Odd Thought on Sea Life

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OddThoughts“Click-clack, glubble glub, clickiticlack-click clack! Blub glubble clack click.”

– St. Paul’s Epistle to the Parathranites

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Look it up.

Category: Odd Thoughts

Archaic Definition of the Week – House Dick

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ADOTWhouse dick: a hotel detective

The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life from Prohibition Through World War II by Marc McCutcheon, Section Five, “Crime”

Category: ADOTW

Archaic Definition of the Week – Effluxes

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ADOTWeffluxes (or effluences), theory of _ Philosophy Theory associated with Greek atomism and its revival in the corpuscularian philosophy of the 17th century as well as by non-atomists like Empedocles (5th century BC).

It holds that objects continually emit films from their surfaces, which cause them to be perceived, much as we ourselves might explain smell. Lucretius (1st century BC) also uses the theory to explain dreams and imagination, and thought in general.

Dictionary of Theories by Jennifer Bothamley

Category: ADOTW

Odd Thought on Second Careers

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OddThoughts“Excel to yo’ mother!”

-when Vanilla Ice became an accountant

Category: Odd Thoughts

Why Spelling Matters

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Hippocracy

Category: Advice From A Dude

Odd Thought on Soul Math

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OddThoughtsThe Inverse Bill Withers: when 26 people know something once each.

Category: Odd Thoughts

Archaic Definition of the Week – Secular Inequality

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ADOTWINEQUALITY, SECULAR. _ A small irregularity in the motion of planets, which becomes important only after a long lapse of years. The great inequality of Jupiter and Saturn is a variation of their orbital positions, caused by the disturbing action of one planet on the other.

The Sailor’s Word Book (1867) by Admiral W. H. Smyth

Category: ADOTW

Odd Thought on Androids

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OddThoughtsYou didn’t have to shut me off
Wipe my primary core memory and change my number
Did I really compute so slow?
Now I’m just somebody that I used to know…

-If Gotye were a robot

Category: Odd Thoughts

A Jazzy Proposal : Villenoire

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villenoire-name

designThe Age of Jazz, nearly a century past now, is taking on a mystique not unlike the Feudal Age, the Age of Pirates, and the Old West.  Like those myth-infused periods of the human past, it has taken on legend and glamor beyond mere historical fact.

And, just as we have Renaissance Faires, Pirate Festivals, and Old West dude ranches, it’s about time we had some themed events and sites celebrating the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.  As an exercise in creating a Jazz Age-themed urban park, I chose a particularly self-contained block in Washington just north of historic U Street, famous in the history of jazz music and early 20th Century American culture, and re-imagined it as a sort of historical shopping mall and cultural center called “Villenoire.” Continue reading

Bilbo Unchained : Twelve-Point Mythic Structure Underlying “The Hobbit” and “Django Unchained”

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BILBO-UNCHAINEDMy formal training is in Religious Studies. So, while watching the film Django Unchained, I couldn’t help but keep an eye for universal mythic themes that I might have seen elsewhere.  The fact that Django’s quest to retrieve his wife is specifically compared to the myth of Siegfried and the Dragon only heightened my interest.

Oddly enough, the patterns I detected in the film invoked a completely different dragon-slayer tale: Tolkien’s The Hobbit.  (The original novel, not Jackson’s ballooned-out trilogy.) If you’ve ever read The Hobbit and are planning to see Django Unchained, watch for the following twelve plot points, with Schultz playing Gandalf’s “Guru” role, Django doing double duty for Bilbo and Thorin as the “Hero,” and Calvin Candie in Smaug’s “Dragon” role:
Continue reading

Category: Advice From A Dude