theory
December 1st, 2021
Prompted by this from The Telegraph (stop loading before download is finished to see full article)
Latest book…
Random oldie…
April 1, 2020-
- NICE T-SHIRT (Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust). Currently unavailable.
Very true, very true. Thank you !
Good to see Mo’s “Telegraph” is now using clear print .. ..
And what a miracle/coincidence that They (modern pronoun) was born exactly in the year 0 AD/BC.
Amazing that the author of the Telegraph article could have typed out 800+ words and complained about the impossibility of finding a “traditional advent calendar”, and yet was unable to type out “https://www.traditionaladventcalendars.co.uk/”
I tried looking up the article using Author’s “stop loading” tip but it didn’t work. Any other ideas? (other than subscribing)
Vittal: brilliant!
Trumpelstiltskin claimed that before he was in office, you couldn’t say Merry Christmas. But then every second word he said was a lie.
On the flip side, Biden, who supports abortion rights despite being Catholic, met with the current pope. So American Catholics that support Trump now hate both Biden and the pope.
Here’s a link, on a friendlyatheist page, to a story of a pastor that kind of gets it right:
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/05/20/a-methodist-pastor-is-brilliantly-calling-out-the-pro-life-crowds-hypocrisy/
Xmas is the official birthday of the PC brigade.
I am really not that concerned about the cancellation of Christmas as it never happened. I don’t like the new version very much “BUYNOWORELSEmas” either.
My bonded sucubus and I are currently enjoying our own holiday of “not buying anything but booze” followed by the feast of “mixing drinks” and finally the sorrowful period of “I posted what ???”.
May all your days be heavily lubricated and non fatal.
Happy Yule
As Christmas was invented as part of a War on Saturnalia it seems only fair that the same thing should happen to it in turn.
One of my neighbours has put up her annual garden lights as of 1/12/21. This is the only early sign of Christmas I’m happy with. She does a pretty.
The endless “Christmas music”, piles of wrapped empty “gifts” that will be binned and wasted before the end of the year, thick-walled bottles of “Christmas Special” liquors that have about 5ml in them for about a hundred quids, shops re-arranging their shelves from about the middle of October so that nothing needed can ever be found for four months, endless “Christmassy” posters, flyers, advertisements and “offers” that are essentially just over-wrapped, more expensive subsets of the tat that is on sale all year round and the nauseatingly saccharine, T1-type-inducing pseudo-bonhomie that is forced upon us from ten minutes after the Hallowe’en tat is cleared from the shelves are all extremely excessive and annoying.
Some of the novelties at the local Christmas Markets are fun but much of those are “shrink-flated” annually and over-priced. Profiteering capitalism at its finest.
Or, to “tl:dr” it, “Bah, Humbug!”
Christmas and Capitalism should never meet.
That said, Merry Christmas and a new-mutant-free New Year to all.
Oh, Deimos, my poor little innocent brain keeps trying to decode your cited site as “Buy No Whore, Else” or as “Buy No Whoreles”. I guess I’m not as corrupted by the Capitalist ideals as I thought? Perhaps hyphenating would help?
My weirded mind is valiantly trying to figure out what a “whorele” is. This comes of reading too much historical fiction and alien languages, I imagine.
Jveeds, the “stop loading” trick worked for me in Opera for the “Telegraph” article. I killed the load before the video showed up.
On the contents of the article: the writer is correct in one thing, when a senior politician expressed total confidence in a junior who is caught dipping into something unsavoury, when that junior is called a fine fellow whom the senior has known and supported for decades that junior in gone within a week. He may return unannounced a month or so later in another guise but expressing support for him is a certain portent of his fate for at least a while.
The writer is also correct about the Capitalisation of Christmas though this is in no way unique to the Winter Holidays. Everything is commercialised to nauseating degrees. Capitalism has no soul, its only creed is profiteering, it ruins everything in the pursuit of more and more profit.
Such is Life and there is little we can do about it.
She is also a bit thick. As Vittal mentioned, she could have typed that URL into the address bar on a browser but she could also just have cut-and-pasted the phrase “traditional advent calendar” into the search bar.
It’s only a technology that’s a quarter of a century old and built into every single web-browser on the planet; it’s not as though it’s super-high-techy, inordinately esoteric or even difficult.
Since when is Mo so damned clever? I can’t believe it’s divine inspiration … And where’s Moses in all this yuletide schlumuzzle? Off inhaling the fumes of some burning weeds?
Solo Hands… a whorele with all letters pronounced, is a Yiddish diminutive of whore. A cute little baby whore. Except that whore isn’t a Yiddish word. In Yiddish, that would be any of nafke, kurve, zoineh, or prostitutke. In each case the final e is pronounced.
… Just in case you’ve got to tell off some ultra-Orthodox Hasidic whorele. 🙂
Laripu, “prostituke”!, I love it! Thank you.
Also, thank you for the elucidation of “whorele”, that is ever so sweet and cute.
I would never “tell off” a whore. They are hard-working ladies who serve a very useful function in our societies, unlike many other jobs we could mention. Also unlike many other professions, I feel that they deserve our respect though I know other people would disagree.
But … “kurve“? Really? 🙂 That is ever so lovely.
God rest you merry gentlemen let nothing you dismay,
Remember Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas day.
To save us all from ignorances power
Solo Hands, I don’t know why Yiddish uses a diminutive in “prostitutke”, the “ke” at the end. It’s as though every prostitute is a little prostitute. Also, the origin of “kurve” is the Hungarian word “kurva”.
