immrama or beyond the beyond

Though the Turkish president is facing some unfair ridicule for claiming that the relationship between the Islamic world and Latin America is a far more ancient one, Ireland stakes an even older title with the legendary voyages of Saint Brendan of Tralee.
Though the saint never stated that America was the Earthly Paradise (another candidate is La Palma in the Canaries), the Isles of the Blessed he was charged with finding by an angel for having been skeptical about an account of miracles and strange beings, Brendan does have a dedicated society of believer advocating his discovery preceded even that of Leif Erickson and the Vikings. Having embarked on this immram (the Irish word for a seafaring odyssey), the abbot assembled a cast of fellow monks (plus a few naysayers for good measure) may not have reached the Americas—though that is a matter of debate and faith—but came across many other curious places along the way. It is told that the adventures camped one evening on the back of a slumbering sea-monster, the aspidochelone, having mistook it for an island, make landfall on the island of the Birds of Paradise that sing like a choir of angels, encounter other monastic communities—including a hermit who has lived in the elements for sixty years draped only in his own hair and taken care of by an otter, a fiery land of blacksmiths that cast molten slag at the visitors (possibly a reference to volcanic Iceland) and crystal pillars in the sea (maybe icebergs) and the lonely skerry where Judas gets his respite from Hell on Sundays and holidays.

hair of the dog or copra cabaña

Do you remember the panic and hysteria over monosodium glutamate (MSG) in Chinese foods or the revelation that a bag of movie-theatre popcorn had the fat content of eighteen fast-food burgers?  A related shock-campaign transformed the world’s culinary landscape in the early to mid-1980s when the old staples of the industry, tallow—lard and tropical oils, coconut and palm, were demonised as the fount of all ills and understudies quickly championed good health and general dietary decency.

The forces behind this paradigm was not, however, a temperance union seeking to unseat processed foods nor agents really interested in public health, but rather flagship agriculture lobbies. Soy, maize and rapeseed crops had of course been cultivated for millennia but not for their oils, as the unsaturated fats were too unstable at high temperatures and quickly went rancid. Once the process of hydrogenation was perfected, bombarding these bumper-crops of the West in order to mimic superficially some of the qualities of the now derided saturated fats, these new, refined oils infiltrated everything we eat. In order to initiate and sustain this rather significant change, a selective explanation and quasi-myth of saturated fats—with an overwhelming array of nuances with un-, mono- and polysaturated, triglycerides and trans-fatty acids, was carefully crafted. With the taste for colonialism turning sour, a whole business started over spices, around this time, conditions were ideal for the promotion of a yet unexploited by-product of farming. The public is mostly appeased by this simplistic coup and throughout alternatives have been available for the sake of those malingerers—considering, however, that nearly all foodstuffs are swimming in corn-syrup and other beefed-up oils, it is a little like the token egg that cake-mixes call for, unnecessarily but it makes people feel more like they are baking. What do you think? Some argue that the normalisation process on these new oil sources create industrial solvents that are not digested in healthful ways.

meh moi

It’s funny how the twists of language and etymology are pulverised by convention and custom until those curious lumps are all but flattened out. English does have a lot of beautiful, virtually redundant words from Greek and Latin traditions that signify practically the same thing. There are, however, many pairs too of more recent lendings and borrowings that withdrew from English as a Germanic word, discovered by the French speaking a Celtic-Romance language as a useful term and returned to modern English under a different guise. Beforehand, it had never occurred to me to wonder why there are more than a few w-g couplings in English that essentially mean the same thing, much less that they were actually different ways of pronouncing one word that eventually took on separate connotations. There is ward and guard, warranty and guarantee, warn and garish, and even wench and garçon (both from an original word meaning outcast).
In these examples, the former from Germanic roots and the latter French, the g-sounding equivalents were reintroduced to spoken English during the Norman Conquest and gradually took on certain nuances in meaning. The French, possibly as the Gaulish that the aboriginal population did not use that particular sound, had a lot of trouble making a w-sound and so prefixed it with a g-sound to make it more pronounceable and less harsh on the ears. It might not seem like much that a given set of glyphs can be used to represent sounds in an agreed-upon manner but one that outsiders would surely recognise as anything other than phonetic and intuitive, but that abiding is pretty remarkable. On the other end of the spectrum, there are a whole host of not invented languages, but rather invented but Greco-Latin based alphabets, like runes (used for inscriptions only as the Germanic peoples were functionally illiterate), Gothic, Glagolithic, Cyrillic, and many others. From an aesthetic standpoint, of course I think that this diversity is a beautiful thing—but from a practical point of view, when writing was dismantled by trade and kept the same to facilitate that same commerce, it seems a little… meh… maybe just adding to the babble and otherness. I never reasoned, however, an alphabet would be designed to give speakers the means to express sounds not present in the derived, given form.
The Greeks and the Romans used the Phoenician alphabet just off the shelf, however, and just changed what sounds the letters represented to suit their way of speaking. Originally, the writing system that the Phonetians used was something called an abjad—that is an alphabet without vowel sounds represented, only consonants and the reader would know the appropriate ligatures by context—and the first letter Alef, which became Alpha and the Letter A did not make that sound (or any sound, as a glottal stop) at all.

