The Hot Dog Code.

Liz Red Shoes Crokin is at it again, with yet another screeth* about the thousands of elite satanic pedophiles who are going to be taken down (they are! they really truly are!), wrapped in a couple of conspiracies and white hat false flag something or others. I think Ms. Crokin has some serious issues, to say the least. Anyroad, I don’t have time to go through the whole mess once more, but I’ll leave you all with this particular tidbit, then you can decide whether or not you want to read the rest:

Crokin said that the news reports about her battle against Teigen and Legend have inspired people to look into the Pizzagate theory themselves and start to ask questions like “why are these people ordering $65,000 worth of hot dogs to the White House under Obama’s administration?”

When Westall asked what the significance of that was, Crokin explained that “hot dog” is pedophile code for “little boy.”

Uh huh. I think the national hot dog and sausage council might not be happy with you, Liz. Do you asses ever get your pathetic minds out of the gutter? The full mess is at RWW.

*Screeth – Screed + Froth.

Stuff.

Time for more medical stuff, so we’re going to be in town the next couple of days. I’ll have the regular stuff up for Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don’t know that I’ll get much more blogging done than that, and there might be a late start on Thursday morning. TNET will be open, as always. Now, if we can just get water back (town’s water main is out again.)

Have An Apple Tree? Get Out Your Toast!

Toast swinging from an apple tree. Richard Gillin/(CC BY-SA 2.0)

Toast swinging from an apple tree. Richard Gillin/(CC BY-SA 2.0.

I do have an apple tree, so I’ll have to get some bread toasted, have some nice cider to pour and drink, and make a lot of noise.

After the New Year’s champagne is drunk and the Christmas tree is set out on the curb, the holiday season feels emphatically over. But in many apple-growing regions, there’s still one last celebration in January. Instead of champagne, the drink is hard cider. And instead of decorating a chopped-down pine, revelers tromp into apple orchards to drink and encourage a good harvest.

Apple wassailing, which has origins in southeast and southwest England, features a procession to the best apple tree in the orchard. There, revelers sing to the tree, decorate it with slices of toast to feed good spirits (and birds), and shoot rifles to scare away demons. Christmas-carolers may be familiar with the term “wassail.” An old Anglo-Saxon term for “Be in good health,” it became shorthand for both carolling and a spiced hot drink, made with either ale or cider. While pouring cider around tree roots, everyone usually shares a fanciful bowl of wassail.

You can read more about these apple tree traditions at Atlas Obscura. They date back about 500 years, and no need to worry about having missed it:

Often, it’s celebrated on January 5, which is Twelfth Night, the last day of the Twelve Days of Christmas. But Twelfth Night used to be on January 17. When the British switched from the ancient Julian calendar to the Gregorian system, though, in 1752, many counties kept the tradition on the old date. (If you live in an apple-growing area, you can celebrate twice.)

Phoenix.

A ventral view of the bird between two trees, with wings out stretched and head to one side, beating its wingsd and looking for the sun.

A ventral view of the bird between two trees, with wings out stretched and head to one side, beating its wings and looking for the sun.

The phoenix turns to face the sun, beats its wings to fan the flames and is consumed. The image may equally show the bird rising from its own ashes, a symbol of the resurrection.

The phoenix turns to face the sun, beats its wings to fan the flames and is consumed. The image may equally show the bird rising from its own ashes, a symbol of the resurrection.

Text Translation:

[Of the phoenix] The phoenix is a bird of Arabia, so called either because its colouring is Phoenician purple, , or because there is only one of its kind in the whole world. It lives for upwards of five hundred years, and when it observes that it has grown old, it erects a funeral pyre for itself from small branches of aromatic plants, and having turned to face the rays of the sun, beating its wings, it deliberately fans the flames for itself and is consumed in the fire. But on the ninth day after that, the bird rises from its own ashes.

[Read more…]

Anti-Clericalism in Medieval Persian Poetry.

Standford Lecture Handouts.

The above reads:

Better be a beggar than king, better practice vice

And perfidy than be a bigoted, pious puritan;

Better make love with many mistresses in the street

Than make piety and abstinence in public show.

– Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d. 725/1325)

I couldn’t agree more.

The dominant attitude of the anti-clerical rhetoric in Persian poetry is permeated by criticism of judges, lawyers, aesthetics, spiritual advisors, and authority figures of that nature. This is one of the reasons that makes this poetry still relevant. A lot of people today can’t read Milton, because anti-clericalism is no longer part of the normal vocabulary. In the West, we live mostly in a secular society, so the conflict between clerics and anti-clerics does not exist. But that is not the case in the Middle East at all, which makes this conflict very relevant.

Dr. Leonard Lewisohn is Senior Lecturer in Persian and Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the University of Exeter where he teaches Islamic Studies, Sufism, history of Iran, as well as courses on Persian texts and Persian poetry in translation. He specializes in translation of Persian Sufi poetic and prose texts.

This is fascinating, and I learned a great deal. The lecture is below, and the Stanford Lecture Handouts for Anti-Clericalism in Medieval Persian Poetry are here.

Via Medievalists.