Farsi of the day

Today's Farsi of the day is "fiil," meaning
"elephant."

This reminds me of the story where three blind sages met an elephant for the first time. The first felt its side, and said an elephant was like a wall. The second felt its trunk, and said an elephant was like a snake. I forget what the third sage felt, but it had no resemblance to walls or snakes, and the people back home didn't believe a word of it. The blind sages' testimony didn't agree, you see.

The moral of this story that you need to keep an eye on feelings and elephants. This philosophical illustration has been brought to you by me. :-)

Farsi of the day

And the Farsi for "fish" is "mahi."

That's as in, "mahi-mahi," which apparently in Farsi translates to "fish-fish."

Nothing like a spot of time travel

http://www.quidplura.com/?p=113

Quote of the day

"Aren't you glad you aren't a fish?" Amelia

"I bet fish are very happy to be fish, because it's their telos to be fish." Me

"Yes, but we did a calculation and fish had less than a .5% chance of survival." Amelia

"Was that all fish or just the fish in your study?" Me

"Maybe it was just the fish in the study. But my math teacher put more than a thousand fish in their pond, and they all died." Amelia

"All dead!" Me

"Yes, because there were snapping turtles, and they ate them all. Aren't you glad you aren't a fish?" Amelia

"If I were a snapping turtle, I'd like fish too." Me

"Yes, but aren't you glad you aren't a fish? Because then your snapping-turtle-self would eat your fish-self, and then where would you be? You'd have eaten one part of you. Sounds Cosmic-Humanist-ey, if you were reincarnated but not all of you was reincarnated into the same thing."

"Sounds Voldemort-ey to me." Me

"I really like the phrase 'and then where would you be,' don't you?" Amelia


Don't you wish you were here? Amelia: "I like being here!"

Fortune cookie fortune of the day

"Time to collect those goods."

My table immediately applied this to wedding showers. :-) Personally, I liked Amelia's fortune:

"Romance could divert your attention away from money matters today."

My response was, what day couldn't romance outrank money?? I ask you!

You learn something new every day

So this beautiful Eilean Donan castle is actually in Scotland. And all this time I thought it was Irish; it was named "Eilean," after all!

Who knew?

Beware the Ides of March

I know it's still seven weeks out, but you can never start being ware too early. ("I am being good! I am being haive!") In any case, I have a more particular reason for this monition. I just bought my tickets to fly out to Virginia--on the Ides of March, as it happened. :-) It's a Saturday. And I'll be there, and thereabouts, and in Joisey, until the Monday after Easter.

See you all soon!

Quote of the day

"If it wasn't this, it'd be something else."

--Elizabethtown

Beauties

I've been reading through Tolkien's letters (my copy arrived yesterday!), and the list of things he despised surprises me. I knew he didn't care for machines and "progress," but I had been blissfully ignorant of his contempt for the works of Walt Disney (he'd object more heartily now, if he only knew), airplanes ("engines of Morgoth"), and Sayers' character Harriet Vane!

I should like to have Professor Tolkien to visit my hometown sometime. I should take him on a drive, and come down the mesa just at blue dusk, when the mountain across the way fades into the sky beyond and only the snowcap reminds you of the separation between earth and heaven. I would show him the long single line of rush-hour traffic winding in and around the clefts of the mountain, jewel-like, all going home to their house-lights snuggled in the valley. We could drive along the gray asphalt skimming between hill and cliff-face, seeing the Caja and knowing the River is just out of sight a thousand feet below, through a land all dusky from the red sun and cooled by rising moonglow. I would let him see silver planes coming in to land like the evening star, sun glinting down to us below. And then, when it got darker still, perhaps I should take him up the truck route, where only our own headlights lit up the road, going through a timeless endless movement of trees and stripes on the road, in which we could almost be sitting still and the scenery instead is moving around us. Even machines have their beauty, and make other beauties clearer, especially in this new town in an old land.

Tolkien's hates are nearly always stemmed straight from his loves, and the things he loves are good. I love them too.

Unfit for its purpose

I've noted a philosophical oddity, and thought I'd bounce it off you my faithful blog-readers. Sometimes, being made for a specific purpose makes an item unfit for that purpose.

I'm thinking initially of "party favors" packaged as such on the party row of Wal-Mart. But I also see it with cheaper editions of fashions (like necklaces and hairbands), Christmas ornaments, scrapbooking kits, and more recently, wedding supplies.

It's not that those things are inherently unusable. My sister and I bought a package of cheap ornaments for table centerpieces, and while they'd have been tacky for a tree they were just right on tables. They're merely unusable for their intended purpose.

Of course, I'm thinking about this because I'm in the throes of planning a wedding. Creativity isn't so much coming up with new things (for there is nothing new under the sun, vanitas vanitatis) as it's coming up with new arrangements of old things. I love old things, though I don't mean to look like something escaped from a Renaissance Faire. There's a fuzzy continuum between boring, creative, and freakish.

But it just seems odd that purposing unfits a thing for that purpose. Is this a function of mass-production and unimaginative trend-copying? What to do, what to do?