The Brush Off
Hello World,
Happy Easter! For many of us in the Western world (or as Bill refers to it as "Unorthodox") this Sunday will be Easter, while the Eastern Orthodox religions have to wait another week for the big day. We have Bill to thank for even more meticulous research into the whole Easter situation (and anyone who misbehaves, don't think I won't send you the entire voluminous compendium of it, so you'd all better watch your step!) including picking the right date for the event. Based on the calculations used by the Eastern and Western camps, there appears to be a cycle where both celebrate the holiday on the same day, then a year that the former is a week behind the latter, and then they're about 5 weeks behind (as in 2005, when Orthodox Easter was May 1) before going back to the same Sunday again for another year. So where do these calculations come from? According to Bill, it's not really all that complicated: [ OK, as I see it, the bottom line is, in OUR calendar, you start at March 21st which, for argument's sake, they consider the Vernal Equinox, whether it is or not. Then you watch for a new moon. This new moon marks the beginning of the next lunar month. From there you count 14 days, which they consider the Full Moon, whether or not it's off a little bit. Easter is the Sunday after that. Got it? It's the first Sunday after the 14th day after the beginning of the first lunar month after March 21. Now I ask you -- what could be simpler? ] On the other hand, Wikipedia has one entire entry on "Computus," which is the word coined to describe the process of determining where Easter is.
====================================
The method for computing the date of the ecclesiastic Full Moon that was standard for the Latin (Catholic) church before the Gregorian calendar reform, made use of an uncorrected repetition of the 19-year Metonic cycle in combination with the Julian calendar. In terms of the method of the epacts discussed above, it effectively used a single epact table starting with an epact of * (0), which was never corrected. In this case, the epact was counted on 22 March, the earliest acceptable date for Easter. This repeats every 19 years, so there were only 19 possible dates for the ecclesiastic Full Moons after 21 March.
=====================================
Well, that's just about as clear as mud, which is about all you can expect from a bunch of experts. Making just a little bit more sense (although he could just be making this all up out of whole cloth, and who would know the difference) is Kenneth C. Davis in USA Weekend magazine, who informs us:
====================================
The English name for this holy day has long been linked to the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring usually called "Eostre" or "Ostara." Also known as a pagan goddess of dawn, Eostre is a deity whose name is connected to the word "east" -- where, obviously, the sun rises. According to Anglo-Saxon myth, the goddess Eostre changed her favorite pet bird into a rabbit to amuse some children. The rabbit produced brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the kids. In Germany, that tradition carried into Christian times with the tale of a Santa-like magical rabbit, Osterhase, who leaves colored eggs for good children.
=====================================
I don't mind saying that I like our Easter Bunny a whole lot better, who already knows that I prefer pastel M&Ms and Hershey Kisses to actual raw eggs any day, goddess or no goddess.
Meanwhile, in the wonderful world of retail merchandising, I received a catalog from JC Penney with a page full of Knitworks French Terry Gauchos in Girls sizes, that were available in a variety of prints including what they referred to as "camouflage." Here I'm thinking, I guess you could consider that print a sort of camouflage, that is, except for the part about it being pink and all. I suppose if you were hiding out in a forest of Barbie Dream Houses, this pink camo might come in handy, but other than that, its usefulness as camouflage would elude even the most relaxed interpretation of the term. Honestly, words have simply lost all of their meaning these days.
Speaking of which, all I wanted to do was get a new hairbrush, because the little plastic one that I had been happily using all these years finally wouldn't stay together any longer because the glue must have let go or something. I may as well warn everyone right up front, if you haven't gone out and tried to buy a brush for a while, it's a whole new ball-game out there, and that's putting it mildly. Nowadays, brushes come with labels and instructions, so you can't just go and buy any old brush and use it with impunity like you could back in the day. Oh no, no, no! Some brushes are for straightening, and some brushes are for curling, and some brushes are for de-tangling, and some brushes are for use with blow dryers, while still yet others use micro-ion technology to control static and inhibit bacteria. I tell you, it's a jungle of brushes out there, and if they weren't mostly black and silver, you can be sure I'd be wearing my pink camouflage gauchos in that aisle. And as much as I hate to be an alarmist, I discovered that you can pay $6 or $10 just for one of these brushes, and even more, if you have special requirements in your hairbrush preferences. Anyway, I finally found one that looked like a pretty comparable replacement for the one I have now, and at a mere $3 it was like they were giving it away, so I snatched it off the shelf and glad of it. That's when I noticed the instruction label on it, and honest to God, it said, "For traditional brushing." I mean, really, sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder.
