[caption time] grrrrr

[heraldry] make your own coat of arms

The purists will no doubt have me on the short list for euthanasia but:

Dymphna, one of the partners in Gates of Vienna, posed the question some time ago: "What would appear on your coat of arms?"

I did have one but lost it. Now if you are entitled to one already, well and good and the World is not Enough. But for the rest of us – time to get working on our heraldry. Mine appears below:

Symbolism of the Higham coat-of-arms

The anchor means hope, religious steadfastness and symbolizes sailing.

The four quadrants separated by the dancette line:

1] Paschal lamb with cross is evident;
2] Stag means one who will not fight unless provoked;
3] Dolphin represents grace and style;
4] Catherine wheel means one who is prepared to undergo trials for his faith
5] Spilt blood means just that.

The dancette line crossing the shields means water.
The wombat represents obstinate determination and directness.
The badger represents hidden talent, integrity and determination.

Amo ut invenio means ‘I love as I find’.


Good sites to help you with your tasteful design

Fleur de lis
Painting about

My notated list of expressions in traditional heraldry

Bordure - polite way of saying "Cr-p"
Couchant - avec moi
Counter-passant - nothing you wish to buy there
Dormant - intimate organs
Fesse - con
Gardant - anti-perspirant
Mullet - Tony Blair
Passant regardant - check out the chicks
Pile - ordure [b]
Rampant regardant - on hind legs, tongue hanging out
Trippant - on substances

[thought for the day] sunday evening

Time for that old Chesterton snippet:

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

[rationalism] perpetuating blinkered half truths

No fool like an old fool

Definition of political correctness:

No matter what guise the particular variety takes, the end result is always the same: repression, followed by carnage and tragedy, born out of good intentions towards the common good.

It's a quick step from here to Statism, compulsion and denial of free will:

If men hadn't free will, how can we possibly come to any moral decisions? This lays the basis for the idea, that the only natural environment for man, is liberty. This being the reason why mentally and emotionally mature people prefer freedom over Statism and Collectivism.

Cassandra explains the lie:

The central philosophical con trick of all Collectivist thought ... is perpetrated in order to accommodate the lie, so that the ideology may survive yet another generation: it is the denial of Reality and with it, the rejection of right and wrong, good and bad.

This rejection or denial creates amorality, a sort of childlike unawareness that some things are just plain wrong, such as indiscriminate sex:

This amorality has become a problem of Biblical proportions as adherents because of it, do not recognize Evil, even if it bit them in the behind.

Plus:

Another, moral consequence of the rejection of reality is, that good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lie, are denied in the same way; or to put it in another way: everybody is 'right' from his or her own particular point of view, and anything 'bad' is called 'bad', only because it doesn't fit into our present, defective idea of society.

Thus we come to moral relativism and into this fuzzy logic steps genuine evil, albeit surreptitiously in its early stages, masquerading under the do-gooder tag of "tolerance":

The denial of evil as a reality leads to wishful thinking, further blindness, and the denial of the self; it decreases rather than increases awareness. A false picture of reality is created -- the reality of the present state of humankind.

Like an alcoholic failing to concede the true nature of what faces him, deniers of the existence of evil leave themselves wide open. Elias Staub, The roots of evil: the origins of genocide and other group violence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.) offers another characterization:

“Evil is not a scientific concept with an agreed meaning, but the idea of evil is part of a broadly shared human cultural heritage. The essence of evil is the destruction of human beings…

That's the bottom line, both in observed experience and in metaphysics. It has always been and still is about enslavement, the denial of "humanness" and the reduction of humans to primal instincts. This is the basis of Associative Disorder and mind control. It's why Jack Nicholson had a lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. People are simply blinded to it, hamstrung by a denial of the metaphysical:

Prefiguring Peck, Rollo May long held that here in America--with its youthful optimism and naivete--we comprehend little of evil's true nature, and are thus naively ill-prepared to contend with it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn showed how it inevitably leads to violence:

"Violence cannot exist in and of itself. It is invariably interlinked with the Lie."

