Long story short — I was reading the Wiki article on Imbolc, since it’s Imbolc as well as Groundhog’s Day, and I found the following something:

Imbolc is also named as the day the where the Cailleach, the hag of Gaelic tradition,  gathers her firewood for the rest of the winter.  Legend has it that if she intends to make the winter last a good while longer, she will make sure the weather on Imbolc is bright and sunny, so she can gather plenty of firewood.  Therefore, it is seen as a good omen if Imbolc is a day of foul weather, as it means the Cailleach is asleep and winter is almost over.

I love it when I find pieces-parts of the universe that neatly snap together.

Today is also the Feast of Brigid, a goddess associated with poetry, healing, and smithcraft.  In the blogging world, today is a day for poetry.  My contribution this year doesn’t seem to fit in as a poem — more like a prose-poem.  I offer it anyway, since the beauty of the prose shines through.

Dreamtigers

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger — not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant.  I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers.  (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.)  My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams.  In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure.  As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream.  At those moments, I often think:  This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh, incompetence!  My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for.  The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

- Jose Luis Borges

Enjoy your day, whichever you celebrate.

Yes, it is at bad as it sounds.  A blog post every day during the month of October.  If you feel compelled to point out to me that today is October 3rd, thank you.  I already know that, and the “rules” say you can begin on any day, including October 30th.

I’ve been in this gray, inchoate place in my mind with regard to blogging.  I think of things to write about, certainly.  I  never actually work up the energy to craft a post, or it just turns into a Facebook update. I’m growing weary of this and figure I need a kick in the pants to get me up and running, or rather, blogging.

I’m hoping I will be able to write a few things this month that aren’t “what I had for lunch today” posts.

When browsing a stationery store in the 6th arrondissement, I found a note card, Questionnaire de Marcel Proust.  It posed about two dozen questions — in French — and I thought it was poking fun at Proust’s detailed observations of peoples’ characters.  A little research on the Innernets proved otherwise.

So, without further ado, here are my answers:

Le principal trait de mon caractère (the main feature of my character). I’m trying to come up with one word that encompasses reserved, quiet, and observant. Introverted is too frequently misunderstood, primarily by people who aren’t introverts.

Le qualité que je désire chez un homme (the quality I want in a man). Wit. He also has to be able to do his own laundry.

Le qualité que je préfère chez une femme (the quality I like in a woman). Discretion.

Ce que j’apprécie le plus chez mes amis (what I appreciate most among my friends). They get my jokes – or they pretend to.

Mon principal défaut (my main defect). In my opinion – stubbornness; in others’ – selfishness.

Mon occupation préfèree (my favorite pursuit). Despite the closet full of yarn, I still can honestly say “reading.”

Mon rêve de bonheur (my idea of happiness). A book, several cats, a cup of something hot, and a long stretch of uninterrupted time. Bonus points if it’s winter and there’s a fireplace involved.

Quel serait mon plus grand malheur (what would be my greatest misfortune). To be trapped by children and be unable to spend any time, energy, or money on myself for decades.

Ce que je voudrais être (who I would want to be – if not myself). Michelle Obama.  She’s one class act and has a handsome, brilliant husband who is crazy in love with her.

Le pays où je désirerais vivre (the country where I’d live). I’d split my time between France (an apartment in Paris)  and the United States (my home in Ann Arbor).

Le couleur que je préfère (the color I prefer). Cobalt blue.

La fleur que j’aime (the flower I love). Violets.

L’oiseau que je préfère (the bird that I prefer). Ravens.

Mes auteurs favoris en prose (my favorite prose authors). Other than Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and Ian McEwan.

Mes poètes préférés (my favorite poets). T.S. Eliot and Anne Sexton.

Mes héros favoris dans la fiction (my favorite heroes in fiction). Stephen Maturin (from Patrick O’Brian’s books); Neville Longbottom (from the Harry Potter books); and Randolph Carter (H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream saga).

Mes héroïnes favorites dans la fiction (my favorite heroines in fiction). Elizabeth Bennett (Pride and Prejudice) and Harriet the Spy.

Mes compositeurs préférés (my favorite composers). I’m assuming this means “classical music,” so my answers are Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.

Mes peintres favoris (my favorite painters). Monet and Vermeer.

Mes héros dan la vie réelle (my heroes in real life). Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

Mes héroïnes dans l’histoire (my heroines in history). Queen Victoria.

Mes noms favoris (my favorite names). Genevieve, Scooter, and Cecil.

Ce que je déteste par-dessus tout (what I hate the most). Prejudice and intolerance.  I really hate homophobes and racists of all stripes.

Caractères que je méprise le plus (characters that I despise most). Dick Cheney. The man is the incarnation of True Evil. Deceitful, self-serving, fear-mongering. He has set the standard for vile, cowardly behavior and has not one atom of integrity in his entire body.

Le fait militaire que j’estime le plus (the military event I esteem the most). This is the oddest question I’ve ever seen in a meme.  My answer — the invasion of Normandy; June 6, 1944.

