Out with the old…

Greyfox
and I have worked our separate ways through the entire backlog of
past-life readings (for him) and the readings on present reality and
future potentials that are my department over at KaiOaty. 
There had been a backlog because we had both been neglecting that work
and that site for about a year, from November of 2003.  Now, in
less than two months we have done as much of the backlog as we could,
all except for a few requests from clients who had
disappeared from Xanga in the interim and couldn’t be reached to
confirm or update their requests, or who didn’t respond to our emails.

At least, I think we’ve done it all.  I could have missed
someone.  There were a few months that I couldn’t access the email
account that is linked from that site, and the inbox filled up and
bounced some email.  I still have a nagging feeling I’ve forgotten
someone, but that could be just the ones who didn’t get back to me, or
my awareness of the indexing I haven’t caught up with.  If you
have been
waiting for a reading from Greyfox or me, and haven’t seen it, check KaiOaty. 
Look at the Subscriptions list on the home page.  If your name is
there, we’ve done at least one reading for you and it is there
somewhere.  I’ve subscribed to everyone we’ve done readings for,
and to no one else.  If you asked for a reading and your name
isn’t there, please try again.  I’m paying attention now.

While we were working on the backlog, some new requests came in, and we
have taken care of all of them now. too.  It feels good not to
have a backlog there (except for that tedious indexing and the routine
checking of links, etc., that must be done eventually– and two more
FAQ pages I can’t even start on until I recall the topics or find my
notes….).  But I have a backlog elsewhere, too, that I can
dispense with more easily.  I have this load of quizzes and
questionnaires I have been doing in the past few weeks and did not post
because… for reasons that… frankly, for reasons I cannot now recall
and might not ever have had at all.  I didn’t post them then, when
I answered the questions, but I’m posting them now, okay?

The geographic basics: Born in California, reared all over the west and midwest.

A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.   creek

What the thing you push around the grocery store is called. cart (or now that I’m older, “walker”)

A metal container to carry a meal in.  lunch box

The thing that you cook bacon and eggs in. skillet

The piece of furniture that seats three people. couch

The device on the outside of the house that carries rain off the roof. gutter

The covered area outside a house where people sit in the evening. porch

Carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverages. pop

A flat, round breakfast food served with syrup. pancakes

A long sandwich designed to be a whole meal in itself.  dagwood

The piece of clothing worn by men at the beach. trunks

Shoes worn for sports. sneakers

Putting a room in order. tidying up

A flying insect that glows in the dark. firefly

The little insect that curls up into a ball. pill bug

The children’s playground equipment where one kid sits on one side and
goes up while the other sits on the other side and goes down.
teeter-totter

How do you eat your pizza? with my fingers if it’s not too floppy, from
the center out, and always eat the crust — mine and that of anyone who
leaves theirs

What’s it called when private citizens put up signs and sell their used stuff? yard sale

What’s the evening meal? dinner

The thing under a house where the furnace and perhaps a rec room are? basement

What word(s) do you use to address a group of two or more people? 
you guys or y’all (familiarly) or more formally, “everybody” as in
“everybody, listen up!”

Would you say “Are you coming with?” as a full sentence, to mean “Are you coming with us?” no

Would you say “where are youat?” to mean “where are you?”  no

Modals are words like “can,” “could,” “might,” “ought to,” and so on.
Can you use more than one modal at a time? I shouldn’t ought to, but I
might could do it.

What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road? verge or parking, depending on my audience

What do you call the area of grass that occurs in the middle of some streets? Median.

What do you call the long narrow place in the middle of a divided highway? Median

What do you call the drink made with milk and ice cream? Milkshake.

What do you call the miniature lobster that one finds in lakes and
streams for example (a crustacean of the family Astacidae)? Crayfish.

What do you call the kind of spider (or spider-like creature) that has
an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs? Daddy Longlegs.

What nicknames do/did you use for your maternal grandmother? none

What about your paternal grandmother (is there a distinction?) none (both grandmothers died before I was born)

What do/did you call your maternal grandfather? Grandpa

paternal grandfather? nothing — he died before I was born

What do you call the big clumps of dust that gather under furniture and
in corners? Dust bunnies, and around my house they don’t hide, they get
right out in the middle of the room.

What term do you use to refer to something that is across both streets
from you at an intersection (or diagonally across from you in general)?
catty corner.

What do you call the activity of driving around in circles in a car? Do
you mean brodies, doughnuts: spinning, as opposed to just getting
lost?  They’re both brodies and donuts to me, since I moved around
a lot as a kid.

What do you call paper that has already been used for something or is otherwise imperfect? Scratch paper.

What is your *general* term for a big road that you drive relatively fast on? Freeway

What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?  a rainbow

When you are cold, and little points of skin begin to come on your arms and legs, you have- Goosebumps

What do you call the gooey or dry matter that collects in the corners
of your eyes, especially while you are sleeping?  gunk

What do you call an easy course? a no-brainer

What do you call a traffic situation in which several roads meet in a
circle and you have to get off at a certain point? roundabout

What is the thing that women use to tie their hair? a ribbon

Do you use the word cruller?   no, I eat donuts

Do you use the term “bear claw” for a kind of pastry?  yes, unless it’s a danish or a bismarck or a blintz or….

What do you call someone who is the opposite of pigeon-toed (i.e. when they walk their feet point outwards)?  bow-legged

Can you call coleslaw “slaw”?  yes

What do you call the box you bury a dead person in? coffin

Do you say “vinegar and oil” or “oil and vinegar” for the type of salad dressing? either way

What do you call it when a driver changes over one or more lanes way too quickly? weaving

When you stand outside with a long line of people waiting to get in
somewhere, are you standing “in line” or “on line” (as in, “I stood ___
in the cold for two hours before they opened the doors”)? In line.

Do you say “frosting” or “icing” for the sweet spread one puts on a cake? frosting unless it is boiled icing

What is “the City”? San Francisco

What is the distinction between dinner and supper? supper is later than dinner

Do you cut or mow the lawn or grass? I can mow it with a mower or cut it with scissors or a scythe.

Do you pass in homework or hand in homework? Turn it in.