Here's something else to wonder about, and I find that people don't pay enough attention to how their Internet addresses look whenyourunthemalltogetherasoneword and without any punctuation or capital letters to help make the meaning more clear. Last week at work, we all had to attend one in a series of meetings they had scheduled about the pension plan, and it was presented by our new friends at A.G. Edwards, who I'm sure are fine and upstanding folks who are investment brokers from White Plains. They repeatedly invited us to make use of the information and resources on their web site, which I thought was saddled with the unfortunate address of www.agedwards.com and looked to me for all the world like Aged Wards. For my tastes, this would not be the image that I want to project as a cutting edge and forward thinking vanguard of financial wizards, but there you have it. In fact, it reminded me of when our Telecommunications director gave me his email address at some screwy ISP with the extravagant name of Omni Sky, but when you print it on a business card as rachod@omnisky.net, it makes you look instead like Comrade Omniskynet, in charge of the road paving cooperative in the Urals section of good old Mother Russia. I know that young people take these things in stride, but I find I'm getting too old for all this folderol.
On the other hand, just to prove that you can teach an old dog new tricks, last week on Palm Sunday, we were astounded at church (congregation founded Christmas Day, 1899) to find our service being projected on the wall with the use of a laptop and computerized projector, rather than an overhead projector and transparencies, which had been the extent of our technological advancement up to that point. It worked like a charm, and everyone was very impressed with it. And it was a big surprise to everyone, since we don't usually embrace any sort of new technology until it's so out-dated as to be impractical. But there we were, being dragged into the 21st century, kicking and screaming, and like it or not. Next thing you know, we'll all be getting new hairbrushes, and people would think of us as a bunch of free-thinking radicals, except that in our pink camo, they won't be able to see us.
Happy Easter! For many of us in the Western world (or as Bill refers to it as "Unorthodox") this Sunday will be Easter, while the Eastern Orthodox religions have to wait another week for the big day. We have Bill to thank for even more meticulous research into the whole Easter situation (and anyone who misbehaves, don't think I won't send you the entire voluminous compendium of it, so you'd all better watch your step!) including picking the right date for the event. Based on the calculations used by the Eastern and Western camps, there appears to be a cycle where both celebrate the holiday on the same day, then a year that the former is a week behind the latter, and then they're about 5 weeks behind (as in 2005, when Orthodox Easter was May 1) before going back to the same Sunday again for another year. So where do these calculations come from? According to Bill, it's not really all that complicated: [ OK, as I see it, the bottom line is, in OUR calendar, you start at March 21st which, for argument's sake, they consider the Vernal Equinox, whether it is or not. Then you watch for a new moon. This new moon marks the beginning of the next lunar month. From there you count 14 days, which they consider the Full Moon, whether or not it's off a little bit. Easter is the Sunday after that. Got it? It's the first Sunday after the 14th day after the beginning of the first lunar month after March 21. Now I ask you -- what could be simpler? ] On the other hand, Wikipedia has one entire entry on "Computus," which is the word coined to describe the process of determining where Easter is.
====================================
The method for computing the date of the ecclesiastic Full Moon that was standard for the Latin (Catholic) church before the Gregorian calendar reform, made use of an uncorrected repetition of the 19-year Metonic cycle in combination with the Julian calendar. In terms of the method of the epacts discussed above, it effectively used a single epact table starting with an epact of * (0), which was never corrected. In this case, the epact was counted on 22 March, the earliest acceptable date for Easter. This repeats every 19 years, so there were only 19 possible dates for the ecclesiastic Full Moons after 21 March.
