August 5th, 2010 §
August 3rd, 2010 §
July 15th, 2010 §
June 30th, 2010 §
People pray to their deity, or ask intercession of a saint or representative spirit, when they no longer possess control or understanding of a painful situation. I completely understand the desire to do this. In order for this activity to have any benefit, however, at least one of two things have to be true: 1)The recipient of these invocations has to exist and be endowed with the power to grant the request, and/or 2) the suppliant needs to believe absolutely that the result of his plea is the will of the godhead that they hold as supreme. For me, therefore, this type of relief is not an option, and in some ways I am saddened by its absence. What do I do, then? I take my meds regularly. I trust in science. I offer love and care to those who suffer. (I am trying to do this even for myself.) I try to make right decisions when the decision is mine to make. I try (but mostly fail) to not obsess about the things over which I have no control, and to focus instead on those over which I do. I cry a lot. I allow others to be a strength to me.
*pause*
More amusingly, however, if I may distract my mind with something I have noticed over the last month or so, I would like to posit that I, along with many others, have begun to pray in a new and different way. I don’t know if it grew out of celebrity worship or from an innate(?) belief in the healing power of well-wishes, but it seems that the various social media venues have become conduits for modern kurushii toki no kamidanomi. I have, and have seen others, tweet or FaceBook-comment celebrities in order to get them to acknowledge or address some charity event, catastrophe, or even sick friend, relative or pet. Obviously, when spreading the word has a direct correlation to the amount of assistance a cause will receive, this is an understandable petition. Those of us, however, who simply want to hear, say, Neil Gaiman wish our ill loved one well, must have some other motive. As I can only speak for myself, I can say that in my case, the use of my own despair and the pain of my pet to garner some new proximity to fame is not reason in the slightest. I cannot think that of most people, really, if their anguish is true. That, then, leaves the idea, amorphous though it may be, that obtaining this blessing from a person you hold as a role model or personal source of inspiration will somehow work a kind of magic… Are we really that in need of gods? Reading what I’ve written, I can tell you with certainty that my cerebral mind scoffs at the idea. My sad little raised-Catholic inner monkey, however, knows that anyone who can create stories or art or music or humor that moves me must be able to help somehow. A nod on twitter as the new papal wave or portent? A saved re-tweet as a modern relic, and backups as reliquaries?
I need a nap. I need a nap with all my peeps and furbabies around me. Thank you to everyone who puts up with my drivel.
June 27th, 2010 §
Today, inspired both by Essers and the Luciferous Logolepsy site, I have come up with a term for “sleep-tweeting”:
somnipipilation: made from Latin roots for sleep — “somnus” and twitter — “pipilo”
I will see it soon in the OED, I’m sure. :D
June 27th, 2010 §
A while back, almost near-quarter-century of Old Bailey doings were put online for historical lookie-loos like myself to peruse. As with most web-gems found, I end up forgetting about it and re-finding it, and in a fit of re-found joy, I spent a while with it the other day. I am always amused (minus the sadness of people having to hide or suffer, natch) at cases that include enough subterfuge and under-the-table dealings to make a novel, such as the case of Messrs John Bowes and Hugh Ryly, first charged with and then, after much effort, acquitted of sodomy. The type that caught my attention this time, tho, were cases of infanticide that only seemed to result in penalty if the child was a bastard, due to what was often referred to in these records as the Statute of King James. The statute seems to classify as murder either the killing of a bastard child, or the stillbirth of a child where no midwife or other assistance was called. As quoted in Murder in Shakespeare’s England
By Vanessa McMahon:
Such defences relied on a sympathetic jury to be effective. Not all juries were willing to hear extenuating circumstances, as a printed text from London in 1673 illustrated. A midwife and surgeon judged a servant girl’s infant to be stillborn:
but the law doth pronounce in such cases, by a statute of the 21th of King James, That if any child be unlawfully begotten, and be born dead, without one witness at the least, and concealing the same to hide their shame (or words to that effect) it shall be accounted as murder, so this woman being delivered of a bastard child (by her own confession), and concealing the same, the Jury found her Guilty of Murder.
Simply stated, then: a woman who gave birth unaided to a bastard, and loses it, could have — at the whim of a jury or judge — been found guilty of murder and put to death. One poor woman was denied help and turned out of her lodgings, only to give birth in the street. When the child died, she was found guilty of murder and put to death. Her case was not an isolated one, with some less sympathetic juries convicting women whose stillbirths were simply under-attended of murder. Even more curious, however, was the loophole King James opened for some women who, upon being able to prove (or fabricate proof of) a husband, were acquitted of murder, even when there was a baby’s corpse to hand. Mary Naples, for example,
was Indicted for Murthering her Male Infant , but it being proved she had a Husband, it was not comprehended in the Statute of King James, provided for the preventing lude women from Murthering their Bastard Children, so she was found not Guilty .
The case of Ann Price could have been judged either way by a modern jury, but should her attempts to get help have been proven true, hers too is an abominable case, resulting in her execution. Of course, there were also simple cases of verifiable infanticide, but without the benefit of diagnoses like post-partum depression or other mental illnesses. Here is one chilling example:
A wench was Condemn’d for murthering her Bastard-child . Being suspected by her Mistriss, and examined, she freely confess’d that she had put it into the House of Office, and that it crying, she pusht it down with a stick.
I know my fascination with all this seems odd to many, but I can’t help it. What with Old Bailey records from 1674 to 1913 freely available, and now newly added Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts for the period from 1676 to 1772, I will be able to hide in crime for a long while longer.