What do you call the insect that looks like a large thin spider and skitters along the top of water? water strider

What do you call the thing from which you might drink water in a school? water fountain

What do you call a public railway system (normally underground)? Subway

What do you call the act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper? TP’ing.

What do you call a traffic jam caused by drivers slowing down to look
at an accident or other diversion on the side of the road? 
rubberneckers

What do you call the paper container in which you might bring home items you bought at the store?  A bag.

What do you call the night before Halloween? Oct 30.

What do you call the end of a loaf of bread? The heel

What do you call a point that is purely academic, or that cannot be settled and isn’t worth discussing further? Moot.

How do you pronounce the -sp- sequence in “thespian” (the word meaning “actor”)? Thes-pyan

What do you call a drive-through liquor store? insane

What do you call food that you buy at a restaurant but then eat at home? takeout

What do you say when you want to lay claim to the front seat of a car? I’m driving.

Do you say “expecially”, or “especially”? Especially.

If You Were in Beowulf…
created with QuizFarm.com
You scored as The Dragon.
Ancient, chaotic, and a bit mysterious is the Dragon figure.  Awakened
from your happy slumber upon a pile of gold, you go about the country
slaying its occupants.  Beowulf manages to kill you, but not before you
ensure his death.  Congrats.


It could have been worse, I suppose.  I might have come out as Beowulf or his mother.

A
stern yet benevolent organizer who often knows best, your wits are
keenly fixed on aiding efforts you deem worthy.Now at this last we must
take a hard road, a road unforseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.
To walk into peril to Mordor.

---

 

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You are 87% Virgo

How much do you match your zodiac sign?

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Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well.An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly.You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view.A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary.You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

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New Year’s Wishes

I’d say these were my prayers instead of my wishes, except that I’m with Jim Morrison on the topic of petitioning prayer: 

When I was back there in seminary school

There was a person there

Who put forth the proposition

That you can petition the Lord with prayer

Petition the lord with prayer

Petition the lord with prayer??

You cannot petition the lord with prayer!
(The Doors,
The Soft Parade)

When I speak to the god within, I’m not
petitioning, but affirming.  Since I lack the power to affirm for
you, I’ll wish for you in the new year what I affirm for myself always:

the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
the courage to change the things we can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

If that is your desire, you can affirm it for yourself.

I’m not nice, but I used to be.

No, that’s not precisely what I meant to say.  “Nice” used to mean
something closer to what I am than it does now.  That’s closer to
what I mean.

I don’t care much for the word, “nice”.   Henry here, Jane Austen’s character, expresses my view nicely:

Once, someone said I’m not very nice (it could have been I myself who
said it) and Greyfox informed me that by the “original” meaning of the
word — and I think he was referring to the sense in which Will
Shakespeare used it — I was quite nice.  He said that originally
it meant precise and correct in speech.

It was not until recently that I looked it up and discovered that
although he was correct about Shakespeare’s sense of the word, the word
had by that time already shifted distinctly away from its “original” or
first recorded meaning.

Here is what I found at the Online Etymology Dictionary (which is also where I found the Jane Austen quote above):

Since I am not even mildly or vaguely agreeable and have no wish to
agree with most ladies (and I don’t mean women), perhaps I should just leave the word to them.

Another word that has been giving me a tough time lately is,
“sentimentality.”  A long time ago, Greyfox quoted me a quote
saying that, “sentimentality means loving something more than God
does.”  I like that definition.  It seems fitting to the
maudlin propensity I see among my supposed peers (the “ladies”) to go
all choked-up and sad over things that to me seem either natural and
inevitable (and thus cry out for acceptance and not for sadness) and
other things that are outrageous and unnatural and thus require active
resistance and change, rather than self-defeating sadness that changes
nothing and hurts only the one who indulges in it.

I wanted to write about that, but first I wanted to find out who said it.  My old fart, Greyfox,
is a great rememberer and quoter of quotations, but not so good at
remembering who said it.  As for myself, the “nice” one in the
family, I feel stupid quoting someone and saying, “someone
said…”  It is important not only to my erudite image, but to the
satisfaction of my curiosity, that I know whom I’m quoting if I’m
putting quotation marks around a statement.

I put the quote in a Google search box, and although it did return a
few results it did not satisfy my need.  It created a new
dilemma.  According to the wondrous web, the origin of that
statement was either J.D. Salinger, or the “haiku poet”
R.H.Blythe.   The former name, I recognized.  The
latter, I did not.  So I searched again.

Now I have a new dilemma:  was Blythe actually a poet, or did he
only translate and interpret haiku?  I know he was a translator
and interpreter, but I have only the one source, the one that quoted
him on sentimentality, saying he’s a poet.  Can I safely dismiss
that source as unreliable and attribute the quote to Salinger?  I
don’t know.

So, here I go….  Someone once said that sentimentality is loving
something more than God does.  I agree.  If any of my readers
here can cite for me the work in which Salinger or Blythe or anyone
else said that, I’d appreciate it.

The Old Fart had a couple of news stories today he shared with me and
thought I might want to share with you.  He was correct.

Jaye Ulak and Jimmy Walker of Scammon Bay are teenage Alaska Native
rappers who were separately “discovered” by a village social worker
after they’d attempted suicide.  She has raised money and flown
them out to behavioral health conferences in Anchorage and
Seattle.  The young men call their duo “Blood Family”, and they
rap about village life, addiction, suicide and elders being
disrespected.  About their message, Walker said, “It’s getting
through, even to the adults.”

Stacia Backensto is a doctoral candidate studying ravens in the oil fields on the North Slope of the Brooks Range.

Livin’ on shaky ground

Confession:  I’m an earthquake freak.  I subscribe to BIGQUAKE email bulletins.  There’s a shortcut to NEIC
in my browser’s link bar.  When I feel a quake, I
participate.  I go to NEIC and fill out a “felt it” form.  I
know (and care) about how long it takes P-waves to travel through the
ground.  I know that tsunamis are not triggered by shaking, but by
what gets shaken loose underwater and settles to the ocean floor. 
I was hip to tectonic plates and continental drift long before any of
that “radical new” science made it into school textbooks. 

