave Christianity for something else, I think you'd say yes.

And as to Christian history--or the general history of those parts of the world formerly known as Christendom--and the artworks inspired by Christianity, you do not have to be Christian to believe it is important to know about those. Friar Tuck, the Holy Grail, the Nun's Priest, the fleur-de-lys, the Pieta, De Profundis, and Judith Beheading Holofernes belong to all of us.