Speaker for the Diodes

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." -- Nelson Mandela

[To Christians celebrating on the Western calendar: a blessed Whitsunday -- Pentecost -- to you!]

[Y'all remember Xena: Warior Princess, starring Lucy Lawless, right?]

"In short, when I can tell you how I break the laws of gravity,
 And why my togs expose my intermammary concavity,
 And why my comrade changed her dress from one that fit more comfily
 To one that shows her omphalos (as cute as that of Omphale),
 And why the tale of Spartacus appears in Homer's versicon,
 [She holds up a tomato:]
 And where we found examples of the genus Lycopersicon,
 And why this Grecian scenery looks more like the Antipodes,
 You'll say I'm twice the heroine of any in Euripides!"
   -- from "I am the very model of a heroine barbarian", by Kevin Wald, 1996 [the melody should be obvious, no?] Note: original has footnotes which some folks may find useful and/or entertaining

(Though I'm a night owl and more likely to be falling asleep than getting up at the relevant time, ever since first reading this all those years ago the line "I wake up every morning, ere the dawn is rhododactylous" flits through my head every so often and makes me giggle. When I first saw this, something about the way that word (a) fit so perfectly, (b) yanked me straight back to middle school and Greek class, and (c) was just not a word I expected to see in an English-language piece, made me laugh so hard I had to stop reading to catch my breath. It took me several readings to make it past that line to the rest of the verse and the rest of the song.)

"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom." -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[Donald Glen Arthur Sr.: b. 1931-11-04, d. 1999-05-17]

Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, interviewed by Thomas Rogers in Salon (published 2009-07-07):

[I've had this in the queue for ages; I'm using it today because a friend recently linked to this article about a lawsuit related to the topic.]

"What do they call it ... the primordial soup? The glop? That heartbreaking second when it all got together, the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets." -- Edward Albee, Seascape

[To everyone celebrating the giving of the Torah today, I wish you a good Shavuot (or at least a good nap if you were up all night).]

"My father spent his years fighting his size, wishing he was smaller, weaker, less of a giant. He was taught to hate his body, and he was ashamed of the amount of space he took up. But he passed his strength to me, and I won't squander my inheritance. I will not let myself be diminished." -- Tiffany at morecabaret.com, 2013-05-07 [thanks to multiple friends on FB who linked to this]

"We are learning that those amenities we took for granted before 2003, you know- the luxuries -- electricity, clean water from faucets, walkable streets, safe schools -- those are for deserving populations. Those are for people who don't allow occupiers into their country.

[...]

"We're learning that the leaders don't make history. Populations don't make history. Historians don't write history. News networks do. The Foxes, and CNNs, and BBCs, and Jazeeras of the world make history. They twist and turn things to fit their own private agendas."

-- Riverbend, 2013-04-09 [thanks to twistedchick for linking to this]

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-05-12:

"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness." -- Honoré de Balzac

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

Upon being awakened by a phone call: "I have a recurring nightmare that I'm never going to get a good night's sleep and then I wake up to find it's a recurring reality." -- from Freefall by Mark Stanley, 2013-05-10

"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice." -- Henry Louis Gates

Why this quote today:

"In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on 10 May 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of 10 May, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades 'against the un-German spirit.'" -- Wikipedia: Nazi book burnings

Edited to add:  Also see Monica Roberts' post about that today:

"Many of those books that went up in flames that night as Nazi Propaganda Minster Joseph Goebbels spoke to a crowd of 40,000 that evening came from the recently raided sex institute of Magnus Hirschfeld.

"Hirschfeld [...] was doing much of the pioneering transsexual research there at the Berlin based institute and it went up in flames. [...]

"And as a trans person, you are also left to ponder the question had Hirschfeld's institute and those books and papers survived, how much futher along trans related medical care and research would be if it hadn't been burned that night in the Bebelplatz?"

