Holidays

Belle found this one in her stocking this morning. I think Santa selected wisely.

Russell says all names are really just disguised descriptions. So why shouldn’t that be a perfectly grammatical title? We haven’t read it yet, but the series sounds intriguing: [click to continue…]

It’s the Winter Solstice. Ancient Celtic mummery is tedious — woo, I am teh Morrigan! — but that shouldn’t distract you from the fact that Newgrange is one of the wonders of the world, and never more than at this time of year. Here’s a reprint of an old post of mine about it.

Newgrange is a megalithic tomb in County Meath’s Boyne Valley, in Ireland. It is more than five thousand years old. Built around 3200BC, it is five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza and about a thousand years older than Stonehenge. When it was rediscovered in 1699, it looked like an ordinary hill. It was properly excavated beginning in 1962, when archaeologists thought it was a particularly fine example of a passage grave, but nothing more. Then, Prof. M.J. O’Kelly of U.C.C. discovered the roof box, a small opening in the hill above the passage entrance, which led to a shaft that ran to the chamber at the center of the tomb. He had an idea about what it might be for. On the morning of December 21st 1967, O’Kelly sat in the central chamber and, as the sun came up, saw the first rays of the rising sun run down the shaft and strike the floor of the chamber.

Newgrange is a clock. The shaft leading out to the roof box is precisely aligned so that on the morning of the Winter Solstice the first light of day will run directly into the middle of the tomb. Or, at least, it was precisely so aligned. It is so old that changes in the Earth’s orbit have affected its operation. When it was built, the sun would have struck the back wall of the chamber, rather than the floor, and the light would have remained in the chamber for about four minutes longer than it does now. It was very accurate. The people who built Newgrange knew what they were doing.

A society — a civilization, if you like — is a hard thing to hold together. If you live in an agrarian society, as the overwhelming majority of people did until about two hundred years ago, and you are on the western edge of Europe, few times are harder than the dead of Winter. The days are at their shortest, the sun is far away, and the Malthusian edge, in Brad DeLong’s phrase, is right in front of you. It’s no wonder so many religious festivals take place around the solstice. Here were a people, more than five millennia ago, able not only to pull through the Winter successfully, but able also to build a huge timepiece to remind themselves that they were going to make it. It’s astonishing.

“Neither snowmen nor reindeer nor blinking lights stays these couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds …”


(From the Parade of Lights this evening here in Tucson.)

I moved to the US a few months ago (It’s been a bit of a shock to the system. Let’s just say that on account of me not being a blonde, big-titted wannabe from the flyover zone, it was never my life’s dream to live in L.A.). Going to church makes me feel at home for an hour or so a week. At Mass last week, the priest gave a good but very rambling sermon. A propos of nothing at all, he said parishioners should make a point of wishing others a ‘Happy Christmas’ or even ‘Happy Hanukkah’ instead of the ubiquitous ‘Happy Holidays’.

Now, this being a very cool, gay-friendly church with great music, one person shouted out ‘why should we do that?’ as the wave of applause moved from the front benches backwards, faltering somewhere around the middle. I happen to feel the same as the priest, but kept my hands firmly in my lap. [click to continue…]

When my husband turned 40, his sister and I joined forces in giving him a present that we knew he would really like: a photography-trip to a city of choice, with childcare included. Read: his sister would take care of our son at home, and I would buy him a ticket for two to a city where he would like to take pictures, and he could spend all day making pictures without me moaning that I want to move on. He chose New York City (which implied that since I think it is crazy to fly across the Atlantic for 3 days, the citytrip turned into a one-week holiday).

We are not quite new to NYC, since we lived there for six months in 2004… nevertheless, given that we worked too much then, I am sure there is still loads for us to see. What do you think we should not miss? And what are the hidden gems of NYC that we are unlikely to find in a travel guide, or the places of special interest for photographers? With doubled thanks!

Who says there are no benefits to blogging? If it wasn’t for CT then I would never have met Matt Gordon and would never have been invited to his wonderful Seder last night. Thanks, Matt!

We talked about lots of things, among them how most Haggadahs lack enough information for a newcomer to really get the Passover story while making the central role of He Who Has No Name unmistakable (even while the rest of the story might remain a bit blurry and I don’t just mean because of the amount of wine consumed).

