ballyhoo, hullabaloo, rumpus

An escutcheon can cause such a kerfuffle--especially if roses are white instead of red. And there's a whole bunch of history to look at, with the brouhaha bringing a white-centered red to the world.

Heralds bore shields with rather elaborate escutcheons by the dawn of the 15th Cent., and all it boiled down to was whom you liked among the children of Edward III Plantagenet. Once more, it's bravo Shakespeare:

"England hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself:
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood;
The father rashly slaughter’d his own son;
The son, compell’d, been butcher to the sire.
All this divided York and Lancaster..."

And at the end of it all, what happens? The new mixed-up neither-red-nor-white king tries to marry his widowed daughter-in-law, but loses her to his younger son.
Who, in his turn, goes onto marry a total 6 times all sanctioned by the church, though the church also states he married... well, once. And he manages to find the time--despite 2 mistresses apart from the 6 wives--to order at least 72,000 known executions during his reign.

The white-nor-reds still rule England, and have in turn enslaved blacks, browns, yellows... all skins save their own motley version. Coz after all, in England, the queen doesn't even get to decide what to wear anymore.

Want an escutcheon, my knight?

I Know

Easiest answer ever.

Black Humor

Well, Snoop Dogg et al may say what they want, but methinx ole Kev's got it spot on!

I used to think it actually meant something, the word Nigger. Turns out it doesn't, it's just a corruption of good old-fashioned "Negro". And yet it hurts.

So, no meaning, and yet all that pain. Noesis bedamned, this ain't about words anymore. They cared so little they used a corruption of the standard race description to demean?!

I guess sometimes Christmas makes you wonder why it's got to be White.

Thrushed Warfare

Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) belongs to the Thrush family. This is a champion bird, determined and invincible when it comes to defending its nest from predators. Its lifecycle pivots around its impeccable will and uncommon gut.

In their admirable quest to safeguard their nesting colonies, they collectively defecate and bombard a predator such as a crow or a raven, with copious quantities of droppings. The crow finds the intense bombardment to its discomfort and beats a hasty retreat, rather than making headway towards the fieldfare nesting colony.

In this manner, the fieldfares are able to defend their nesting colonies and operate with their secret arsenal, which is virtually unparalleled in the avian world. The precise aerial bombardment bewilders the predator, which has no alternative but to withdraw to a safe distance to cleanup its messy feathers.

Che

Nice to know the Argentinians also used it as an epithet.
Nice to see it grow to a cult too.
Nice to know it all happened to a man on his way to a leper colony, the "realization" that capitalism was for the burds (or in this case, rich-before-capitalism-happened "entrepreneurs").

But nice as it all is, the best is at the end. THE execution to beat em all. He's said to have steadied the hands of the young rookie who'd drawn the short straw. A leader even in death.

Carpet Baggers?

If you're a stranger in a strange land, you're almost always seen as a carpetbagger. And no history lesson on the post-Civil War South is truly the explanation for mistrust as rampant as I've seen in college campus and school ground cross-country.

But the term, the "original" carpetbagger, is an epithet post-facto to legitimise the whole "who're you and why haven't I seen you before".

And would you know... some of history's real carpetbaggers were Republicans.

Turning A Corner

Seems a good day to revisit this page. Got a nice one.

Irreverence is best left undescribed. But there are some things born of it that bear repeating.

Got this in a nice picture postcard today, from someone whose very existence I had forgotten. Reminds me to keep in touch, but more importantly, reminds me to dust off the old tomes and re-read something Earnest.

"I am not young enough to know everything."
--Oscar Wilde

Phædrus

Phædrus spent an inordinate amount of time chatting with Socrates, and failed to impress him with much... Socrates actually thought he was the most unevolved souls state there is...

Then along came Zen. And Pirsig made Phædrus his alter-ego, the "dad" of a journey nowhere. Suddenly, Phædrus becomes more evolved and acutely realised: he's the throwback to our real selves, the "pure" soul state.

Funny how two points in time make the same thing more or less yearned-for. Socrates saw what we could become, by the time Pirsig wrote his two cents, we'd "become" so much we'd forgotten what we truly were at the start.

And Why Another Blog?

My WordWeb says Noesis is "the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning". I don't know about all that, but I do think I need to find a place to store all the "useless" bits of trivia that aid in making one look good in polite conversation. Apart from my head, that is, which is a bit... shall we say... sievey.

So here goes.

BTW, all that German merely means the site talks about Worth, Meaning and Facts... just wanted to sound hi-fi at the start there.