Today is:
Gregorian: 2013 May 10
Julian: 2013 April 27
Hebrew: 5773 Sivan 1
Islamic: 1434 Jumada t-Tania 29
Persian: 1392 Ordibehesht 20
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.0.7.0
Indian Civil Calendar: 1935 Vaisakha 20

"What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884-10-11, d. 1962-11-07), Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

Stayed up late packing, slept a couple hours, then got up again and have been going for 26 hours and counting w/o more sleep. Am home (if it counts as home before I've picked up Perrine and brought her back here). Check-in at BA was going to charge us a whole lot of money for extra baggage -- nearly 2/3 of what their published policy said, so less than we expected -- then there was a long period of waiting and confusion and phone calls between BA staff and then all of a sudden we weren't being charged anything for extra bags and they handed Mom's credit card back. Don't quite grok what happened but didn't want to jinx it (or add still more delay) by asking. Larnaca security confiscated a bottle of Commanderia and jar of watermelon glyco from Mom's carry-on (no, I don't know what made her think these didn't count as too much liquid to carry on. Heathrow security was annoying as %$^# but I don't think I lost anything there this time. Company that does all the weelchair assistance for all airlines at Heathrow screwed up so the four wheelchair passengers (including Mom) were 20-30 minutes late boarding (they'd been very helpful right up until then), but pilot flew very fast and made up most of the time. Near end, pilot announced the flight was being rerouted "east" to avoid weather; I had trouble recognizing what terrain peeked through clouds, thought I recognized the Magothy river but didn't think that made sense, then I saw something that looked rather a lot like the US Naval Academy, which would mean "east" was really "east and south"; at end of flight, pilot beamed a huge smile when I asked whether we had flown over the Academy and confirmed that we had. US Customs took a long time (mostly waiting in line), opened all of Mom's bags and none of mine, and let everything through after asking what stuff was and how to pronounce "dra(c)hana". Guitar and banjo survived trip as checked baggage in inadequate cases (saz went as carry-on) but the backgammon/chess set I bought in Ledra wound up with a busted latch despite being in middle of suitcase with soft stuff inside & around it. Have done most of what I really needed to get done before I could go to bed (including making the bed, finding the charger for the PowerBook, and getting Mom to find her pills). So: good night. Don't forget, The Homespun Ceilidh Band is performing at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt, MD this weekend. I think I can wake up by then.

(Stella: like I said, when tired, I babble. Now very very tired but tried to keep this short anyhow.)

"A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood. " -- Chinese Proverb [thanks to blueeowyn]

"When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed." -- Russel D. Moore, "Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience", 2010-06-01

From "My Time of Day", from Guys and Dolls (music & lyrics by Frank Loesser:

My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone.

When the smell of the rainwashed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the streetlamp light
Fills the gutter with gold

That's my time of day

From Cyprus Trip

Easter in Cyprus is loud. Between the loudspeakers blaring the chanting and the rest of the service to all the people who couldn't fit inside the church, the fireworks being set of in various parts of the neighbourhood, the church bells ringing chaotically when the big moment is announced (then gradually coming together as they continue ringing), and later on the enthusiastic screaming of children at play after a huge family meal in the wee hours right after church ... it's joyous and it's loudly joyous.

As we were walking up the street to my cousin's house (where we're staying, and where today's big family gathering is) from my other cousin's house (where this morning's huge dinner was), my cousin was startled to notice how alive and awake I was while eveybody else had that "way past my bedtime" feeling -- after a few weeks of seeing how tired I've been most of the time. I've been trying to tell them I'm a night-person... I really did feel more alive then -- I'd been not just awake but interacting with people, and it had been at my time of day; I wasn't merely awake and trying desparately to get to sleep.

I took only a film camera loaded with high-speed black and white film to the church itself, so no digital photos of that to post now.

[To Christians celebrating on the Orthodox calendar, Happy Easter -- Χριστος Ανεστη!]

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake." -- Basil Hume

"My mom used to say that Greek Easter was later because then you get stuff cheaper." -- Amy Sedaris< [This works when it's a week later. When it's a month later, like this year, not so much.]

