Friday Who humour

The Book Faire for non-readers

Today is the Book Faire day at work for people who don’t read. These are always really annoying days for me because everyone at work knows I am always reading so therefore I must want to go to the Book Faire, uh no.

Those book faire have the worst selection of books. Supermarkets have better selections than the Book Faire people. It’s a mishmash of best seller hardbacks, self help trash and the kind of children’s books you find on the remainder table at B&N on a bad day with a few booklights and other random objects thrown in.

There is absolutely nothing a true reader would want because it’s all too old or generic. If you are a big fan of some author that writes best sellers you will have already read it and I don’t read best sellers. If something I’m reading is down there the world will have ended. Any best seller I read is it’s because that author suddenly got popular after I was reading them. Not the other way around which is why sometimes I freak out the Amazon recommendations. Since Amazon books opened I’ve bought over 4000 books (and I donate what I don’t keep to the local library) and it would have been a lot more but unemployment has cut into my book buying and I’ve had to rely on the library. The problem with the library is sometimes I read authors that they don’t buy. Or I decide to read an old book that they no longer have in any of the branches. And good luck finding a pagan book that you want, someone has either stolen it or taken it out so no pagan can actually read it. I’ve been told that some Christians take out the pagan books to keep people from reading things that will turn them from the Church. That’s really dumb because if you really want to read a pagan book there are always used ones on Amazon and people can always get a PO Box to mail them to or find a friend who will allow them to get delivery if they really want them.

And the free books on Kindle could make me a menace in the future. Did you know how much folklore and faery tales are free? Bloody dangerous!

About the only genre book the Book Faire carries are romance novels. Ewwww! I do not read romance novels unless it’s a mislabeled urban fantasy. I could never figure out why my dad liked to read romance novels. I understood the Zane Grey and the history and biography but not that bit of quirkyness. Give me some Science Fiction, fantasy or murder mystery if I’m reading fiction.

So I avoided the Book Faire today and read my latest cozy mystery at lunch.

A bit of Faery mischief

I keep all my necklaces on a small Manzanita branch that looks like a tree. It used to be my display tree when I sold my jewelry at Faire. I put what ever necklace that I wear during the day on it. I usually wear my BunniHoTep necklace, either out or in my shirt. This is the Swarovski crystal rabbit that I gave everyone one of when we dedicated the Iseum.

I have a sort of ritual I do every night when I put them away so that I know I do it and to thank the day. Two weeks ago I remember distinctly doing it as usual but when I got up in the morning. BunniHoTep was gone. I took all the necklaces off the tree. It wasn’t there. I looked on the floor… not there. I took apart my drawers thinking I might have knocked it off my accident or the cat might have because she sometimes jumps up there when she wants me out of bed to feed her. I cleaned the dresser top, nada . It was nowhere to be found.

So I did decided to wear other protective necklaces such as alternating two of my Kwan Yin necklaces and a few moon ones. And I asked the faeries that if they had taken it to please bring it back. It was important to me. Nothing. It was quiet for two weeks and I had almost given up. That I was crazy and maybe I hadn’t done the ritual but I remembered doing it so clearly it made me a little nuts.

So yesterday I went to put something else on and couldn’t quite decide on what when I looked at the tree. BunniHoTep was laying in front of the tree all by itself and tangled with an earcuff that is normally in a drawer! If I didn’t know I had taken everything off there and rearranged it I really would think I was around the bend. NOT FUNNY FAERIES!

I have no idea if there was a point to this or if BunniHoTep wanted a break or they wanted the top of the dresser cleaned but it’s really annoying when they do this!

If Steven King designed a carousel

Oops!

Goddesses of Los Angeles – Guess the movie

Discworld!

Rant on the letter “K” A Pagan Blog Post

Okay, just in time for the letter “K” comes a bit of a rant started by the email Rowan sends out with ideas. And here it comes: If you worship Kerridwen you are a colossal Grade “A” idiot and you are guilty of the worst kind of cultural appropriation. Why? Because there is no “K” in either Welsh or Scots or Irish Gaelic, it will always be CERRIDWEN. So if you are worshipping Kerridwen you are not worshipping her in her correct cultural context. It’s one thing to honor Kwan Yin, Quan Yin or other spellings of her name because there is no direct and absolute translation of the ideographs of her primary languages but Welsh and Gaelic use the Roman alphabet and there is no “K” in their alphabets. That sound is always taken by the letter “C” and the letter “C” is always hard even if followed by the letter “H”. (The idiots who named the basketball team not withstanding.)

And that comes to my second point, bad Gaelic pronunciation. There is no excuse for it. There are tons of tapes and videos, some of them very good where you can hear the correct pronunciation of words. And yes, there are some regional differences between Gaelic of the Isle of Skye and Cape Breton to the Irish of Ireland but what I’ve heard in circle bears no resemblance to anything I’ve ever heard spoken in Irish or Scots Gaelic, and Welsh is still spoken by a whole country so there is no excuse at all.

The worst I’ve heard was a bunch of Druids at Pagan Pride and when I said something about it I was told they learned it from someone who had an Irish grandfather. Well, all I can say is she wasn’t listening very well or had a hearing problem. And by the way, I’m speaking to the Americans. Just because you think it’s an ancient or dead language doesn’t mean it is and that nobody speaks it.

I saw this at the Ren Faire one year. Some person of the male persuasion thought he could make a comment about my breasts in Gaelic and that I wouldn’t understand and was quite surprised when I told him to “Pog mo thoin!” and took off running when I rounded on him. (For those who don’t know it means, “Kiss my ass”. That was the best cuss I could think of quickly because Gaelic cussing depends on descriptive phrases more than Anglo-Saxon speech. There is no satisfying version of F*** off!)

Something that is puzzling me is Pixar/Disney’s choice of music on the “Brave trailer, “Tha mo ghaol air arid a ‘chuan”. Merida certainly does not look like she’s mooning about for her love who is lost on the high seas? Anything but! She doesn’t want to get married. Again why is Pixar/Disney assuming no one understands Gaelic or in this day of instant translation, that they wouldn’t be curious enough to look it up?

There are only 18 letters in the Scots Gaelic alphabet, none of them are a “K”.

The Consonants:

B, C, D, F, G, H, L, M, N, P, R, S, & T (See no “K, J, Q, V, W, X, Y, Z,”)

The vowels:

A, E, I, O, & U

All the sounds come from these letters and the letter “H” can make a few of them silent just for fun or change the sound entirely. It also has something called broad and slender vowels which does not refer to the shape of the written letter but what it does to the shape of your mouth when you say it. Broad and slender vowels change the consonants they are next to so SI has a SH sound but SA sounds the same as in English.

Languages evolve from the culture and not the other way around. They come from the way people think. For instance Irish Gaelic has a present tense but Scottish Gaelic does not. Scots Gaelic uses participles and future tense to indicate the present. Future tense is used for things that are continuing. Participles for things that you are actively doing. Example: I am running (or more literally, I be running) or I am reading but never I read or I run. The mindset is the present is an active thing or that if you are doing it now you are continuing it into the future. You cannot be passive in the present. You are ‘being’ in the now.

So, I beg of you, have some respect for all the cultures you pull into circle. Just because you call yourself eclectic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do a little research. I’m not asking you to be a reconstructionist just respectful and accurate in something that is easily researched. I know how I get when people don’t call me my name correctly. Imagine if you are a deity and lots of people are massacring your name? Smiting comes to mind…

Madainn mhath, beannachd leibh!