When the 8.1 quake hit north of Macquarie Island off Antarctica on
December 23, I caught the BIGQUAKE email and started looking up details
online.  Then I started waiting for the other shoe to drop. 
Thus, I wasn’t caught by surprise yesterday evening when the BIGQUAKE
alert for the 9.0 event off Sumatra hit my inbox.  When that alert
first came out, though, it didn’t say 9.0 magnitude.  It said 8.5,
and the French Observatory was calling it 8.0, while the Indonesian
authorities rated it at 6.4.  I didn’t learn until I woke up today
that it had been upgraded to 9.0.  The last earthquake bigger than
this one was forty years ago, on Good Friday, here in Alaska.

I don’t know why I get those “feelings” that earthquakes are coming –
I hadn’t had any presentiment of the one off Antarctica — and I
haven’t a clue how that “sense” might work.  I don’t know, either,
how and why it is that I feel small local quakes that nearly no one
else around me is aware of.  Not knowing how and why is a minor
little itch in the back of my mind, while the WHAT of it gets most of
my attention.  In the earth’s crust one thing leads to another in
a ripple effect, and I’m more interested in where the next shock will
occur than in when.  That it WILL come, that the pressure will be
released somewhere, is a given.  I’m intensely interested in the
patterns of distribution.

Before I got internet access, my ability to monitor this stuff was much
less, and the attention I paid to it was more sporadic.  I’d
notice when some big event made the news or when I was feeling a lot of
local shaking, and I’d get curious.  Now I have access to maps and charts and tables,
and I spend time studying them.  The Pacific Ring of Fire has been
getting a lot of my attention in recent months because it has been
active.  Sometimes I just gaze at the map
(the one below shows activity 8-30 days ago) to see what I see. 
I’m not looking for anything in particular.  I wouldn’t know what
to look for.  I just look and sometimes I see a pattern. 
Here I see a pattern of deep events, but I’d have to go to the charts
and tables to get the timing of them before they’d make any sense to
me.  Maybe I will, or maybe I’ll go back and search the news for
some more reports of the human side of last night’s events.  It’s
all fascinating to me.

Yesterday when I’d seen the BIGQUAKE alert and went to Google News,
there were two stories available.  That’s when I learned of the
disparity among the magnitude reports.  By the time I stopped
haunting the news sites about six hours later and went to bed, there
were over 600 reports.  When I got up today there were almost
2,000, and it had become the top story.

In imagination, I hear the cries of, “Oh, the humanity!”  Some of
the news reports of tsunami damage and casualties I’ve been reading
today list several previous tsunamis that have hit the same
areas.  One of the interesting facts about our species is that we
apparently like to settle on shaky ground, on some of the most
dangerous ground around.  The “cradle of civilization” was in the
area of crumbled crust where several plates meet and there is nothing
even remotely resembling solid bedrock.  The planet’s largest
cities are located on the margins of oceans and in the flood plains of
great rivers.  I understand the economics and logistics involved
there, the proximity to navigable water, not to mention the attraction
of ocean breezes and ocean views.  What I don’t understand is the
surprise and consternation exhibited when the earth and the oceans do
what they’ve been doing all along.

I’ve lived on the prairies where the relative safety from shaking and
flooding is offset by the wind.  They can have it.  My
preference is for mountains.  The place I’ve chosen to live is
another area where there is no solid bedrock.  Here at the edge of
the North American plate, where the Pacific Plate has thrust these
mountains up and has ground the earth’s crust to bits, we have
volcanos, too.  The wind blows, the ground shakes, the snow piles
up, and occasionally there’s volcanic ash piling up as well.  It’s
that kind of planet, filled with breathtaking vistas and all the things
we need to support life, as well as any number of hazards that might at
any moment snuff out a few thousand of our lives.  That’s life on
planet Earth.  I love it — don’t you?

What a marvelous night…
    and a pretty good day, too.

When I was a little girl, for the six Christmases before my father
died, the holiday was always joyous.  There was a tree and
decorations, always a few presents even though my parents never had
much money to spare, the music of the season — both the upbeat and
happy tunes and the moving old carols — and most of all there was
love.  The profile pic I’ve had up here for a couple of weeks
shows me on my second Xmas, at fifteen months of age, playing with my
new alphabet blocks in front of the Christmas tree, at the wicker table
and chair my father had salvaged from the dump.   My parents’ love
for each other and for me gave our little house furnished with things
other people had discarded an atmosphere of peace and security I would
never experience again in this lifetime.

I recall nothing of
the Christmas of 1951, just a bit over three weeks after my father
died.  Maybe we had a tree and presents, or maybe my mother wasn’t
up to that.  She was an emotional basket case for years after his
death, and my lack of recall of that time speaks eloquently of my own
mental state then.  There were days that Mama was doing well to
open some canned soup for supper.  I learned to “cook” then,
opening the cans and heating the soup and serving us both.

Even after Mama began adjusting to life without Daddy, December would
plunge her back into deep depressions every year.  The Christmas
blues was a simple fact of my adolescence, something Mama and I shared
and got through somehow, leaning on each other, the blind leading the
blind.  Even after I was out of her house and on my own or in one
of my marriages, Christmas blues usually found me.  It was an
insecure life I led and I was scared much of the time.  Seeing
tinsel and lights, the warmth showing from out of other people’s
windows and the happiness in their eyes made me that much more aware of
how much less I had than I had had in those idyllic years of childhood.

I learned to cope with the blues the way my mother did, by getting
loaded.  After I stopped doing that, I realized that it had never
really helped.  It just made things worse in the long run. 
So, yesterday evening after Doug went to bed, while I was baking my
wheatless, gluten-free, sugar-free, pumpkin-free squash pies, for just
a moment when a tinge of lonely blue hit me, I didn’t quite know what
to do.  Getting loaded was not an option.  I’d need to wait
until 9 PM when cell minutes lost their cost before I could call
Greyfox, and being up to my elbows in pie fixings made getting online
and tracking down any other friends impractical.

For “company”
and diversion, I turned on the radio, public radio, and caught the last
part of All Things Considered followed by an Anglican Festival of 9
Lessons in Carols as I finished up my work, just background sound to
dispel that feeling of being all alone in the world.  About the
time I got the pies done and sat down at the PS2, they segued into an
hour of Jonathan Winters reading Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  It was ending when Greyfox called, and by then my mood had swung from blue to pink, from down to up.