Le réforme que j’admire le plus (the reform that I admire most). This is the second oddest question I’ve ever seen in a meme.  Off the top of my head, I’d have to say the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution.

Le don de la nature que je voudrais avoir (the natural talent I would like to have). I would love to be able to dance well or do gymnastics.  Actually, I would give my eye teeth to have any kinesthetic sense whatsoever.

Comment j’aimerais mourir (how I wish to die). I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

État présent de mon esprit (my present state of mind). Stretched thin.  I’ve been working on this questionnaire for far too long.

Fautes qui m’inspirent le plus d’indulgence (the fault I find easiest to tolerate). Narcissism.  It keeps the focus off of me and it can be endlessly entertaining if you’re in the right frame of mind.

Ma devise (my motto). Can you solo it? and if not that, then Hell is other people.

However, The Game I’m writing about today is wholly different, completely innocuous, and gives me something moderately interesting to post on the blog since I can’t think of a damned thing to write about this morning.   The Game is an Internet Flickr meme that I discovered on Pierre, The Yarn Snob’s blog.

What you do is:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions in the Flickr search feature.
2. Pick an image on the first page of the search results.
3. Copy/paste the image’s URL into the Mosaic Maker, using whatever layout you desire — providing it shows the 12 images.

You’ll wind up with something like this (Click for biggie size.  It looks much better) :

So, here are the questions (with my answers).

1. What is your first name? [edited out for privacy reasons]
2. What is your favorite food? Chocolate
3. What high school did you attend? [edited out for privacy reasons]
4. What is your favorite color? Cobalt blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Michael Kitchen
6. What is your favorite drink? Latte
7. Where would your dream vacation be? Paris
8. What is your favorite dessert? Ice cream
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? What?
10. What do you love most in life? Quiet
11. What is one word you use to describe yourself? Introverted
12. What is your Flickr user name? Laiane (I find it terribly amusing there’s a supermodel out there somewhere who shares my name.)
    

Et voilà.

Here’s another version of The Game where you keyword search (your answer) + sign.  I think I like this one on a more aesthetic level.

There are some fun things you can do with Big Huge Labs and your uploaded photos on Flickr.   I’ve posted a mosaic of my raindrop laden irises, and here’s a mosaic of my yarn pr0n pictures.  Well, my valiant attempt at yarn pr0n pictures.

Ooooo…..shiny.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, cats and kittens.  I’m off to do some knitting.

]]> http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/index.php/2008/07/05/the-game/feed/ 0 http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/index.php/2008/05/17/dear-god-its-a-meme/ http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/index.php/2008/05/17/dear-god-its-a-meme/#comments Sat, 17 May 2008 12:53:13 +0000 Laiane http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/?p=462 I haven’t done a meme in a long time, but this one caught my eye. I think the last meme I did rated my chances of surviving The Zombie Apocalypse. I was much better at this one.

70 words

Speedtest

I love mindlessly surfing the Innernets. I truly do.

If you look closely, you’ll see a woolly bear caterpillar between the pawsitude.

And, just because I haven’t thrown a meme in here in so long, and because I’m sure you’re just dying to know what kind of yarn I am…

What kind of yarn are you?

You are Mohair.You are a warm and fuzzy type who works well with others, doing your share without being too weighty. You can be stubborn and absolutely refuse to change your position once it is set, but that’s okay since you are good at covering up your mistakes. Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Once again, I cannot get the spacing right on these “copy and paste” meme thingies.

I recall what one of the nuns at St. Tom’s used to say: “You have other gifts.”

The Husband and I came home from our Saturday shopping to find an amazon.com box on our doorstep with Books Six and Seven of the Harry Potter series, and I vanished for the rest of the weekend, finishing Book Seven around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday night. I’m estimating 1,500 pages in less than two days.

I think I hurt myself.

I’m in the process of re-reading Book Five at the moment, and I will then go through Books Six and Seven again. Since I flew through them at the speed of sound, I’m certain I missed many details. Plot, for instance.

A few (spoiler-free) observations:

• The Harry Potter fans — the ones I know both on the Internet and in Real Life — have been fabulous. Several people commented how they wished they could be reading the books again for the first time since they remembered how exciting it all was. They never talked about spoilers, and if they were posting online, they gave ample warning they were about to do so, like STOP READING NOW. Part of their fun in sharing the story with me was watching as the plot revealed itself and I put the pieces together or speculated on the fates of certain characters. I know I amused one of my co-workers no end with my hypotheses on Dumbledore and Snape.
  
• My favorite Hogwart’s student was Neville Longbottom. Even though I hate to say this (because it’s such a trite expression), he definitely “grew” the most during the course of the seven books. In terms of my least favorite, I would have to say Pansy Parkinson in Slytherin House, mainly because she seemed more like a cardboard cutout than a real character to me. I mean, we were offered little glimpses of the personality or family life of other minor characters (Lee Jordan, Seamus, Dean), but we only saw Pansy laughing maliciously at other students.
  
