So last night Andrew used his regular every-other-week D&D campaign slot to run a one-shot First Edition adventure, in honor of Gary Gygax, who passed away recently.

The tone of the evening was set when, realizing there were only four gamers present, gkp79 asked, "What would we have done in 6th grade?" The answer, of course, was "Play two characters each." So that is what they did.

Remember the other week when I posted about Charlemagne's edict on medieval gardening? I Googled around looking for the list of herbs he'd instructed his subjects to plant, but apart from a few references to the list and maybe a few items cherry-picked (heh) out of it, I couldn't find the actual list anywhere. Maybe in German, but I'm not going to learn German just for this. Sorry, Germans.

In the back of my mind I thought I'd written a paper once that quoted this. So just now while both girls were napping I dredged up my "Random Research" folder and flipped through old papers until I found "Medieval Herbal Medicine," which I wrote in 1997 for my "Seminar on Monasticism" class at St. Olaf.

And what do I find but a big beautiful paragraph-long quotation, from young-me to older-me. Well, actually from Charlemagne, circa 795 CE. Quotation:

"After the fall of Rome, gardens and vegetables are not mentioned at all in the West until 795, when Charlemagne issued his Capitulare de villis vel curtis imperii, instructions for the administration of towns under his sway. Charlemagne's edict tells his subjects what he expects of them:

We desire that they have in the garden all the herbs namely, the lily, roses, fenugreek, costmary, sage, rue, southernwood, cucumbers, pole beans, cumin, rosemary, caraway, chick pea, squill, iris, arum, anise, coloquinth, chicory, animi, laserwort, lettuce, black cumin, garden rocket, nasturtium, burdock, pennyroyal, alexander, parsley, celery, lovage, sabine tree, dill, fennel, endive, dittany, black mustard, savory, curly mint, water mint, horse mint, tansy, catnip, feverfew, poppy, beet sugar, marshmallows, high mallows, carrots, parsnips, oraches, amaranths, kohlrabis, cabbages, onions, chives, leeks, radishes, shallots, garlics, madder, artichokes or fulling thistles, big beans, field peas, coriander, chervil, capper spurge, clary. (Citation: Helen Morganthau Fox, Gardening with Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933, reprinted Dover Publications, Inc., 1970), p. 45.)"

Whew! Now I know what to plant this weekend, thanks to Helen Morganthau Fox... and Charlemagne! 

I scribbled these lines down myself in Penglai, China, between February and March 1998. (After that my TV broke, so I couldn't record any more.) Some of these are from movies; some are from TV shows.

Can I really take down subtitles that quickly? Usually, yes, if only one or two lines in a row need to be transcribed. I credit my years of devotion to transcribing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles quotations down from live TV, since we didn't have a VCR... but that's an embarrassing anecdote for another time.

Anyway, the subtitles!

Cleaning out my Geocities account of drecky old stuff. Posting some of it here so as not to lose it.

Behold -- Hong Kong Movie Subtitles, as sent to me probably almost 10 years ago (!) by Craig Andera, who introduced me to Call of Cthulhu.

"You are not an object. You are a system. Like with any system, if you change the inputs — change what goes into it — you'll change what comes out."

-- from hackyourself.org

(I would have said "As with any system," but other than that, I agree.)

Lots and lots of fun the past two nights at various par-tays.

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This morning so far: Baked French Toast, bacon and eggs and coffee.

And now I hear the girls waking up, so it's time to put on my mom hat.

"Deprivation feeds desire and can lead to overindulgence at the first opportunity."

--New York Times columnist Jane Brody, in "My Diet Strategy? Controlled Indulgence"

This applies to way more than just food.

"In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you."

Art critic Dave Hickey

More this'n'that.

My $99 stand mixer came last week. So much for Amazon's shipping estimate of October 5 -21! I'm going to move the cake stand up to a high cupboard -- I seldom use it -- so I can have this semi-accessible on the counter.


Tonight's Tanga puzzles were fun, especially the Hypercross. Great stuff! Only 21 more "tanga points" before I "level up" from Lemon to Strawberry. Oh, the suspense... ;-)

Have been playing Kingdom of Loathing for a few weeks now...

I was up at 3:30 yesterday morning nursing the wren, and remembered that right then would be during the "totality" of the lunar eclipse -- the second total lunar eclipse in 2007 so far. The first was in March, and we didn't get to see it here in the Pacific Northwest.