We talked a while, caught each other up on the day’s events and
discussed plans for today, then said good night.  The game wasn’t
engaging my attention so, leaving the radio on, I got into bed and
started reading.  It was much too early to sleep, but the bed is a
warm spot and last night’s weather was COLD.  A brisk wind was
sucking the heat out of the house and I had reason through the night to
be glad that this time while Doug’s “diurnal rhythm”, asynchronous as
it is to that of this planet, took him around to being wakeful in the
daytime, my own sleep irregularities had brought me around to being
awake at night to stoke the stove while he sleeps.

[aside:  Recently, when I had persuaded Doug to stay up later than
he liked, so we could make a run to the spring for water during
daylight, he complained that it had screwed up his diurnal
rhythm.  I remarked that his "rhythm" was more like brownian
motion.  It got a laugh, which was what I was going for, but
there's some truth in it, too.  Although for the most part he runs
on a daily cycle that's around 26 hours long, occasionally he will
either stay awake for up to 36 hours or sleep up to 14 hours and throw
the whole cycle into a different phase.]

My book is very
absorbing.  The Camulod Chronicles series is so absorbing for me
that after I’d gone through the first few volumes I stopped in the
middle of Uther because it was too intense and was monopolizing my
consciousness.  I was reading long into the night as I’m back to
doing again now, and dreaming in the Dark Ages British culture after I
put the books down at night.  Following a break of a few months, I
got back into Uther and finished it and now I’m off and running again
with Merlyn.  It’s an addiction.

Last night, my attention
was divided between the book and the Christmas music on the
radio.  I listened to carols from various times and in many
languages, and to little Christmas stories.  Then around 2 AM, it
switched to piano jazz.  Jazz is my music.  Last night the
Japanes pianist Harumi was asked what jazz means to her.  She
answered, “freedom.”  Nailed it in one word!

We were in
the second hour of the jazz when Doug got up, and I went on reading and
listening into the beginning of Weekend Edition, finally putting out my
light and settling down about 5 AM.

Greyfox got here before
noon, and I had been up for a few hours by then.  He brought some
groceries and a gift:  a 2-DVD set of old Western movies.  He
shared some news stories, we had a few laughs, and he took Koji, who
was ecstatic to have his whole pack together again, out for a short
walk in the brisk subzero breezes.  As I was cooking the steak for
our lunch Charley, my ex, called for an exchange of holiday
wishes.  A little later, Charley’s mother, the only grandparent of
Doug’s who lived long enough to get to know him, called.

The
subject of age came up, as Greyfox and I were talking about arthritis
and fibro.  Then he said that one of the worst parts of getting
old is his never-ending case of sticker shock.  He reminisced for
a moment about how cheap this thing and that USED TO be, and I said
that my mother used to tell me about when eggs were a dime a dozen and
you could get bread for two cents a loaf.  Doug chimed in to say
that the scariest thing about getting old was turning into your
parents.  At that Greyfox said his sister, scary old Alyce, is
turning into their dad:  She’s crazy, in active alcoholism and
drug addiction, her kids are afraid of her….

At one point earlier this afternoon, I reminded Greyfox of last Christmas
– the one he said, “didn’t suck.”  From all indications, his
holiday memories are even more painful than my own.  I asked him
how this Christmas is for him.  He said, “It’s great! 
…doesn’t seem like Christmas at all.” 

The
species Rangifer tarandis is native to Scandinavia, Greenland, and other northern areas of Europe, Asia, and
North America.  They had been native to Scotland
until their extinction in the tenth century, and they were reintroduced
there about half a century ago.  The wild ones are tasty and
nutritious, and the domesticated ones are working stock in addition to
being a source of meat and milk.  Generally they pull sleds, but
in Siberia they are also ridden.

Around here, in Alaska, they are known as caribou unless they are
domesticated, in which case they become reindeer.  That makes
sense doesn’t it?  Deer with reins are reindeer.  

They
are known from archaeological evidence in northern Europe to have been domesticated since
sometime between the bronze age and iron age, close to three thousand
years ago.

The earliest known print reference to Santa Claus with (possibly) a single flying reindeer is this from William B. Gilley in A Children’s Friend (1821):

“Old Santeclaus with much delight
His reindeer drives this frosty
night
O’er chimney tops, and tracks of snow
To bring his yearly
gifts to you.”

The image of Santa with a team of
reindeer appears to have originated with Thomas Nast in a series of
illustrations he drew between1863 and 1886, a few of which were copied
as color lithographs by George P. Walker to illustrate a popular
children’s book, Santa Claus and his Works, around 1870.

(My source for much of the above info is B.K. Swartz, Jr.’s college course on Christmas history.)

The likeliest origin for both Santa’s
aeronautical reindeer and his residence at the North Pole is in the
Russian myth of Father Frost, “ded moroz”.  In some ways, Father Frost is
similar to the Anglo-American Jack Frost who personifies and explains
the appearance of frost, hoarfrost, rime and Ice
in freezing weather.  Even though Jack Frost has a chilling
effect, he is an elfin and friendly character in comparison with the
ancient pagan Father Frost, a powerful smith who forges rigid chains of
ice to bind water to the earth in winter.  Some aspects of the
Saint Nicholas legend have adhered to the older pagan ded moroz in contemporary Russia.

That most famous reindeer of all, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was
the brainchild of Robert L. May.  May worked for the
Montgomery-Ward department store chain as an advertising copy
writer.  The company had been buying Christmas coloring books as a
promotional give-away to children.  In 1939, Robert May was asked
to come up with a story that could be printed in a give-away
booklet.  It was a money-saving scheme.