Way back in the mid-80s, I had a girlfriend whose father would swear in Hungarian: “Az anyja kurva picsáját!”
I like Google Translate, even though it’s often imperfect. 🙂 And I really like the online etymological dictionary:
https://www.etymonline.com/?utm_source=homescreen
About Christmas: it’s a well known fact that Jesus commanded companies to give us paid days off from Dec 24 to Jan 1. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Personally, I try to stick to the natural date for winter celebration, the winter solstice, and I think of it as the pre-christian “Yule”. This year it’s on the 21st of December, some years it’s the 22nd.
Really December 25 is a winter solstice holiday. (Or to be precise, a holidary _near_ the solstice, which is December 21.) So it’s based upon objective astronomical fact, and therefore can rightly be called a “natural” holiday. It’s a dark time at the bottom of the year, so it makes sense to throw a party. The Romans called it Saturnalia, after the god Saturn; the Christians took over the time slot and named it Christmas, after the god Jesus; and the Capitalists took over the time slot, kept the name, but dedicated it to the god Santa. But the names are just excuses.
Aye. I like the solstice piss up. Nothing quite like quaffing heavy dark ales in a warm hostelry with a fire ablaze. Then scoffing your bodyweight in junk food….oh and a bit of old fashioned rumpy-pumpy is to be partaken as well…
I haven’t spent much time on sites recently due to bloody f******** kung flu.
Here in Deva Victrix we still celebrate Saturnalia AND Yule plus the Christian feast.
I find genuine joy in all these celebrations as they are all the midwinter feasts and hugely important to keep a settlement together in the shite of a north European winter. Drinking, eating and bad communal singing are the mainstay of group survival in the dark north. Deva is in a river valley so our winters are milder, hence the construction of Deva Victrix and its history as a settlement lasting 2000 years.
AVE
…I had an interesting* interaction with a young lady in Deva Victrix a quick snurfle on the city walls….xmas 1985….
I’m a devout atheist, but I do object to “Happy Holidays” on the assumption that it occurs in shop windows (instead of Merry Christmas) in order “not to cause offence”. As far as I know, no one was ever offended by Merry Christmas greetings.
Or it’s just there because they think it will encourage Jews, Muslims, Hindus etc. also to engage in the orgy of consumption?
Oooh. I’m so offended that I’m going to buy TWO Christmas trees this year! 🙂
On the subject of religion, two data points as it were:
https://twitter.com/CloarecJulien/status/1467493766881759237
The Church of the 95% Confidence Interval #rstats
https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1467645037525803011
Plumber Finds $600,000 In Cash And Checks Stashed In Wall At Joel Osteen’s Texas Mega-Church
Praise the Lord but hedge your bets.
“Happy Holidays” is “inclusive”. Even we atheists receive “the holidays”, whether we asked for them or not, and it relieves the shopkeeper of the burden of trying to address all the mock Christmas holidays built up in other religions – Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, who knows.
I suppose I don’t approve of the things that are being included. I used to be under the impression that secularisation/atheism was increasing (which is a good thing, in my opinion).
Having Christmas in the dark month was just a cultural/traditional thing: sparkly lights, fir/beeswax/cinnamon smells, and of course alcohol/chocolate/presents (and little kiddy squeals of delight).
30 years ago it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to “include” Zoroastrians or any other religious groups.
But now some of us feel the need to include them. Perhaps because there are more of them? Perhaps because some of them demand (and are getting) more respect (aka fear)?
I don’t care what any individual does in religious matters (as long as it has no effect on anyone else, including their children), but I don’t like the trend (if it exists) towards *more* religion in public.
I don’t like the idea that we may one day end up back in the Middle Ages (where you could get burnt at the stake over the issue of whether Jesus owned the sandals he wore).
There’s no point in complaining about things when it’s too late. That’s why it’s important to be vigilant, ie. looking for the initial signs that things are going the wrong way.
30 years ago wasn’t so long, but over the broader history, it was just plain Christmas, big Christian holiday (albeit with lots of vestigial pre-Christian stuff.) Now we (in the English speaking world) work towards a more pluralistic society, which is as good for atheists as it is Zoroastrians.
If you want to get religion out of the public sphere, you have to can the whole holiday, maybe have the winter festival at New Year. That isn’t going to happen, though, so instead we do what we can – make much of alternatives like Hanukah, say “Happy Holidays”, etc. It’s cheesy, but it’s progress. The problem with Christmas is that they tacked Jesus up on a holiday people really get into.
Jebus has no clout in my solstice celebrations, I will be donning the elf suit to dish the prsents out to my family, specially my 4yo grandson….
Several years ago I spotted a friend and his wife at the local shopping mall. When we had exchanged pleasantries and were ready to part I started to say “ Merry…” and I saw the wife’s jaw starting to tense up. I finished with “holiday season”. Her jaw relaxed into a smile. Until then I hadn’t realized that my friend is Jewish. Now I automatically go to “happy holidays”.
Several years ago I spotted a friend and his wife at the local shopping mall. When we had exchanged pleasantries and were ready to part I started to say “ Merry…” and I saw the wife’s jaw starting to tense up. I finished with “holiday season”. Her jaw relaxed into a smile. Until then I hadn’t realized that my friend is Jewish. Now I automatically go to “happy holidays”.
I typically go with Happy Hollandaise.