June 9th, 2010 §
@fablor posted a link on twitter to the lost dog ad found after the jump. It can be read, for now, on craigslist, but I had to make sure the text was saved somewhere, as it truly is the best lost dog ad I have seen in ages.
» Read the rest of this entry «
May 31st, 2010 §
I got caught up in the iPhone “game” WeRule for a while, enchanted by the idea of building my own town, especially one with a Medieval theme and dragons. As a child, my brother and I would draw our own detailed island maps on graph paper, and I hoped that this “Farmville”-like app would provide a similar feeling of omnipotent creativity. It lasted longer for me than did Farmville, probably because it is not associated with the time-suck that is Facebook. (Yes, I am on facebook, partially for work, and partially to more easily keep in touch with people who live far away, but I would honestly be just as happy if everyone was on Twitter so there would be no FB app pollution in my snippet-based correspondence.) I farmed and ran my businesses, grew my holdings and watched clouds float prettily by. I even started ordering goods and services from neighboring “towns”, and fulfilling similar orders. My kingdom, at the time of its demise this afternoon, was a sizable one. Why, then, did I stop? The disillusionment came in small increments:
- I had not wanted to build a lumber mill. Recycled paper goods are far superior, more readily renewable building resources like bamboo, hay-bale and rammed earth are just as readily available, and the impact of both of these on the ecosystem is lower… I was given no option for a recycling plant, however, and I would not foist my paper and wood needs onto other towns to assuage my own ecological guilt, so I built one.
- I also had no desire for a butcher shop. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t see the killing when it happened (such is the sterilized nature of the game). It was simply horrific enough to know that the happy little cows that roamed my screen were occasionally made into sausage! However, I am not the type to force my beliefs onto others. I prepare non-vegetarian food for my family, so I couldn’t keep my townsfolk from their kielbasa. I built a butcher shop as well.
- I never had any real need for the rulers of my town to be so well-housed. Even if it were a monarchy, no ruler rules for long if their subjects see too great a disparity between themselves and the powers that be. The game left no option, however, for increasing the land holdings of my town without also adding on to the castle at its center. Here, too, I grudgingly gave in, promising to set aside whole citadel wings for hospitals and other social services.
- “They” took my magic cauliflower away from me, even though I had been growing it since level 20, and announced that it would only be made available again once I’d reached level 40. This needs no explanation, really. Stealing a woman’s magic cauliflower. Really.
- New expansion options were regularly added, and all were welcome until the most recent additions. Two of the four were a prison and a chopping block for capital punishment. If a butcher shop made me queasy, imagine the effects of these two celebrations of human cruelty! At the same time, ruby colored castles and ruby-fruit trees were also made available. Shocking displays of the misuse of wealth, I say! No thanks!
- Finally, even if all the previous points are just me being silly, the last straw was my realization that, despite being able to enact commerce with other players, there was nothing at all truly social about this game-that-isn’t-really-a-game. I realized that I was playing solely to get more stuff, by myself, for myself: A noxious addiction to something that, while somewhat relaxing in its rudimentary attempts at fostering creativity, was a complete waste of my time. These are not values I want to nurture in myself in real life, so why do so online, when I could actually be chatting with friends or writing poetry or watching my daughter skate or walking outside or napping with my dogs?
I have, instead, pulled out an old notebook and some crayons. Anyone want to make maps with me?
May 26th, 2010 §
May 1st, 2010 §
I know I am not alone in my fear of clowns, and I am also aware of this fear’s irrational nature, especially since I 1) have never seen Stephen King’s It (and love Tim Curry enough to negate that movie’s creep factor even if I had), and 2) had spent quite a bit of my childhood as a friend of lovely clowns, one of whom I hope takes no offense at this revelation of my fear. Personally, I chalk it up to a mix of uncanny valley taint and the clowns’ faces being painted with discomfiting levels of exaggerated emotion. Someday, when I have the time, this not-uncommon fear might make an interesting research topic.
This post, however, is about something else from childhood that didn’t begin to scare me until adulthood, but which disturbs me far worse than clowns, and, I believe, for more and better reasons: the ice cream truck. Am I alone in this, I wonder? Here are some of my reasons:
- The vans, innocuous to children but recognizable to adults, especially those of my age or older, as colorfully decked-out and refrigerated versions of the vans we girls were told to avoid, and that held (less often than imagined but more often than is societally healthy) all-surface shag carpeting and a large mattress in the back when driven by mustachioed, hairy-chested, medallion-wearing disco man-whores (or their progeny).
- The horrible music, so warped that it couldn’t have been long after it started life as a sprightly, music box rendition of “the Entertainer” or “Turkey in the Straw” before it was somehow melted in the fires of hell into a wilted, minor-key version of its former self, a tune that somehow suggests ice cream to children and everything bitter and evil and corrupt to adults.
- The pictures of all the treats on the sides of the van, none of which could ever taste as good as they look, even at their most faded. Perhaps, viewed in a charitable light, this is a lesson taught early about the disappointments inherent in an inescapable adult life of cubicles and roach-coaches, but isn’t that a bit cruel? I mean, that’s like sitting at the food court above the ice rink and yelling at the young Olympic hopefuls having lessons below, “I hope you like doing triple-lutzes while wearing a Minnie costume!” (Perhaps they shouldn’t serve beer at the food court…)
- The incredible pull the damn ice cream truck has on children! They come running from everywhere at the sound of the truck’s ghostly tune, and with such demented fervor that I can only imagine them following it into the ocean if it went there, all of them slowly going under in a parade of screams and warm, clutched quarters, and melting Rocket Pops and a final dirge of that awful music…
- And, if that all were not enough, now there is this:
Can you see it? Oh, the horror!!!