=====================================
Well, that's just about as clear as mud, which is about all you can expect from a bunch of experts. Making just a little bit more sense (although he could just be making this all up out of whole cloth, and who would know the difference) is Kenneth C. Davis in USA Weekend magazine, who informs us:
====================================
The English name for this holy day has long been linked to the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring usually called "Eostre" or "Ostara." Also known as a pagan goddess of dawn, Eostre is a deity whose name is connected to the word "east" -- where, obviously, the sun rises. According to Anglo-Saxon myth, the goddess Eostre changed her favorite pet bird into a rabbit to amuse some children. The rabbit produced brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the kids. In Germany, that tradition carried into Christian times with the tale of a Santa-like magical rabbit, Osterhase, who leaves colored eggs for good children.
=====================================
I don't mind saying that I like our Easter Bunny a whole lot better, who already knows that I prefer pastel M&Ms and Hershey Kisses to actual raw eggs any day, goddess or no goddess.
Meanwhile, in the wonderful world of retail merchandising, I received a catalog from JC Penney with a page full of Knitworks French Terry Gauchos in Girls sizes, that were available in a variety of prints including what they referred to as "camouflage." Here I'm thinking, I guess you could consider that print a sort of camouflage, that is, except for the part about it being pink and all. I suppose if you were hiding out in a forest of Barbie Dream Houses, this pink camo might come in handy, but other than that, its usefulness as camouflage would elude even the most relaxed interpretation of the term. Honestly, words have simply lost all of their meaning these days.
Speaking of which, all I wanted to do was get a new hairbrush, because the little plastic one that I had been happily using all these years finally wouldn't stay together any longer because the glue must have let go or something. I may as well warn everyone right up front, if you haven't gone out and tried to buy a brush for a while, it's a whole new ball-game out there, and that's putting it mildly. Nowadays, brushes come with labels and instructions, so you can't just go and buy any old brush and use it with impunity like you could back in the day. Oh no, no, no! Some brushes are for straightening, and some brushes are for curling, and some brushes are for de-tangling, and some brushes are for use with blow dryers, while still yet others use micro-ion technology to control static and inhibit bacteria. I tell you, it's a jungle of brushes out there, and if they weren't mostly black and silver, you can be sure I'd be wearing my pink camouflage gauchos in that aisle. And as much as I hate to be an alarmist, I discovered that you can pay $6 or $10 just for one of these brushes, and even more, if you have special requirements in your hairbrush preferences. Anyway, I finally found one that looked like a pretty comparable replacement for the one I have now, and at a mere $3 it was like they were giving it away, so I snatched it off the shelf and glad of it. That's when I noticed the instruction label on it, and honest to God, it said, "For traditional brushing." I mean, really, sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder.
Here's something else to wonder about, and I find that people don't pay enough attention to how their Internet addresses look whenyourunthemalltogetherasoneword and without any punctuation or capital letters to help make the meaning more clear. Last week at work, we all had to attend one in a series of meetings they had scheduled about the pension plan, and it was presented by our new friends at A.G. Edwards, who I'm sure are fine and upstanding folks who are investment brokers from White Plains. They repeatedly invited us to make use of the information and resources on their web site, which I thought was saddled with the unfortunate address of www.agedwards.com and looked to me for all the world like Aged Wards. For my tastes, this would not be the image that I want to project as a cutting edge and forward thinking vanguard of financial wizards, but there you have it. In fact, it reminded me of when our Telecommunications director gave me his email address at some screwy ISP with the extravagant name of Omni Sky, but when you print it on a business card as rachod@omnisky.net, it makes you look instead like Comrade Omniskynet, in charge of the road paving cooperative in the Urals section of good old Mother Russia. I know that young people take these things in stride, but I find I'm getting too old for all this folderol.
On the other hand, just to prove that you can teach an old dog new tricks, last week on Palm Sunday, we were astounded at church (congregation founded Christmas Day, 1899) to find our service being projected on the wall with the use of a laptop and computerized projector, rather than an overhead projector and transparencies, which had been the extent of our technological advancement up to that point. It worked like a charm, and everyone was very impressed with it. And it was a big surprise to everyone, since we don't usually embrace any sort of new technology until it's so out-dated as to be impractical. But there we were, being dragged into the 21st century, kicking and screaming, and like it or not. Next thing you know, we'll all be getting new hairbrushes, and people would think of us as a bunch of free-thinking radicals, except that in our pink camo, they won't be able to see us.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:39 PM
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