I do remember that particular full moon as being especially beautiful, however. I went to a concert with autumnbottom the night of the March full moon, and there was a misty "moonbow" of diaphanous colors surrounding the full moon like a halo on our way there.

Anyway, yesterday morning I was pretty tired, but I stepped out to gaze at the moon. How often does this happen? Not all that often.

It was rust-red and high in the sky, and its center was marked with a darker circle: the umbra. The color and the shape reminded me of the center of a bull's-eye. Or an old penny. Or a drop of blood flattened between two rectangles of glass.

I was reminded of the bit from Revelations 6: "I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red..."

With its associations with waxing and waning (like pregnancy), its blood-red color during total eclipses, and the circle-within-a-circle pattern reminiscent of a nipple and areola, it's no wonder the moon is considered feminine in most cultures. I always thought it was odd that Tolkein made the moon masculine and the sun feminine in his mythos. It seems he took this from Norse myth. Here's a source I found on the subject:

One of the more interesting features of Old Norse literature - at least on the poetic and linguistic level, is the apparent gender role reversal of sun and moon. In Old Norse, the word for "Sun" (ON - sól) is feminine gendered and "Moon" (ON - máni) masculine. Throughout the body of Old Norse poetry, the sun is consistently referred to as "she" and the moon as "he." This contradicts, somewhat, a notion of the solar man and lunar female which recurs throughout Western literature, language, mythology and folklore.

(from http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20060826081954436)

From the August issue of the online magazine Vocabula:

"To throw an apple at a tree on a warm day after an exam when you are in love and you have an upcoming baseball game produces a different emotion than if any of those ingredients were not present. It is the essence of being human that we can build a single feeling — an answer to the question "how are you" — from an utterly heterogeneous set of factors that define our experience at any given moment...

"If we have an infinite variety of possible emotions, then each of us may have a genuinely unique personal selection. Instead of the ten or so emotions that we all share (commonly suggested in modern psychology), each of us may experience 100,000 different emotions. If novel sentences mean things never meant before, then beyond language, each of us has emotions that no one in the world has ever had before."

(from "Grammar's Gift to Our Image of Human Nature," by Tom Roeper)

"I don't understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine's Day.  When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon."
   ~Author Unknown

Here's a couple of quotations to mull over:


"The reader is reminded, quite seriously! that all the language arts involve either spelling — the laying of spells — or grammar — glamorie,¹ the knowledge of magic."

(Footnote: Walter W. Skeat, in A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford, 1901), writes: "Gramarye: magic. (F.-L.-G.) M.E. gramery skill in grammar, and hence skill in magic—O.F. gramaire, grammar.; see Grammar. O.F. grammaire, (1) a grammarian, (2) a magician. Para. The word glamour is a mere corruption of gramarye or grammar, meaning (1) grammar, (2) magic.")


And,

"The art of swearing flourishes only in a high civilization, and the loss of that art and its powers is a great one."


--From "The Melancholy of Anatomy: Cussing, Cursing, Swearing, and Spelling, " an article by Richard Burnett Carter to be found in the May 2002 edition of The Vocabula Review (vol. 4 no. 5). (A subscription, sadly, is necessary to view the content of articles past the first paragraph or two).

To eat and be eaten is a consummation devoutly to be wished in a
universe that is all mouth, where black holes have a prodigious
appetite for stars and neutrinos are always changing flavors.  Small
wonder then that humans have but the one orifice for food, speech, and
love, or that the mouth, in eating, speaking, kissing, should be the
portal to the serpentine tubing of the gut, the electrical wiring of
the brain, the palpitations of the heart.  The mouth is the shaman's
portal to the Other Side, whether the Other is a kosher-keeping
Yahweh, a vegetarian Puritan, or a dieter's Thin Man.  All foods, all
mouths, are sacred to the force that created them, whatever sumptuary
laws man invents to triumph over his enemies in the vain attempt to
deny that all alike are food for the mouths of worms.

Betty Fussell, from "My Kitchen Wars"


"Mutual pleasures are the sacred core of life: food, body warmth, love
and sex...these things are sacred because they are necessary, because
they confer pleasure in the giving and the receiving, so it is impossible to
say who is giving and who is receiving."
- Marilyn French

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.
Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)