But we also talked about other things, for example: how one comes to name machines in one’s lab. Perhaps not surprising given my previous post, the machines in my lab have Star Wars references. This idea dates back to the machines in the offices of one of my college mentors: Joe had a big black Next machine that was called Darth and the little white Mac I used was called Yoda. So when I started populating my lab with machines I named the white one Yoda and the two black ones Darth and Vader.
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Henry’s post below reminds me of one of the 50,000 completely ridiculous things that have happened to my sister in her day. She went to a Christian day camp in Sewanee one summer when she was about 11. They all set out for an overnight camp-out, and decided upon a meadow of tall grass. The camp’s faithful golden retriever promptly got bitten by a copperhead. Now, for the benefit of our European readers, I will disclose some wisdom from the South, and that is, where there’s one copperhead, there’s another. The only solutions are either to get the hell away, or, if it’s your own yard you’re talking about, stalk around nervously with a gun until you’ve shot both of them. (I did once watch my mom chop the head off a snake with a hoe and some vigorous action, but that was only a rat-snake. It had just swallowed “Quing-Quack”, my newborn duckling friend, who unfortunately did not survive. The life of a hippie farm is not necessarily a placid one.) [click to continue…]

French Church Street, Cork. To avoid excessive nostalgia, below the fold is an equivalent photo from my current location, Tucson. Merry Christmas, everyone.
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The one thing I enjoy about this season is watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Some part of me always hopes things will turn out differently this time — that maybe the Grinch won’t go back to Whoville and return the stuff. (Of course I do know better; still, it’s my holiday wish.) Also, it is impossible not to admire the Grinch’s efficiency.

From the blog Intellectual Conservative, I learn that my green hero is being Semiticized. Who knew?
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We’ve posted before here about the “horridness of Christmas Music”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/06/most-annoying-christmas-record. Ian McDonald has the “antidote”:http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com/52744.html.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

I’m back from a trip to the West Indies, including several days on Canouan – the home island of my brother. It’s one of the Grenadines – part of the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which became independent in 1979. It’s still tiny – around 3 square miles and somewhere around 1500 people – but things have changed a lot since Adonal was growing up. There’s now central electricity, for example, and a few more paved roads. There’s also a fence around the runway, so airplanes don’t have to circle around to wait for the cows to be driven out of the way.

But the really big change was the development of the northern half (actually a little more than half, I think) of the island. What was previously an uninhabited forest is now an ultra-luxury resort, complete with championship golf course, casino, and villas developed by Donald Trump. (Here’s a link with a nice picture – and notice the url.) Essentially the only previous building on the area was a church to which Adonal remembers making the journey a couple times each year when he was a kid. On our last night, we went to dinner at the resort. The food was outstanding and the setting unbelievably beautiful – the buildings and design were lovely and surprisingly tasteful. I was also surprised that by American standards, it was not outrageously expensive. Still, it is far beyond the means of essentially all residents of the island. Quite the interesting dilemma. On the one hand, turn over half of the island to obscenely wealthy foreigners who will only admit you past the gate if you are employed there. On the other hand, essentially everyone on the island who is able to work now has a job. Most of the people I talked to about it were not outwardly hostile, but neither did they view it as their salvation, either – just part of life. In any event, we’ll never know what they would have chosen since the decision was made by politicians in St. Vincent.

As always, the choices are limited to maudlin, drunk, and maudlin drunk. I choose drunk.

Best wishes this Christmas to all our readers. Here’s a little bit from Alexander McCall Smith’s _At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances_ that I like to think about at this time of year. Plenty of time for shouting at one another in the New Year, but for the moment:

The Master then rose to give a short address.

‘Dear guests of the College,’ he began, ‘dear Fellows, dear undergraduate members of this Foundation: William de Courcey was cruelly beheaded by those who could not understand that it is quite permissible for rational men to differ on important points of belief or doctrine. The world in which he lived had yet to develop those qualities of tolerance of difference of opinion which we take for granted, but which we must remind ourselves is of rather recent creation and is by no means assured of universal support. There are amongst us still those who would deny to others the right to hold a different understanding of the fundamental issues of our time. Thus, if we look about us we see people of one culture or belief still at odds with their human neighbours who are of a different culture or belief; and we see many who are prepared to act upon this difference to the extent of denying the humanity of those with whom they differ. …

‘Here in this place of learning, let us remind ourselves of the possibility of combating, in whatever small way we can, those divisions that come between man and man, between woman and woman, so that we may recognise in each other that vulnerable humanity that informs our lives, and makes life so precious; so that each may find happiness in his or her life, and in the lives of others. For what else is there for us to hope for? What else, I ask you, what else?’

It’s that time of the year again: the “King William College General Knowledge Paper”:http://www.kwc.sch.im/gkp.html has arrived. It’s the kind of quiz that exists at a point just (or far) beyond the production possibility frontier of a space defined by your fondness for crossword-puzzles and your stock of cultural capital. If previous years are anything to go by it’s designed to be google-proof, but you’re in with a shot if you can guess the theme that unites all the questions in each section. Have at it. (The Great Miracle, incidentally, is scoring more than, say, 20 points.)