The primary battleground is indeed the destruction of liberty via the unsustainable constructs of society peddled as the Lie but where the Libertarians now jump ship is that they ascribe this to the non-metaphysical entirely. However, even philosophy recognizes the place of the epistemological and epistemology seeks to explain:

"The daimonic," wrote May, "is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. When this power goes awry, and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have "daimon possession," the traditional name through history for psychosis.

Problem is though that it strays into the realm of the metaphysical:

Nowadays however, the epistemological problem, by a fatal mistake of method, is assigned to metaphysics, and the result is a confusion between the two branches of philosophy, viz. metaphysics and epistemology.

Metaphysics joins the dots:

The metaphysical sciences reach the highest point of abstraction. They prescind, or abstract, not only from those qualities physics and mathematics abstract from, but also leave out of consideration the determination of quantity. They consider only Being and its highest determinations, such as substance, cause, quality, action etc.

It leads the scientist to a dilemma:

When therefore, the scientist rejects metaphysics, he suppresses a natural and ineradicable tendency of the individual mind towards unification and, at the same time, he tries to put up in every highway and byway of his own science a barrier against further progress in the direction of rational explanation.

Besides, the cultivation of the metaphysical habit of mind is productive of excellent results in the sphere of general culture. The faculty of appreciating principles as well as facts is a quality which cannot be absent from the mind without detriment to that symmetry of development wherein true culture consists.

Similarly, to try to reason as a philosophe, whilst excluding or rationalizing the metaphysical has always been quite erroneously fashionable; to ascribe verbose esoteric labels as the post-modernists are wont to do creates an aura of academic competence but is, in fact, incompetent by definition.

It's a stubborn mindset more concerned with perpetuating a loosely strung together set of half-truths and rejecting as beyond the pale the notion of concepts of good and evil.

Meanwhile, one side in this eternal struggle sits back and chuckles.

[baby photo parade] for your delectation

Photo 1

Hmmm, here's how it works, people - the clues are written in the post but they do not correspond to the photo in the vicinity.

Photo 2

The trick, of course, is to mix and match the photos [no more than two of any baby] to the blurbs.

Photo 3

Then some nice words in the comments section about someone else's baby photo here would be much appreciated.

Photo 4

Answers themselves are in white, as usual, below and can be seen by highlighting the line.

Photo 5

I'd take it as a personal favour if you clicked on the name in red, if you haven't already visited today and drop in on these folk to say hello and maybe have a snoop around.

Photo 6

Right, so away we go.

Photo 7

Cherie

One of me aged about 6 months old. I don’t think I have changed all that much ;-) Well maybe I have a bit more to say for myself these days!

Photo 8

Kate

These pictures are of my two youngest in the buggy, and how they are now holding my baby niece Freya who is only 10 weeks old. All very cute and very hard work......but very much loved.

Photo 9

Ginro

Some pics my Dad took when I must have been about three years old. They're black and white unfortunately so for the record I had blue eyes and dark brown hair.

The first photo I seem to look a bit dazed so was probably contemplating Einsteins Theory of Relativity, or had just done a surprise in my trousers, lol.

The second photo someone had probably put something on their head to try and make me laugh. Hmmm, now I know where my daughters serious look comes from.

Photo 10

JMB

Attached is the not so great but earliest photo I have of me. I'm lucky to have any since I have moved country twice.

Here you have the chubby legs and the chubby freckled face of JMB at the ripe old age of six. I was in 1A, it was 1942 (yes we had air raid drills regularly) and the school was Mortdale, a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Only dresses allowed but you could bring your doll to school in those days as you can see behind me and there were quite a few in the original photo of 33 students. Imagine teaching 33 children to read at one time!

Photo 11

Sean

Sean01_a1: Where's my Teddy?

Sean02_a2: Ah ...

Photo 12

Juliet

Here I am aged three - my (paternal) gran had this photo taken during one of my visits with her.

Photo 13

Bob G

Not everyone can be a hero; somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

Photo 14

Welshcakes

I expect it's too late but here I am at 3 [I think] at my auntie's house in Devon. To think that one was ever so carefree!!

Nunyaa did not submit a blurb so her two photos in the post are the wildcards. Thanks so much for submitting those - it was a bit of yourself you were sending so I tried to do you justice.