May, drawing in part on the tale of The Ugly Duckling and his own
background (he was a often taunted as a child for being shy, small, and
slight), settled on the idea of an underdog ostracized by the reindeer
community because of his physical abnormality: a glowing red nose.
Looking for an alliterative name, May considered and rejected Rollo
(too cheerful and carefree a name for the story of a misfit) and
Reginald (too British) before deciding on Rudolph. He then proceeded to
write Rudolph’s story in verse, as a series of rhyming couplets,
testing it out on his 4-year-old daughter Barbara as he went along.
Although Barbara was thrilled with Rudolph’s story, May’s boss was
worried that a story featuring a red nose — an image associated with
drinking and drunkards — was unsuitable for a Christmas tale. May
responded by taking Denver Gillen, a friend from Montgomery Ward’s art
department, to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sketch some deer. Gillen’s
illustrations of a red-nosed reindeer overcame the hesitancy of May’s
bosses, and the Rudolph story was approved. Montgomery Ward distributed
2.4 million
copies of the Rudolph booket in 1939, and although wartime paper
shortages curtailed printing for the next several years, a total of 6 million copies had been given by the end of 1946.

The
post-war demand for licensing the Rudolph character was tremendous, but
since May had created the story as an employee of Montgomery Ward, they
held the copyright and he received no royalties. Deeply in debt from
the medical bills resulting from his wife’s terminal illness (she died
about the time May created Rudolph), May persuaded Montgomery Ward’s
corporate president, Sewell Avery, to turn the copyright over to him in
January 1947. With the rights to his creation in hand, May’s financial
security was assured. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was printed
commercially in 1947 and shown in theaters as a nine-minute cartoon the
following year. The Rudolph phenomenon really took off, however, when
May’s brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, developed the lyrics and
melody for a Rudolph song. Marks’ musical version of “Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer” (turned down by many who didn’t want to meddle with
the established Santa legend) was recorded by Gene Autry in 1949, sold
two million copies that year, and went on to become one of the
best-selling songs of all time (second only to “White Christmas”). A TV
special about Rudolph narrated by Burl Ives was produced in 1964 and
remains a popular perennial holiday favorite in the USA.

May quit his copywriting job in 1951 and spent seven years
managing his creation before returning to Montgomery Ward, where he
worked until

his retirement in 1971. May died in 1976, comfortable in the life his reindeer creation had provided for him.

(source:  snopes.com)

I had one of those books when I was
little, and as children do I read it over and over until I knew the
story by rote.  Although the best-known Rudolph is the
one from the song and the subsequent short film narrated by Burl Ives,
May’s original Rudolph wasn’t quite the same
story.  Originally, Santa found Rudolph by accident when he
noticed the glow from his nose as he was delivering gifts to the home
where Rudolph lived with his loving parents.   I recall the
first time I heard Gene Autry sing the song.  Mama and I were in
our kitchen listening to the radio.  I must have been five years
old, because that was when that record was released.  I was
outraged and complained to my mother:  “He got the story all
wrong!”

---

I had planned to go to Wasilla today, to
drive the van from the rehab center to the NA meeting.  It is
snowing again here now after a brief rainfall this morning.  The
highway is slushy in spots and icy in some of those places and in some
places where there is no slush.  The back roads between here and
the highway are even less navigable.  Greyfox’s report suggests
that it’s even worse in town, so I’m staying home. 

Doug, in between pauses to catch his breath, is shoveling snow from the
roof so it won’t collapse on us.  When I woke this morning, he was
at the PS2.  Sleepily, I asked, “How would you feel if you were
sitting there when the roof caved in on us from the snow load?” 
He thought for just the perfectly-timed comedic beat and answered,
“Probably annoyed, because I wouldn’t have saved my game for a while.”

My plan for this unexpected bonus time is to spend some of it at the
computer and the rest working on a gluten-free pastry recipe for pie
crust and a sugar-free “pumpkin” pie recipe to make use of some of the
winter squash I have.  I also need to bake a fresh batch of those
gluten-free muffins that are my main source of nutrients.  Not
getting to town today means that Doug’s and my Xmas feast will be an
improvised thing minus the spiral-sliced ham that Greyfox bought for us
and a few other things I meant to buy, but there’s no danger of our
going hungry.  The larder is full and there’s tenderloin steak in
the freezer.

Any suggestions for tomorrow’s Christmas Countdown segment?  If no
one gives me any better ideas, I’ll probably go back to Santa Claus for
an illustrated history of the evolution of his image.

UPDATE — Doug was on the roof
shoveling snow, when I noticed that sunset had turned the light to
pink, so I got a couple of shots of it.

It kept on
snowing.

Throughout yesterday and into the night, the snow grew deeper.  I
would have walked out and taken a comparison shot from the same POV as
yesterday’s, but the snow that was merely over my boot tops in that
previously packed path then is over my knees now.  Going out there
would be stupid.

Instead, I stayed in the paths that Doug has shoveled this morning, and kept the snow out of my boots this time.

Greyfox called several times yesterday.  On one of those calls, he
left the message that the weather service was predicting three to four
feet of snow overnight north of Talkeetna.  We are just a bit
south and west of Talkeetna.  We got between one and two feet here.

Branches
that yesterday were only sagging a little are bowed today.  If
there was some sunshine, it would be pretty, “like a Christmas card,”
as so many people have said of my photos. 

With this gray sky, it looks a lot like the Christmas cards we get from
our garbage collectors.  The Alaska Resource Group, which runs
Talkeetna Refuse, has sent us the same photo cards for each of the last
3 holiday seasons, as long as we’ve been using their services. 
It’s a monochromatic snowy scene, presumably local, of a clear stream
in a rocky creek bed.  They must have bought a wholesale lot of
those cards, and maybe they have fewer customers than someone had
anticipated when that order was placed.  For my money, they could
find better ways to spend it than mailing out greeting cards.

I know I may be sounding like Scrooge there.  The competitive sport of holiday spending baffles and befuddles me.  NFP
addressed that issue today, with a link to an excellent opinion piece
from some newspaper columnist. 

This may be an appropriate place
to insert the pic of our holiday wreath, our only seasonal
decoration.  It came from the dumpster at Felony Flats and I have it because Greyfox
didn’t want it.  The evergreen boughs are fake, and the fir cones
are real.  The pink flowers and berries were presumably red before
they faded, and the rope of aurora borealis beads appears to be
something the person who discarded it had added (assuming that that
person didn’t make the entire wreath) because Greyfox also fished out
of the dumpster, at the same time, two more such bead strings new in
the box.  I think it is lovely in its simplicity.  One of the loveliest things
about it is that it is salvage, recycled.