• I haven’t quite figured out Snape yet. I knew by Book Four that there was more to him than meets the eye, and I was surprised by the revelations in Book Seven about him as a young boy, but there are still missing pieces. I’m sure those missing pieces are all in the text; that’s just what happens when I read so quickly. I’m thinking he would qualify as my favorite Hogwart’s professor. McGonagall and Hagrid were cool in their own way, but Snape had a certain je ne sais qua.
  

• Ravenclaw needed a better representative than Luna Lovegood. It’s not that Luna was a bad example; I just don’t recall seeing a Ravenclaw student that exemplified their House’s emphasis on intellect. I was always sorted into Ravenclaw in the umpteen online quizes/memes I took.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!



Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose intelligence is surest.”

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron’s affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine’s editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

Hogwarts Sorting Hat: Based on Myers-Briggs Personality Typing

You are a RAVENCLAW!As a Ravenclaw and as an NTP, you are intellectual, independent, and value excellence in yourself and in those around you. You have a strong sense of curiosity, and in general can see many aspects of a single issue or debate. You have a strong drive to acquire knowledge and set very high standards for yourself and those around you. You enjoy being challenged, and can accept constructive criticism without taking it personally. You are probably at least somewhat unconventional, and will not usually follow authority for its own sake; instead, you will consider the issue at hand and make a decision for yourself.
Take this quiz!

Quizilla |
Join

Have a splendiferous Friday, cats and kittens.

In any event, I found a nice version of the Myers-Briggs that churned out a spiffy badge for your blog or myspace page or whatever, so I thought I would give it a whirl. I love spiffy badges. I will probably need to create a separate page on this blog to contain them because if I put up all the spiffy badges I found it would look a tad chaotic over here.

I went back this morning to take a look at their Multiple Intelligences Test. I was interested because it measured different scales of intelligence, e.g., verbal, musical, mathematical, kinesthetic, and so on — a nice change from the run of the mill IQ tests, which measure verbal/analytical and spatial relations skills alone. I knew I would score highest on the verbal, but wanted to see how the other scales stacked up (especially how low I would score in the categories of “musical” “spatial,” and “kinesthetic,” all forms at which I, to be blunt, truly suck).

So, here’s the results:

There’s nothing too shocking here. “Verbal” off the charts and everything else median or lower, some much lower. Pretty typical for me. I’m not at all surprised that “musical” is all the way at the bottom.

Since everyone likes to be told things they already know about themselves, I clicked to read the definition of verbal/linguistic intelligence. Just a sampling:

• Loves words games (Oh, yes.)
• Often speaks of what they have read (Too much, I’m sure some people think.)
• Notices grammatical mistakes (Most of the time, not all of the time.)
• Enjoys writing (A yep.)
• Cherishes their book collection (“Cherish” is a mild word to use, but acceptable.)
• Likes to use “fancy” words (I beg your pardon? Back the truck up, mister.)

[I'm going to degenerate into some snarky commentary here. If you don't like my snarky posts, I'm going to suggest you go to Cute Overload and look at pictures of widdle kitties and bunny wabbits and come back when I've calmed down and am writing about cats and yarn and computer games.]

Still with me? Moving along.

Likes to use “fancy” words? Putting quotation marks around “fancy” contains a little too much condescension, don’t you think? “Oooo, those verbal/linguistic people use ‘fancy’ words to show off how smart they are. They can’t be normal like us; they have to be ‘fancy’.”

I went on to look at the defining characteristics for the other categories and the only other uses of quotation marks I found were:

• Has a mind “like a computer” (logical/mathematical intelligence)
• Learns by “doing” (bodily/kinesthetic intelligence)

Not quite the same tone, is it?

And what exactly is a “fancy” word? Something with more than two syllables? A word that a person with a steady diet of People magazine, American Idol, and Fox News wouldn’t recognize? But I digress.

A more apt and appropriate description would be “has a large vocabulary.” Geez Louise, how hard is that to come up with? There’s not a “fancy” word to be found in it, either.

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of humor here in that a verbal/linguistic person is rewriting the description of verbal/linguistic intelligence.

I’ll leave you on that (less snarky) note. Enjoy the rest of your day, cats and kittens!

40%

[Yes, I KNOW THE SPACING IS OFF. I've been playing with it for half an hour now.]

Deconstructing the test, my chances of survival appear to be based on my Save My Own Bacon First mentality and a copious supply of canned goods and ramen noodles. My percentage could be higher if I owned (and knew how to use) a firearm, lived in a less urban area, and was in better physical condition. All righty then, if I can’t run from zombies, I can hide from zombies, and I’m smart enough to know not to go to a hospital or mall when the chips are down and the undead are marching.

Next up, a parental guidance warning!

My references to pain, hell, and torture put me in the PG category. My post that included erotica, sex, and lesbian cheerleaders didn’t even show up on the radar, nor did my link to Susie Bright’s (Not Safe For Work) Journal..

And now, Cadavers!

$3440.00The Cadaver Calculator – Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 – Free Online Dating

I can’t recall if I would be of more interest to medical research if I was an albino. I might need to retake this one. This is a moot point since my goal is to donate my body to the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, and they are welcome to have me at no cost.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Watch for zombies.