Answers


1 Sean...2 Welshcakes...3 Bob G...4 Kate...5 Ginro...

6 Cherie...7 Julie...8 Nunyaa...9 JMB...10 Kate...

11 JMB...12 Ginro...13 Nunyaa...14 Sean.

[national stereotypes] n2 - the glaswegian

Glasgow, European City of Culture, 1990

The city itself is a mishmash, described in this article on its reign as European Capital of Culture:

The City fathers still bend over backwards to accommodate commercial interests; new buildings--commercial and residential--of abysmal quality are allowed, and the old are still allowed to decay and tumble. Glasgow has always had a strong American character, reflected in particular in its early-twentieth-century architecture, but today much of the city looks like parts of Detroit.

hingie

A traditional activity in tenement buildings, to have a hingie is to lean out of an open window in a flat and pass the time of day by watching the comings and goings in the street, occasionally conversing with passers-by or occupants of other open windows.

The stone-built tenement is a major feature of Glasgow's urban landscape, [b]uilt in large numbers from the mid-1800s to the early years of the twentieth century to accommodate the city's growing population.

The local humour's a good guide to a city's reputation:

Glaswegians consider Edinburgh to be in the east - the Far East. Edinburghers consider Glasgow to be in the west - the Wild West. How do you know when you're staying in Glasgow? When you call the hotel desk and say "I've gotta leak in my sink" and the response is "go ahead".

Glasgow teachers are known to use the following translations for the remarks they make on pupils' report cards:

"A born leader" - Runs a protection racket
"Easy-going" - Bone idle
"Helpful" - A creep
"Reliable" - Informs on his friends
"A rather solitary child" - He smells
"Popular in the playground" - Sells pornography

Rab C. Nesbitt [pictured] gives an insight into Glasgow and in particular, Govan:

Ian Pattison's scripts mercilessly poke fun at the more sanctimonious tendencies of nationalism, such as tartan wearing exiles, folk songs from the Hebrides, and the worst aspects of the 'remember Culloden' victim mentality. However the failings of the proletariat are satirised too - working-class culture and its limitations are hardly romanticised through Rab and his drinking pals, who often proudly refer to themselves as 'scum'.

Rab: "Mary, we huv knain each other tae long to let a pound ae dead meat tae come between us".

Mary: "Let's leave oor sex life oota this."





If you'd like to see the whole episode, Part 2 is here and Part 3 here. The language - a bit of background:

Northeast English, spoken throughout the traditional counties of Northumberland and County Durham , shares other features with Scots which have not been described above.As well as the main dialects, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow (see Glasgow patter) have local variations on an anglicised form of Central Scots.

Glaswegian is a bit more specific, described thus:

Glasgow patter has evolved over the centuries amongst the working classes, Irish immigrants and passing seamen in the dockyards. The dialect is anglicised west central lowland Scots or Scottish English depending on viewpoint, and features a varied mix of typical Scots expressions and vocabulary, as well as some examples of rhyming slang, local cultural references and street slang.

Some examples:

Buckie/Bucky — Buckfast Tonic Wine - cheap, strong, fortified wine popular with many teenagers.

Cleek — To refer to picking up a partner of the opposite sex, cleek being the Scots word for a hook or crook referring to the linking of arms. A more colourful theory is that it originates from late night kissing couples on tenement doorsteps and knocking milk bottles to make a clinking sound.

Dreepie - hanging from the edge of a roof so that your feet are as close as possible to the ground.

Electric soup — see buckie, also a Scottish comic book. Anything more alcoholic than tasty. To 'be on the electric soup' has an implication of loss of faculty.

Hauners — A helping hand in a playground fight.

Jeg — Any carbonated soft drink.

Mad wi it — Drunk or intoxicated.

Mintit - Cool/amazing.

Particks — A term for breasts which came about through a number of slang words, an area of the city and a pub (The Partick Smiddy).

So that's the Glaswegian and his life and as Rab explains to his wain:

"You'll be skint, battered, exploited, lied to, cheated and despised. But at least you'll no' be bored."