Doug
has gotten most of the snow off my car so I can go to town
tomorrow.  It is again my turn to drive the rehab van to the NA
meeting.  It’s my mental health day, getting out among people,
doing something useful and therapeutic.  I have been giving some
thought about how and when to post tomorrow’s segment of the countdown
to Christmas.  I’ve also been giving some thought to what its
topic might be.  No firm conclusions on either of those questions
yet.

I have a topic for today, however.

Today’s topic is:

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why would an almighty loving god send its
offspring to a little planet circling a minor sun near the end of just
another arm of just another spiral galaxy for the purpose of
sacrificing himself so that the mortal creatures of that planet might
be saved by that sacrifice from the jealous wrath of that loving
almighty god?  Balderdash, nonsense and bullshit!

What would Jesus do?  What would that incarnation of the Christos
do if he were here now to respond in a televised interview to such a
question?  Would he shake his head and tsk tolerantly at the way
his message has been distorted, or would he go berserk as he did with
the moneychangers in the temple?

It’s apparent to any open-minded seeker of wisdom and truth that the
Apostle Paul, Saul of Tarsus, was the origin of the “sacrificial lamb”
crap that crept into Christianity.  It was a central tenet of his
native religion, Mithraism.   Every year, Saul’s people would
select a “Solar King”, a poor sap who was wined, dined and lionized,
fattened up for the slaughter and then killed as a sacrifice to their
jealous vengeful god so that he wouldn’t take his wrath out on the rest
of them for their human frailties.

The Heavenly Father that Joshua ben Joseph spoke of and worshipped was and IS loving, omniscient, omnipotent and far above such petty bullshit. 

So, if any of my readers has gotten this far and can either agree that
the “sacrifice” model for Christ’s incarnation doesn’t entirely make
sense, (and has not already totally rejected the very idea of Christ for that reason) and/or can openmindedly accept that there might be another
explanation that makes more sense, I offer this:  Christ wanted
to come here because (a) the planet had gotten a bad deal, some bum
breaks and (b) he wanted to dispel some of the illusion and delusion
about our nature, our purpose and our destiny that had come about due to the masses of
us not having been thinking too clearly and having been misled by a
bunch of manipulative warlords and priests.

I have always liked the way Vermont Royster of the Wall Street Journal
put it in 1949 for this editorial the paper reprints every December:

There is only one way to liberty, and we have to start digging now.

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

It

has been snowing here today, a heavy wet snowfall that sticks to the

trees.  Branches are bending under the weight. 

I’m not complaining about the snow.  The precip comes with a

welcome warming trend.  Yesterday, the temperature decreased

throughout the day, starting around fifteen degrees.

Just to lighten my mood, make it seem

warmer

in here and give a little acknowledgement to the Solstice holiday, I

turned on every light in the front part of the house. The temp was

down

to near zero Fahrenheit outside before I went

to bed early this morning.  When I awoke later in the
morning,

it

was up into the low twenties, a much more comfortable temperature, and

one that makes it easier for our little woodstove to keep my

houseplants alive.

Recently, my body hasn’t been wanting to get to sleep early. 

I’ve

been tending to stay up later and later into the wee small hours, and

then awaken when the sky grows light outside, between nine and ten AM

this time

of year.  I question what’s behind it, but I don’t fight

it. 

Making peace with my body and its rhythms is part of my healing

process.

Last night, I was sitting in bed reading a good book, in the climactic

ending sequence of Uther

by Jack Whyte.  Time flew, and when it became apparent that I

would be awake for the Solstice Moment, about a quarter to four this

morning, I got up and turned on the porchlight to illuminate the

festive wreath hanging on the door of the little cabin beside our

trailer.  It is our only outward display of holiday

celebration.

Then I lit some incense, a Celtic blend in harmony with my reading

material, and some candles:  red, green and white. 
I

tuned

in to the planetary consciousness and felt

the turning of the season.  It felt good.  Back in

bed, I

finished one book and started the next in the series, read until I

felt

sleepy and then snuffed the candles and turned out all but the one

light that is generally left on for minimal illumination when one of

us

is at the PS2.  Doug went on playing and tending the stove as

I

slept.

[aside:  Freaky little thing -- an odd-looking, hanging,

gooseneck-style lamp with a small cupped shade painted to look like

the

toon Tasmanian Devil, which hangs over the computer desk, hasn't

worked

for weeks.  I thought the bulb was burned out.  As I

was

typing the copy above, it came on, lit up.  At the same time,

Koji, nearby, started to growl, with his hackles up... and

there

was light.]

Merrie

Yule, Y’All

For the past week, I have been writing about what Christmas means to

me, sharing some memories, and posting a few research pieces about the
pagan roots of some

common holiday traditions.  I was complimented by lionne

on my research, and I must confess that I really enjoy doing

it. 

Whenever any person, event or random thought suggests a topic on which

to dive into the vast library that is the internet, I do it with

pleasure and get great kicks out of what I learn there.

I guess there might be some of my readers who do not realize that the

Mass of Christ or Christmas is not Baby Jesus’s birthday.  It
just

isn’t.  Historical documents from the time of the Roman
Empire

give evidence of that fact.  While I’ve no objection to
people

choosing any time of the year, or the whole year long, to celebrate the
earthly incarnation of

the Christos, my Virgoan skin crawls when they ignorantly and
inaccurately call the

Saturnalia holiday, “Baby Jesus’s Birthday.”  In last year’s

Yule/Saturnalia
blog, I wrote:

Okay, so that gives us some clear clues to the seasonal timing of Baby

Jesus’s birth, and I’ve mentioned one possible good reason for the

early church leaders to choose to co-opt the already popular Winter

Solstice/New Year’s Roman holiday for their Mass of Christ. 
Now

I’ll tell you more about Saturnalia.

The rhetorician

Libanius said:

Sound familiar?

    

(According to

wikipedia.org,

Libanius (Greek: Libanios)

(ca

314 AD – ca 394)

was a Greek-speaking teacher of

rhetoric of the later Roman Empire, an educated pagan of the Sophist school in an

Empire that was turning aggressively Christian and publicly burned its

own heritage and closed the academies.)

