More books that will piss you off if you have an iota of common sense:
Olympus and its Inhabitants, Agnes Smith, 1851.
“The universal belief in the existence of a Supreme Being shines through the accumulated mass of error which it [i.e., Greek and Roman mythology] presents…” (emphasis mine, Page 9)
UNIVERSAL belief??? “Accumulated mass of error”?? Really?!!??? Poor Aggie. If she hadn’t already kicked the bucket, that chirpy and dimwitted bit of toxic ridiculousness opening this silly book would have inspired me to help her get there in a more timely fashion. Apparently, she had so little knowledge of every other faith beyond her own judeo-christian cult, it was downright pitiful. Let’s run it past a few Atheists, Pagans, Hindus, Buddhists and non-capitulatory Native Americans and see what THEY think of it.
Maybe that should be my first book: “Books to Avoid If You Don’t Wish to Watch Your Own Head Explode”. In fact, SHE’s the only “accumulated mass of error” I could see on that page.
Fortunately, this was a Google books download, so when I say I basically tossed the entire book after reading her first “narrative sketch” - a horrific description of Jupiter:
“Jupiter, the father of gods and men, the most powerful and most generally worshipped of all the heathen divinities ...” (emphasis mine, page 12) - heathen!!??!!
- I meant: thank goodness for delete buttons. Stupid woman.
DaVinci’s Demons
Don’t ask me why, but I ended up watching the world’s silliest movie, “Lost in Austen”. Premise: goofy, vulgar, London girl exchanges places with Elizabeth Bennett, the fictional heroine of Pride and Prejudice, and proceeds to screw up the entire plot, not to mention lying unashamedly to everyone connected with that twisted plot, so why she - chronically rude liar that she was - gets rewarded with the hot hunk at the end, I have no idea. Austen herself would have been horrified. I was about to change the channel, when … I suddenly caught sight of said aforementioned “hot hunk”.
(*BLINK*!!) (*BOING!*) “Hey, that’s Lorenzo de Medici!”
It was indeed. Elliot Cowan – a younger Elliot Cowan than the man I had been watching on “DaVinci” – was playing the role of Mr. Darcy. And that guy, may I state for the official record, was seriously hot. Ladies, if you manage to catch the movie and find yourself getting nauseous in general, you must at least stay through the “wet shirt in the small pond” scene. Ohhhh myyyyyyy. That boy was utterly delicious. After that scene you can tune out, because it was a pitiful movie except for the scenes he was in. I, despite my better judgment, actually sat through the whole thing, just to watch Elliot Cowan. He’s probably the hottest guy in “DaVinci” too, now that I think about it – bare butt and all – and the series shows more male frontal nudity than I’d seen on TV ... I was going to say “in quite some time”, but perhaps I should say “ever”.
Explanation: if you’re going to show women fully naked, men should get the same exposure in the name of gender equality. And yet, for some reason, male producers/directors have always had an aversion to filming the male appendage (in all its softened, relaxed, unexcited glory) bobbing about on the screen. Even those silly late night Cinemax soft porn programs never show an un-erect, dangling penis. Why? Because they’re supposedly not arousing to look at? Perhaps we all need to define what “arousing” could possibly mean.
The producers of “Game of Thrones” could learn this lesson from “DaVinci” – and I love “Game of Thrones”! One of my few complaints about the series is just this – we get plenty of full frontal nudity when there are women on the screen, but not of men. Why is that?
Starz should get an award for simply taking the beautiful human body – both male and female, young and old - in its natural state and putting it on film without blinking. Of course, even Starz has room for improvement: we haven’t yet seen an older woman naked, while they’ve shown plenty of grandfathers with everything hanging out. But I’ll welcome the small steps wherever I can find cause to celebrate them.
And by the way, they’ve been pronouncing the family name incorrectly since Day One. It’s “MEH-dee-chee”, not “Med-EE-chee”. How do I know this? I know one of their descendants, born and raised in Florence, and now living in the USA, personally. That’s how she pronounces it, and is extremely emphatic about it. I’ll take her pronunciation over theirs any day.
Finally, on behalf of Italians everywhere ... we WISH Lorenzo de Medici looked like that! Because here’s the real one ... sculpturally captured in the days of old, while he was probably thinking, “Damn! Why can’t I look like Elliot Cowan?”
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Back to business.
Spiders. Living on the ground floor (by which I mean, partially underground – great for insulation against either heat or cold!) – can also mean you’re visited by spiders. Fortunately, I’m not terrified by the sight of spiders, the way some people are, and we have a basic agreement, those spiders and I. I give them a few hours notice to get themselves free of the bathtub nooks (like the soap dish – for some reason, they like to hang out in the soap dish, don’t ask me why) and I won’t wash them down the drain. A simple, “You need to find a safer place to hang out – fair warning!” is sufficient ... by the time I turn on the shower, they’re hiding somewhere else. Also, I’ve politely requested that they stay away from the bed area, as I would prefer to not wake up with one of them crawling on me, and they’ve stayed away ever since.
So we co-exist quite peacefully, the occasional spider and I.
Was reading The Real Witches’ Year for 29 March – did you know placing a clean cobweb (without the spider in it, obviously) over a cut or bleeding wound will help stop the bleeding? Here’s another: “if you can collect a cobweb with dew on it, without breaking it, place it on a dish of water to attract love into your life.” The things I learn these days! I won’t have access to any dew-covered cobwebs until I move, but I’m slowly building a mental list of the things I want to try when I move into my home.
The Witch’s Book of Days for the same day cracks me up. “As Diana, prepare for coming renewal of virginity and the need to hunt.”
OK, well, I don’t feel any need to hunt, so let’s toss that one out the window, but ... “renewal of virginity”?? How exactly does THAT work? Isn’t that sort of a “you either are or you aren’t” kind of thing? Hey, here’s my take on that. If any of you remember your first moment when you stepped over the “virginity” line in the sand – and I’m referring to women here, not men – a lot of us don’t always remember that moment fondly. Not the most pain-free moment of your life, usually. I know most guys like to imagine their bedding of a virgin to be her most ecstatic discovery of the glory of the male phallus, but ... yeah, that rarely is her first thought at that moment.
Unless you consider “^&%^&, that ^&*%^’ing HURTS!” to be a euphemism for “I’m really ecstatic but am masking it extremely well by grimacing in pain.”
So, do I want my virginity renewed?? Two words: HELL NO. Jes’ sayin’.
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