Happy New Year! I’ve spent the day so far lazing around, eating leftover pizza and listening to music. And that’s about all I’m going to do, I think.
I’ll be back at work blogging tomorrow.
In the meantime, does anyone have any especially fond memories of Tom Martin and/or Steele from the past year?
Oh, and here’s a video from an Old School New Wave band called Polyphonic Size. It was 1983. They were from Belgium.
Oldest oral histories that can be tied to events: Okay, I didn’t Google just to be fair. I remember learning about some oral traditions in Africa that go back pretty far, but I’m not sure they can be tied to the events they describe with any authority. This is an interesting puzzle…Or maybe the Edda, which I believe started out as an oral tradition and was only written down later.
Of course my first thought was about what I think of now as oral history, which is a more recent tradition/discipline, and that made me think of the stories collected from former slaves, often (and problematically) by daughters of former slave owners. But that’s modern oral history, which I’ve been trained in but I’m not very good at. (Ask open-ended questions! I tend to default to yes/no questions, which is also why I’m not great at small talk.)
Promise to share the answer eventually! Don’t make me Google!
Well, you know Dumbass is slow on the uptake, LBT.
Though somehow it doesn’t surprise me that a pompous git can manage to call himself a cynic and yet still come across in a dumb-fundy way.
“Cynic” deriving for the Greek words for dog and dog-like is apt for this one. I think it’s been said before, but he’s just a badly-socialised Chiahuahua – lots of yapping and a serious case of Small Dog Syndrome.
I promise, I will share the answer; which includes the proof of verifiabilty.
RE: Argenti
Ooh, I might take you up on that! I do hope to see ya in February, you seem cool.
RE: Kittehs
It’s funny, because I’m LOUSY on Bible knowledge. Everything I know, I learned one of three ways: through Southern Baptist hubby, through linguistics courses, and through world-building research for my Jews-without-a-diaspora story. And even I know goddamn Spinoza!
“you seem cool.”
You too! And Quincy market has the perk of not having to agree on what to eat, I’m thinking Indian myself 🙂
Yeah, Quincy’s a bit of a ways from us, but we should be able to make it, and now that I have a bit of money, I don’t have to do the awkward thing of packing a lunch for the trip!
LBT – you’re still ahead of me for having read the thing, then! My religious education (snerk) was limited to someone coming in and waffling about the parables when I was in primary school, prolly about grade three. All I remember from it is the cutout pics that got stuck on black felt board to illustrate them, and being pissed off that I NEVER got picked to put them on.
I have a general knowledge that the Bible comes from various sources written over centuries, numerous translations, being gone over by an editorial committee (well, the Council of Nicea), bits put in, bits taken out, languages not expressing thoughts the same way, meanings shifting, context being lost … and yet fundamentalists, even if they know this themselves (and I’ve been having a banging-head-against-brick-wall conversation about this on another site over the last couple of days) expect everyone to ignore it. They want the damn thing taken as history, not as metaphor, symbol, moral tale, whatever, with all its contradictions and the stuff that is outright horrifying. And they want us to believe that their genocidal God is all loving as well as all powerful, that it’s perfectly okay to send someone to some sort of eternal punishment for what they think, or innate traits like sexuality.
Even if you read the book as history, it simply doesn’t work. What I really want to know is how the hell all the island species, the species from other continents, got to Noah’s Ark. And how they all fitted (think of the millions upon millions of insects alone). And how he fed and cleaned up after them with his little family crew. And so on.
What did they do with the manatees?
But oh yes, the worldwide flood sent by a loving God who doesn’t mind wiping out innocent animals because he’s pissed off with one species is totally a thing!
LBT — idk which of us is confused here, but Quincy market is backbay Boston, not Quincy. I’m probably telling you things you know though XD
Kitteh — well the koala’s had been in the sphere of water that fell, they had parachutes and backpacks full of eucalyptus. Thank my ex-finacé’s brother for that (and plank eye actually)
But the flood came, “From the deep” It was, apparently, a lot of rain, and a vast upwelling.
OMG THE ORIGIN OF DROP BEARS
He’d heard some fundie theory about it being a sphere of water, to explaining why the earth hadn’t been covered in all that water already. Note that this doesn’t cover wtf happened to the water after.
…we have some interesting discussions, thanks for that oldest verified event info, it answers another long standing question — what’s the oldest we can date the earth to without using carbon dating (certain fundies apparently question carbon dating)
and Naïf missed the point… he tried to drop a topic, because he was in a hole so deep he could see stars at noon, and he just traipses in here as if nothing had happened the past.
Disrespectful of the community.
Oh no, not a drop bear attack!