Bad: I'm still waaaay behind on editing and posting pictures of Cyprus. Good: I did get around to copying all of the Facebook ones to Picasa, which I think will be easier for the non-FB-users (do let me know whether that's correct). I'll try to do another post-of-thumbnails here soon -- where we're staying now, WiFi reception in my bedroom is iffy and moving the charger and plug-adapter back and forth betwen there and the dining room is a bit of a pain). In the meantime, here's one recent image I wanted to comment on, and a link to the Picasa album.

From Cyprus Trip

I find it interesting that some authors' names get transliterated on translated editions (also note 'TZ' -- that's tau zeta -- for 'J', and the P-shapes are uppercase rhos) and others appear in their original alphabet. Also, I'm amused that Dan Brown's book's title appears half in one alphabet and half in the other (I'm guessing that's because the half of the title not translated or transliterated is the name of a famous historical figure usually sppelled in the Roman alphabet). I didn't expect to see as much alphabet-mixing as I've been seeing here.

(I mentioned this elsewhere but I can't remember whether I've said it here: I'm learning to hate words -- especially business names -- that lack internal clues as to which alphabet they're written in. Although reading an alpha as an ay is no biggie, and prounouncing a beta as if it were a bee is close enough to be recognizeable, substituting aitch for eta (uppercase), vee for nu (lowercase), or pee for rho (either case) makes a much bigger difference.)

This afternoon/evening: rest. Tonight: church for midnight (I think) Easter service. (Dunno about anybody else, but it works better for me than a sunrise service, so I'm not questioning the plan.) Tomorrow: huge family gathering and meal for Easter day -- when I asked whether comparing it to American Thanksgiving was apt, I was told that was about right (but the weather will be much warmer). Haven't been to Kyrenia yet -- that might be on the agenda for Monday, I'm not sure. Tuesday maybe some last minute shopping, then figuring out again how everything fits into the suitcases. Wednesday: awake and on the road to the airport too darned early and a long, long flight home.

SATURDAY: a Homespun Ceilidh Band gig -- we're playing at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland. I'd really hoped a bandmate with a more stable Internet connection would create a FB Event for that -- dealing with the photo-posting interface on a slow computer with sporadic signal loss is bad enough! -- but I don't think that's been done yet. Or if it has, they forgot to invite me on FB.

[Also bad: the computer eating the first sentence of my entry. I've put it back in this copy.]

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-04-29:

"Yes, I have a dream, and it's not some MLK dream for equality. I want to own a decommissioned lighthouse. And I want to live at the top. And nobody knows I live there. And there's a button that I can press, and launch that lighthouse into space." -- Stanley Hudson, a character in the U.S. television series "The Office", in the WUPHF episode written by Aaron Shure.

(submitted to the mailing list by Susie Bright)

"Suppose, for a moment, that I were deaf, and had been so from birth. Had heard no sound, ever, was not even capable of decoding vibrations through my body. And suppose someone came to me with the story of a man called Beethoven. I would have to accept the existence of Beethoven (unless I were of the extreme cast of mind that refuses to accept as truth anything I had not personally tested myself) and I could read of his life, see pictures of him and of his home, and the strange artifacts with which he surrounded himself. But what he did, the work to which he gave his life, would be completely physically unprovable to me. I could see reams of paper covered with incomprehensible symbols. I could see films of people waving their arms about, blowing into things, scraping strings fastened to wooden boxes with sticks, just as people see other people making signs across their bodies, standing up and sitting down and singing and kneeling in silence, but it would make no sense to me. Being me (assuming I still was me, which hardly seems likely given such a catastrophic lack) I would, I think, be inclined to take the existence of 'music' on faith; but I could certainly understand such a person deciding that there was no such thing, that it was all a vast game of 'let's pretend' whose rationale completely escaped me. Especially if there were many people like me who could not experience the thing directly. And this is how I think of God." -- smallship1, 2010-12-23