---

So, that covers Saturnalia and Kalends, Winter Solstice through New

Years, which roughly corresponds to the West’s annual winter

celebration that many of us call the “Christmas holidays.”

Yule was a Northern European celebration, already in practice when the

conquering Romans first encountered the Celts, Saxons and
Germans.

 

According to 13moons.com:

Okay, so it’s a “lesser” sabbat.  I suppose that’s
understandable

for a bunch of people who tend to celebrate life and
fertility. 

Although I do endeavor to live in the Now, I still find myself looking

forward in time.  At summer solstice, the thought that occurs
to

me is that days will be getting shorter and soon the midnight sun will

be gone. 

At this time of year, it is not the darkness on which I focus, but
that

embryonic new year gestating within the frozen Earth, and the coming
of

the Sun. 

good news just when I needed it

I was logged into my ISP just now, “cleaning my spam filter”, rescuing
a few valid emails that had been diverted there and deleting a ton of
spam.  That job tends to get me down because the subject lines of
the spam run the gamut from intriguingly vague to distressingly
explicit.  The volume increases during the holiday season, too,
I’ve noticed.  It takes attention, discrimination and endurance to
get through that task.

For a drug addict, wading through that spam can be like a walk in a
minefield.  The one that said, “take some Valium and have a
blast,” didn’t tempt me.  I’ve never been a downer freak. 
The ones that offer relief from depression, though — they do give me
pause.  It would be too damned easy to poison myself, and there
are too damned many toxin merchants out there clamoring for my
money.  Oh for the good old days when it was just a few sleazy
types hanging around the schoolyard whispering, “Wanna try something
fun, little girl?  The first one’s free.”

While I was fighting my way through the “message center,” a call came
through on the CallWave from Greyfox, and it was good news indeed.

In October, Michael our friend the mechanic had told Greyfox his water
pump needed replacing.  The Old Fart had been replacing more
coolant than oil because of a leak at the pump.  Michael told
Greyfox that the engine would have to be hoisted out to reach the water
pump and while he was at it he should probably change the timing belt
because the car is an ’88 model and they usually don’t last much longer
than that.  Greyfox went to Mountain View Auto Parts, our favorite
because it’s a local family-owned business and their prices are
generally much lower than the national superstores like Schucks and
NAPA who spend so much on advertising.  The parts cost about
$90.00 there, and would have cost as much at $250 at one of the others.

Michael had injured his back before he got the work done.  Greyfox
hung onto the parts and kept adding coolant and viewing the puddles
under his car with alarm.  When the alarm edged over into panic he
called around to a few of the local garages and was really alarmed at
how much they wanted to charge for the work.  Michael does his
work on his off hours at the place where he is employed, and charges us
a lot less than the going rate for shop time.

This weekend, Michael had recovered enough and caught up with his other
backlog of work so that he could take the car in.    He
discovered that the water pump problem was just a loose screw.  He
tightened it.  When he got a look at the timing belt he could see
that it had been replaced recently — that probably happened during the
repairs after the wreck that rendered that car cheap enough that
Greyfox could afford to buy it.  So Michael put everything back
together and had Greyfox’s car back to him within a couple of
hours.  He didn’t charge him anything.

That was the good news.  The bad news was that the receipts for
the parts said, “no returns after thirty days.”  But today when
Greyfox went into Mountain View Auto, they took the parts back and gave
him a break on the restocking fee.  He was crowing with happiness
as he recorded his message to me.  This time of year, when
business is slack, we live off our credit.  Today, Greyfox has
some cash for groceries.  That’s really good news.

I will be back later with the Christmas blog, on mistletoe and holly and other woody subjects.

self-control

I have just been making dough for pizza crust.  Doug likes pizza,
and doesn’t like tomato sauce, so we’ve been planning to make pizza
using an alfredo sauce, lots of cheese and several meats: 
pepperoni, chunks of “breakfast” type sausage, slices of hot links with
reindeer meat (’tis the season to eat reindeer, y’know), and
hamburger.  He has no interest in vegies or fruit on his
pizza. 

I had been thinking it was about time to use up the wheat flour I’d had
on hand when I stopped eating wheat two years ago.  Anyhow, I
found some packets of yeast in the fridge with freshness dates in 1999,
last century’s — the past millennium’s — leavening.  I think
this was something Jono and Sarah left here at the time we moved into
this place in ’98.  To my surprise and delight, it is still alive
and active.  The sponge rose nicely in the bowl on top of the
woodstove.

I added the salt and oil then and the remainder of the flour and
kneaded it in the bowl for ten minutes before placing it back on the
woodstove to rise again.  What I did NOT do, and what motivated me
to sit down here and boast a bit, was this:  I did not pinch off
any of the lovely soft fleshy-feeling yeasty wheat dough and stick it
in my mouth.

Mama always told me that eating raw dough would give me parasites in my
intestines.  Since mama told me many fibs and shared a lot of
misinformation with me during her lifetime, I chose not to heed those
warnings.  Now I know better.  I gotta tell you the stuff was
tempting.  It isn’t just the taste, but the mouth feel of all that
gooey gluten.  I’ve always preferred raw bread dough and pastry
over the finished products.  But I battled systemic yeast
infections for years.  I’m not going back there again by my own
hand.

See ya later, all.  I shall be back in a while, with another Christmas blog.

With one week left until
Christmas,

I want to thank some of you for illustrating my point.  I tend, in
my writing, to present the facts and observations that have led me to
some conclusions, and leave the conclusions up to my readers.  One
of my favorite clients, JadedFey, who became one of my favorite friends after I’d done some readings for her – it was she who persuaded me to blog on Xanga, by the way, in case anyone’s looking for someone to thank or blame – has called that style of exposition, “obscure.”

I realized after reading the comments below that I was probably being,
in Sarah’s sense, “obscure” again with my entries on some of the myths
surrounding prevalent Christmas traditions such as Satan Claws, Gaspar,
Melchior, and Balthasar.

