Who's the Man?!
Andrew fixed my blog! With a tagboard and comments and a hit counter an' everything. And so far it seems to be behaving very well and not doing foolish things like freezing halfway down the page. Andrew is the coolest ever!


childhood mysteries
As I was reading to Sage from her nursery rhymes book, I was struck by the tantalizing mysteriousness of many of the entries. As some of you may know, a lot of nursery rhymes and fairy tales actually have their roots in actual events, such as 'Ring Around The Rosie', which is supposedly about the Black Plague of 1347.

In case you don't know:

Ring around the rosie (A round, red rash was often the first indication of infection.)
A pocketful of posies (They used to carry little bunches of flowers around to combat the smell of dead and dying bodies.)
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. (This is either a corruption of the sneezing sound 'achoo', or a reference to the fact that they would burn the corpses to prevent the further spread of disease.)

So I can't help but wonder what some of those other rhymes are really about. Why, for example, was some king somewhere served a pie of four-and-twenty blackbirds? What was that all about? Who was Wee Willie Winkie, and why did he like to run around town in his nightgown? And, most puzzling to my mind, why did the cheese stand alone?


untruth in advertising
As Dean and I were walking home last night, we spotted a delivery truck bearing the logo Solomon Beds, with the startling tag line since the beginning of time...

Which is really quite the revelation! I mean, who knew that beds even predated mankind? Were they made in extra-giant-emperor size to accommodate the brachiosaurs? Or super-teeny-tiny, to give the paramecia a comfy place to rest?

Honestly. Do people not think before they come up with that kind of thing?