FedEx “Office Print Online” sounds like a great idea for work-at-home types like me. But if it won’t work in Los Angeles, I hold out no hope for southern Colorado.
The follow-up customer (dis)service is equally bad.
No doubt FedEx is promoting this as a wonderful time-saver for the self-employed.
Another strike against the so-called Transportation Safety Administration’s general bureaucratic ineptitude. Add religious discrimination to their list of ugly attitudes.
Judge: Let’s take the witchcraft out of it. If someone complains to you, he’s Jewish, and refers to a stereotype about his Judaism, go to mediation and work it out? Is that management’s response to that?
Lloyd: No. That would not be management’s response to that.
Judge: OK. But witchcraft takes it into a different thing? I guess. I guess witchcraft and Judaism are different in the sense that — what?
Lloyd: To be perfectly honest, sir, at the time, I wasn’t even — I didn’t know anything about witchcraft or Wiccanism. … I wasn’t even aware that Wiccanism was a recognized religion at the time. I had to research it afterwards.
In cave-riddled Tennessee, archaeologists are discovering more and more ancient art, mostly from the High Mississippian culture (roughly coeval with the European Middle Ages) but some much, much older.
Just to whet your interest, here are a few paragraphs from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “America’s Ancient Cave Art.”
The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the Eastern part of North America around 1200 A.D. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spooky-eyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity.
•••
High Mississippian culture fell apart just before the Spanish reached Florida, not just after as you’d expect, given the diseases and the massacres—it’s a riddle of American archaeology.
•••
A good archaeologist, Russ Townsend—he’s now the “tribal historic preservation officer” for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Townsend has worked with Jan on plenty of projects, but he has never gone into the caves. I asked him about it. “The Cherokee interpretation is that caves are not to be entered into lightly,” he said, “that these must have been bad people to go that deep. That’s where they took bad people to leave them. So they can lie on rock and not on the ground. It makes a lot of Cherokee uneasy. The lower world is where everything is mixed up and chaotic and bad. You wouldn’t want to go to that place, where the connection between our world and the otherworld is that tenuous.”
•••
It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffee-table books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird—its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.
If you liked this, you will like Office Hours, “a humor website about academia through the eyes of an adjunct.” Bonus: actual human actors.
Here is Season Two, Episode One, but maybe you will want to start at the beginning.
The AP Stylebook, the holy book of the American journalist, is making some changes, such as now specifying “email” instead of “e-mail.”
In my journalist days, I used to tell people that I had it memorized, but now I have moved on.
Since entering academic journal and book editing, I have embraced the true path of the Chicago Manual of Style—the Torah, nay, the Urantia Book of style books.
And if there is any question that it does not answer, its editors will issue a fatwa to the seeker after truth.
I have received one, and I felt blessed.
Still, in deference to the AP and just to keep my hand in, expect to see “website” instead of “Web site” here in the future.
Deep in Mother Earth, an important ritual takes place.
Don’t tell the wrong people that we might count it as “nature religion.”
• Star Foster’s Pagan song list for Ostara—with videos!
• St. Patrick’s Day has passed, with all these Pagans saying “Not us, we’re the snakes,” etc. Sannion has a different take: Patrick as Dionysos (Or Fun with Iconography).
• I need to prune apple trees. Peg Aloi has some links.
• If you are really watching the calendar, then the spring equinox occurs just before midnight Sunday, Greenwich time.
Adrian Ivakhiv blogs on religious responses to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
All of this resonates with an immanence-based process-relational perspective: nature does what it does, it includes the “good” and the “bad” (which are relative to their perceivers), we are part of it and sometimes we get struck down in it. (Careful readers will know that when I say that good and bad are “relative to their perceivers,” this doesn’t mean that “everything is relative, anything goes, and whatever you think or do is as good as anything else.” The world is layered and folded: perceivers share their perceptual situations with other perceivers, so my “good” is closer to your “good” than it is to the good of an amoeba, a viral bacteria or cancer cell, or an asteroid whipping through the solar system. Hitler’s actions may have seemed “right” to him, but in a human context they come off as psychotic and grotesque. And as for “nature,” if it includes everything, becoming a fairly meaningless term, so be it. It corresponds to what, in an East Asian context, is thought of as “the way,” ziran, an active and unfolding “suchness,” or what Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects.”)
There is lots more with interesting links. Apparently even the mayor of Toyko took a “the gods are angry with us” line, although he later backed away from it.
Sometimes, the nonhuman world is not All About Us Humans.
Aidan Kelly’s Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, which has circulated in digital form for some years, can now be purchased as a book from Amazon, with new material added.
As the San Francisco counter-culture teeters on the edge of the Psychedelic Era, a group of twenty-somethings, open to spiritual experiment (and other sorts of experiments), find themselves morphing into something that they do not quite a have a word for . . . Druids? Witches??
Built from recollections and interviews, it is a picture of people creating a new religion based on a heady mix of reading, ritual, and inspiration.
If you can, please donate to the Pagan-identified fundraising drive for the the charity Doctors Without Borders for medical assistance in Japan.
I just did.
As of today, this Pagan relief effort has raised more than $16,000. More about it here.
Other charities involved, such as the Japanese Red Cross, are grouped on this page.