Monday, April 20, 2009

Why Neil Gaiman Rocks


"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen–I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of The Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies too. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive


and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."


you can read part one of this book here...

do it!

Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Truth About Easter and Why I Celebrate...

Easter is NOT a Christian Holiday. In fact, the term "Easter" is used only once in the Bible and is used to describe the Passover. But everything we "traditionally" use to celebrate Easter here in the States comes completely from Pagan origins. Eostre, Eoster, or Ostara, is the Norse Goddess of Spring and fertility who is awakened after her long sleep (Winter).  There are MANY similar legends in many other geographic regions, but since I know this is where a majority of my ancestry is from, this is the one I pay most attention to. The Greeks of course have Dionysos and Persephone, and I'm pretty sure we were all taught that story. Then there's Cybele and Attis, from the Mediterranean. Attis is the God of ever-reviving vegetation who was born of a virgin, who dies and is reborn every year. Sounds slightly familiar, hmm? Dates back about 200 years before that other guy. Anyway, Attis gets it on with Cybele, a fertility Goddess associated with Spring, who some folks called the Phrygians worshipped. 

Here's some info about the origin of the Easter egg hunt... 

"At the spring Equinox, the balance of the day shifts from dark to light; the hen senses this and begin to lay her eggs. In the forest, wild birds lay their colorful eggs, and in ancient times our ancestors went out to hunt for them, and perhaps brought them back in their nests, or in baskets imitating them. Therefore nestlike baskets of decorated eggs and the Eoster Egg Hunt remind us of the revitalization of nature. Colored eggs were also offered to Eoster. 

Raw colored eggs are used as amulets, kept raw to promote fertility, and hard-boiled colored eggs are eaten at sunrise on Eoster's Day. They are often dyed red all over to represent the Sun, and their red shells are thrown in the river so that they might float down to the "Kindly Ones" (the daughters of Hades and Persephone ). Thus they go to the Underworld as symbols of renewal." http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/JO-Eo.html 

You can find more info here,

here,
here,

and here.

Happy Eostre!