I’m back (again)

I’ve taken a short (long) hiatus. It felt good not to have an underlying responsibility to a website, but I feel liek I ought to – it’s fun.

Did you know that the Berserks were a group of Vikings who would go into battle naked? It explains the word origin. I wonder who went trawling through a history book looking for people to be made into terms.

Being made into terms – is that a word? Termify? Termitize? Etymonize? Get to work on that, Linguists.

Sick

I am sick. Or, rather, my throat is sick. The rest of me is fine. I feel like I could run a mile (I can’t really) if it weren’t for the hacking cough every few minutes. I bought a book recently. It’s a book on Mythology from DK, and encompasses all kinds of heroes and gods and such. Quite a few stories (Gilgamesh, etc…) had stories of a great flood in them. Which got me thinking…Why doesn’t the book have the Torah/Bible stories in there? Without even questioning their validity, aren’t they just as mythological as Odin or Raven the Trickster god? Because nowhere in the book do they even mention whether or not the stories are real, and nowhere to they mention Christianity w/out the phrase “Before Slovakia was taken over by Christianity, they had a rich mythological heritage” or some such flapdoodle.No, it’s a great book. But it does confuse me so. 

It’s Alive

Somewhere – directly above my head – there is construction. One of the benefits is that this construction will not have to be done at a later date. Actually, that’s the only benefit. The grinder is making BZZZZZing noise, loud and annoying as possible without being illegal. So my ears are buzzing, and my computer is not portable.

On the plus side, I discovered that not everyone knows the history of the umbrella. Using the umbrella in rain is not how it originated. In anchient Eygpt, papyrus was draped over sticks to protect from the sun.

Darn, now they’re hammering.

Umbrellas were used as a shade, and only after the 18th and 19th century and such were they used for water repellent.

Back to drilling.

Darn.

Rules

Five rules for historical research.

5. Write legibly.
4. Understand your concepts.
3. During an oral presentation, know how to pronounce everything you’ve written.
2. Spell correctly. Mayan words like Xiuhpohualli are best left alone.
1. Make sure your sources are non-fiction.

I’m currently researching Mayan numbers and calendars, and there are month names that are incredible.

Email

There is a secret address which I can mail to which will automatically publish to my blog. It’s a secret because, were others to find out, they could falsely post. This is the first time I have done such a thing, but hopefully this will make it easier to blog during my trips away from a computer.

I spent most of today designing a new site layout in Illustrator, only to be hopelessly set astray because of the fact that I couldn’t do anything with it. If one of you CSS Geniuses could help, that’d be great.

iWeb has turned out to be a flop, too. You can publish… but only to .Mac, which is expensive. You can save to HTML, but the images don’t follow. HTML is great, but for my idea, it just doesn’t do the trick.

I spent the other half of the day reading the Constitution. It’s a brilliant piece of work, but I’d love to see it translated like XKCD did for Washington’s Farewell speech.