Why does questioning carbon dating not surprise me …
Oh, LBT, this might be too much like shit you’ve heard, so trigger warning: I wasn’t at all surprised when the fundy I was arguing with on the other site hinted zie thinks Louis is some sort of demonic entity. To which I was, NO, don’t say so, I have totally NEVER had that dumbass idea thrown at me before. And got eye sprain from rolling ’em so hard.
“…thinks Louis is some sort of demonic entity…”
Who? (Sorry, I’m apparently dumb)
Whoops, no, that was me using his name! I’ve always called him Mr K or Mr Kittehs’ here.
::brain fart::
RE: Kittehs
Ah, that old one. I’ve been incredibly lucky; nobody’s had the gall to say so to my face. (Then again, I still fit the old MPD model enough that most people aren’t going to hit the douchitude needed to say, “No, you don’t exist because of rape, you exist because of SATAN.”) And if we do… well, hubby’s a Southern Baptist. I’ll let him handle the theological discussion. (He’s the only religious one here, PLUS the closest to a foreign entity. Watch the brains ASPLODE.) I have had the whole, “you’re not a person, you’re just a coping mechanism!” one, though. Did you know, I once had someone refuse to call me male because dammit, that was encouraging my delusion of existance? True facts.
RE: Argenti
Wow, I’m dumb. I thought Quincy market was in Quincy. I’ve now been corrected by the folks here who’ve been in Boston longer.
We can date some buildings by tree rings.
I suspect the tree rings in the evidence for the actual flood event (localised, and of a nature which makes the, “waters rising from the deep” understandable) is probably datable without carbon dating, which means we have ca 7,000 years ago.
Oh, ok…I was guessing Guy Fawkes from the facial hair, clearly guessing was a stupid idea!
I think fundies are demonic entities myself, and I’m only half joking here.
RE: religious education (see what I did there!)
Back in 2001 or 2002, a friend of mine was taught in RE that if a terrorist group were to attack the school, and ask if anyone believed in god so that they could shoot all the god-believers, admit to belief and Jesus would save her. She would’ve been about 6 or 7 and just in primary school.
Aside from being advice for a ludicrous scenario – militantly athiestic and methodological school shooting terrorist groups aren’t actually a thing that exists – it seem to be some half-remembered perversion of the various Columbine Martyr claims and a *really fucking irresponsible* thing to say to a group of children already shaken up and confused by the September 11 bombings and the confusion arising after them.
(going off-topic…)
I mean, just after those attacks I had no idea who the various people involved or where they’d target. Howard was telling us to be “alert, not alarmed” and there were neighbourhood-watch type things on what to do if people were buying too much fertiliser or whatever and we seemed to get a million lectures on what to do in the case of “terrorists”. Terrorists were just these Bad People waiting out to do something. Once I saw a man going round houses delivering junk mail, went inside to mum, and cried that I worried it could be an anthrax attack on us.
Did I mention that on the day of the September 11 bombings, my class (of 6-year-olds, mostly) was one of the groups packed into the school library to watch the footage?
Well, Guy Fawkes was an older contemporary, so not too far out. 🙂
Ditto to that about fundies. Some of ’em … scary, scary people.
“Did you know, I once had someone refuse to call me male because dammit, that was encouraging my delusion of existance? True facts.”
Fucking assholes.
Quincy market is an easy enough mistake, had to google maps it to prove this to my mother!
Pecunium — I hadn’t thought of that, or had and figured wooden buildings couldn’t last nearly long enough. I have no issue with believing a localized flood, those most certainly happen, it’s the world wide flood that I can’t resist mocking. Weird that it dates ca 7,000 years go though, the fundies in question were young earth-ers, ~5,000 years. So even that would prove that much wrong. (I enjoy batting our trolls about, he enjoys doing the same to fundies 🙂 h
Pecunium:
I literally read this three times, thinking to myself “no, we can’t have romantic relationships with buildings! They’re buildings, not people! I don’t see why their being encircled by trees should make the least bit of difference!”
By localised I mean it covered 170,000 sq miles, and hasn’t receded yet.
LBT – ditto about fucking assholes.
Hope this isn’t oversharing or anything but I really enjoyed reading your blog and learning stuff. It’s partly because it gives me a new perspective on “Okay, what if Mr K is a mental construct rather than the soul of the person who died three hundred years ago?” but mostly because it gives me a totally new perspective on how MPD is not automatically the dreadful awful omgscarystuff we’re commonly given to believe. I really appreciate you putting that info out there just for its own sake.
lowquacks – argh, all that “alert but not alarmed” BS. Howard’s whole reign was about alarming people about one thing or another. Say, have you ever read Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman novels? They’re set in Melbourne late in the Howard years and the narrator gets in some lovely digs at the gummint. Like saying her cats ran out of the building as fast as if they’d been trapped in a lift all night with Phillip Ruddock talking about refugees.