TheCrimsonNinja wrote, in response to my blog on the Three Magi:

I would take vehement exception to the judgement that “everything
in the Bible” is more symbolic than literal, and to the contention that it was written as fiction.  People have long
been using symbolic and metaphorical figures of speech — a fine
example of a disastrous misinterpretation of such a New Testament
passage can be found in the recent news of a mother who killed her baby girl
by cutting off her arms
– but I feel it
is safe to assume that most of what is written there is literally what
the authors meant to say and, in many cases, what they remembered,
understood, or believed to be true.  The propensity among
preachers to
freely interpret Scripture in their own symbolic terms is, in my
opinion, one of the primary factors that have debased and devalued the
Bible as a historical document.

The various authors’ perceptions of reality might have been skewed, and
in some cases
their intentions might have been less than honorable.  After the
end of the Babylonian captivity, a cabal of Judaic priests made a
concerted power grab through a rewriting of Scripture, for example, and
during the Holy Roman Empire, Justinian and Theodora convened a
conference of tame scholars and Churchmen to rewrite existing Scripture
to suit their beliefs and political advantage.  These are facts
known to scholars because we have documents to compare from before and
after the changes.

True, some of the authors of biblical materials are now “anonymous,”
their identities having been lost or having long been obscured by
accident or design.  But we can also reliably trace the authorship
of some of the Bible.  For the oldest parts of the Old Testament,
it is fairly easy for a careful reader, for example, to determine
whether a particular passage originates in the “E Document” (E for
Elohim), or the “J Document” (for Jehovah), and we know the cultural origins of both documents.  Of the four authors
of the Gospels of Christ:  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (to give another easy example), it is
fairly evident that Luke was a Greek who never in his life laid eyes on Jesus the Christ.  That in no way betokens anonymity.

This admirable comment from astrohooker beautifully embodies Buddha’s words from the Kalama Sutra that I have quoted in my sidebar, the quote that concludes, “…after
observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with
reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all,
then accept it and live up to it.”

For most people that would be a wise course, but too many people
believe in the literal truth of every word of Holy Writ, of whatever
religion, no matter how debased, deluded, degraded or simply untrue
those words may be.  And far too many people, perhaps even a
larger number than those who believe the Holy Writs themselves, believe
the symbolic interpretations, paraphrases, distortions, and specious
additions such as the story of the Three Magi.

I don’t often write of my beliefs or of my religion, not nearly so
often as I simply express them in my actions and ideas.  Please
note that my beliefs are separate from my religion.  My basic core
belief is that the less we believe the better off we are.  My
personal path of self-development involves questioning all my beliefs
and either upgrading them into the knowledge category, relegating them
to the ignorant myth, fearful superstition, or wishful thinking
category and dismissing them, or keeping them as working hypotheses
pending further investigation.

I do not believe in God.  And, NO, I am not an atheist.  The
deity I know is nothing at all like the jealous and vengeful
micro-managing God that most atheists don’t believe in.  I am a
Christian who does not believe in God.  I’m a gnostic, one of
those outcast Christians that the mainstream of Christianity, the
Apostolic followers of Peter and Paul, despise, fear and disavow. 
They claim that because we do not accept the distorted creed of the
Church Fathers that allows them to piously hate Pagans, Jews and
Muslims and subjugate women, to cite just a few of the more egregious examples, we are not truly Christian.

I use the tag anyway because one of the alternate tags that has been
suggested, “Jesusonian”, is meaningless to most people, and “gnostic”
to far too many people suggests “agnostic.”  People, far too many
people, are grossly ignorant and stupidly content with their
ignorance.  For the benefit of  those of my readers who are
ignorant but not content with that state, I’ll explain.  The
gnosticism which is my religion is not Gnosticism with a capital
“G”.  That’s a group of organizations, each with its own set of
creeds and dogmas. 

The gnosis I practice is simply a direct communion between my spirit
and the Spirit of the Christos.  The deity I revere is genderless,
non-corporeal, omnipresent and infinite.   We mortals have
powers of Will and manifestation that some people call godlike.  I
do not hestitate to use those powers, nor do I blame the deity when
what I manifest jumps up and bites me in the butt.

While the deity of my understanding manifests itself to me through my
own mind and soul, I do not avoid the study of other people’s
expositions of their spirituality.  That is a form of fellowship,
of sharing the Spirit.  From my pre-teens into my thirties, I
studied many major and minor religions.  The year I was in ninth
grade I read both the King James Bible and Webster’s New Collegiate
Dictionary.  While it’s true that I did learn more of value from
the dictionary than from King James, I got some interesting stuff from
the Bible, too, and it sparked the rest of my religious study.

To date, I have read (if memory serves) seven separate translations and
one paraphrase of the Christian Bible.  One paraphrase was more
than enough.  Such travesties of self-serving misinterpretation
are, I think, responsible for much of the cultural decadence of our
society.  Under cover of an attempt to render the bible into
common American English, they omit or distort many of the key concepts
of the original work.

After those decades of study, I have settled on the NIV, New
International Version, as my Bible of choice when I feel it’s
appropriate to quote the bible (usually when some bible-thumper has
been misquoting it at me).  That is, the NIV is the one I go to
when I need to look up a verse to quote.  Its international and
interfaith commission of scholars and translators did an accurate and
thorough job, and where there are conflicts over the correct
translation of a passage the book supplies all the possibilities. 
I like that, their giving me the option of deciding which fits
best.  Often, however, the quotations that come to mind without my
having to look them up are phrased in the argot of the era of King
James.

In my opinion, as spiritual works and guides to highly-evolved human
conduct, there are better works in print than the Holy Bible, Qur’an,
Torah, Popol Vuh, or any of their ilk.  Two of these I most enjoy
and respect are The Urantia Book and Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God. 
To me, it stands to reason that as our species continues to evove
intellectually, culturally, and spiritually, we naturally achieve a
broader and deeper understanding of reality.  To rephrase that,
the old books are obsolete.  In the absence of and toward the
establishment of a direct communion with the Great Spirit, such
recently channeled works can be of great assistance to the spiritual
seeker, much more assistance than works composed millennia ago and
perverted to the political ends of many power elites in the
interim.   How can we expect to find God in books of human
politics that advocate such ungodly practices as genocide and genital
mutilation, to cite just an alliterative couple of examples?