siege perilous oder kokosnußritter

Though there is no definite, contemporary written account of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the island, given how many fled and the apparent lack of the merging of cultures and languages, we can probably safely assume that the event was not a comfortable one for the native populace. Modern-day genetic studies seem to indicate that there was no genocide by the settlers, as older affinities from earlier migrations still remain strong among guest and host, but given the few, latter-day accounts and attested exonyms that the newcomers gave to the natives, the broader term of the Germanic speakers was Walhaz and referred to the aboriginal cultures and Celtic speakers—and is preserved in several toponyms, Wales and Cornwall, locally, and Wallachia and Wallonia on the continent, to name a few, it looks like the native English were mostly relegated to the margins of society. The Germanic English language accommodated few Celtic influences, just a few place-names—although that lack of vocabulary might be spoken for in the unique grammar of English.
Many of the inflections were dropped to help keep communication simple among the co-mingling Germanic tribes, but English does a couple more curious things that it only has in common with the Celtic languages that were subsumed: no other Germanic or Latinate language inserts do into syntax like English does and no other language treats its present-tense as English does. In German (and many other related languages), it suffices to say, “Wir sehen fern,” however in English—unless one was referring to one’s vocation, one would always say, we are watching television. Adding did and do and this long-hand construction for doing something are typical to England alone. Further evidence of strife and unhappy co-existence comes in the form of folklore: the legendary tales of one Arthur Pendragon, fifth century king of the Britons, was able to unite the people against a common-foe and turned back the Anglo-Saxon incursions in series of decisive battles, now lost to the ages. For a span of five centuries, the Britons who remained in the far north, along the coast and those who had retreated to Brittany (Bretagne) kindled the idea that the prodigal leader would one day return to banish these interlopers definitively, the once and future king. The chance for the original displaced inhabitants to reclaim their land came with the Norman Invasion, but the embellished traditions had taken on a life of their own—growing to include a whole host of characters, intrigues, exploits and the eventual transition from fighting Germans to a more spiritual quest in finding the Holy Grail. The Siege Perilous refers to the seat reserved by Merlin at the Round Table—specifically made that way so there was no head of the table and all gather were equally—for the knight who recovered the Grail, and deadly for any other occupant. Founding myths are more than propaganda and patriotism, of course, and it would be a grave disservice to the storytellers the body of literature that has been expounded to supplement the Matter of Britain to treat them as mere jingoism and allegory. The chance for civilisations to express themselves as a nation (from the same root as nativity, birth) and to coalesce socially with heroic role models to aspire to is as important as the collective amnesia of the violence that accompanies the taking or retaking and the clannish pride, local patriotism and heritage, which if fully remembered, would spoil the illusion. Besides, castle and court do more for the imagination than the progressive brutalities of mankind.

precise dwarf bravery

A happy Redditor by the handle of k-popstar has been scouring textile discounters in Japan and shares a lot of fun, apparent randomness. I think some of these t-shirts have a sense of unassuming profundity and there are a few I wouldn't mind sporting.

oneironaut

Always on the weekends, I have the more vivid, detailed dream sequences. I do not know if there's particularly brilliant or inspired in them as they always slip away too quickly no matter what kind of discipline I try—or fail to implement—and it seems I usually recall the plotlines in a general sense only during the next time I am dreaming.

It's not a continuation of one story but I get the hazy sense of there being something epic and on-going that I cannot piece together. Whatever therapeutic properties dreams have I think never come through directly, and surely no one's psyche is wired in the same ways, but it is an interesting suggestion that every character in the dream is the dreamer, sort of like in Being John Malcovich, when the actor learned in the real world about the production-planning for such a film rather shocked the director by asking to be a part of it, instead of suing for libel and in the scene when Malcovich crawled through the portal into his own mind and was awake to see what never should be seen.