Posts Tagged ‘holidays’
May Day 2022
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on May 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »
May Eve 2022
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on April 30, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Easter 2022
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays on April 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Ship of Fools
Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged censorship, cops, holidays, hysteria, left-right myth, politicians, The Implosion Begins on April 1, 2022| 1 Comment »
I used to like hoaxing on April Fools Day, until it stopped being fun; five years ago, in “The Rule of Fools“, I explained why:
…the…media are positively riddled with idiotic nonsense about “sex trafficking”, the “War on Cops”, supposed “epidemics” of things that are actually less common than they’ve ever been, and other tall tales that could be easily debunked by ten fucking minutes on Google if reporters actually cared to practice journalism rather than stenographically reporting every moronic, impossible and self-serving lie vomited out by cops, politicians, prohibitionists and all the other bipedal vermin who glut themselves on others’ suffering and profit from human misery. Mathematically-impossible, scientifically-illiterate and sociologically-absurd poppycock too ridiculous for a ’50s science fiction B-movie is routinely presented as fact even by “respected” sources like The New York Times, and politicians base laws on fantasies roughly as credible as the contents of Malleus Maleficarum, complete with penalties that would’ve found approval from those who employed that book. Clowns are widely presented as objects of terror (and are the subject of a recurring moral panic), which perhaps makes sense given that our rulers are themselves violent clowns who send forth armed thugs in clownish costumes to terrorize, rape, rob and murder the populace based on excuses Caligula himself might recognize as mad. And their cringing subjects attempt to impose order on a world gone completely insane by artificially dividing their overlords into teams, swearing fealty to one of those teams and then obstinately ignoring all the evil done by “their” leaders while blaming the other side for everything no matter what the facts show. In short, we live in a world in which the highest points are all occupied by professional full-time fools, and it seems pointless for a sane person to even attempt to compete with them.
In the five years since, the situation has only grown worse. The mad emperor had at that time barely even begun his Carnival of Crazy, and the powerful deranging effect he had on minds still harboring some childlike faith in government had only begun to show itself. The American political stage soon became a Punch and Judy show writ large, and everyone was too busy watching it to pay attention while their hollowed-out rights were reduced to paper-thin facades; a plague of snitches spread across the land; “sex trafficking” hysteria began its implosion in a more spectacular fashion than I had anticipated; another, more literal plague gave tyrants and control freaks the best excuse for a power grab they’d had since 2001; censorship became wildly popular among all those who believe the most terrifying fact of the world is that others beside themselves have free will; and those in power gave up all pretense of even attempting to make their lies resemble some rough fascimile of the truth. In short, the lunatics are running the asylum; every day is Fools’ Day, and the joke is on us.
Vernal Equinox 2022
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on March 20, 2022| Leave a Comment »
The apparent path of the sun will cross the equator moving northward at 15:33 UTC today, signaling the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern. Enjoy the milder weather to come, and Blessed Be!
Off the Green
Posted in Biography, tagged Catholicism, holidays, Ireland, psychology on March 17, 2022| 4 Comments »
Long-time readers may have noticed that although I do a lot of holiday columns, and used to do even more, I’ve never done one for St. Patrick’s Day. The reason is simple: I dislike it almost as much as I dislike Valentine’s Day. But while my reasons for disliking the latter are mostly rational, my reasons for disliking the former are almost entirely irrational, and go back to childhood. I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone reading this that I was a willful, rebellious child who hated being told “you must” with the same intensity I hated being told “you can’t”. Now, that doesn’t mean I was purely contrarian; however, even then I reserved the right to decide for myself whether I would comply with some adult diktat, starting with demanding to know why I was supposed to do something or refrain from doing something. Being told, “because x authority says so,” or handed some tautological non-justification, would generally provoke either immediate non-compliance or a pretense of compliance as long as the parent/teacher/cop was looking, followed by refusal as soon as they left the room. To this day, the surest way to lose my cooperation is to accompany the demand with a phrase like “you must”, “you are required to”, “it’s the law”, etc, though obviously I am a lot better at avoiding negative consequences for my hardheadedness than I was as a schoolgirl. So, as some of you may have guessed, my aversion to St. Patrick’s Day started with the annual declaration that I must wear green on the occasion; I was told to do it, not asked or encouraged. The reasons I was provided, when they existed at all, were pure blarney (I was skeptical about that snake story even before I stopped believing in Santa Claus), and given that my school uniform contained no green, the obligatory color display generally took the form of a stupid little felt shamrock pinned to my blouse. On top of all that, I had an odd aversion to green clothing in the first place; Maman thought it was because my other grandmother had made several rompers for me out of an old green sofa cover, so after a while I was thoroughly sick of the color. Or perhaps it was due to association with the vegetables whose mere smell nauseated me. In any case, I eventually outgrew my aversion to the color, but not to the holiday; as I grew into young adulthood I even rationalized my dislike by tying it to my disdain for binge-drinking and my reflexive rejection of any attempt to include me in some group membership against my will (back when people were declaring “We’re all New Yorkers now”, my response was usually “I’m not.”) So anyhow, now you know. I no longer have issues with wearing green, but I still find beer (of any color) revolting and am wont to roll my eyes at fake brogues and dopey leprechaun cartoons. And while I was perfectly willing to kiss the Blarney stone, I can’t say the same for drunken Irishmen. 
Sex Worker Rights Day 2022
Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, holidays on March 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »
As I wrote last year on this day, the time has come for me to stop writing new essays for this and the other days in which I have in the past published polemics, “lest I grow irrelevant due to repetition. Besides, I’ve already written plenty“… Last year, I observed each of those occasions with links to all the previous examples, so that the interested reader can more easily explore them. Though some of them may contain details to events which are no longer current, I think you’ll still find most of them worth your while if you’ve never read them, or even if you have.
Mardi Gras 2022
Posted in Holidays, tagged carnival, holidays on March 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Maybe the places where many of y’all live don’t observe it, but I still do. So Happy Mardi Gras, dear readers!
Valentine’s Day 2022
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays on February 14, 2022| 1 Comment »
As longtime readers know, Valentine’s Day is my least favorite of holidays, and I’m not particularly fond of the typical iconography associated with it, either (which is often weird or violent or creepy as hell). So every year I try to share an exception, like this cute kitten valentine which eschews the usual terrible puns in favor of a simple, direct message which could have been written by a computer, had computers existed back then.
Diary #606
Posted in Diary, tagged holidays, recipes on February 8, 2022| 1 Comment »
I usually like to do feasts (or at least mini-feasts) around the sabbats, and for Imbolc I nearly always make gumbo. Last time I ordered andouille from Louisiana I had the foresight to get six pounds, and froze most of it, so I just pulled out some of that and a package of frozen chicken thighs a few days before and I was all set. This time I decided to make a king cake as well, so Tuesday was spent making the potato salad and pre-cooking the chicken, then Wednesday all I had to do was make the king cake in the early afternoon and the gumbo later. Grace is diabetic, so I left one section of the cake without the traditional glaze and colored sugar so she could have a treat, because the “cake” itself is just a sweet brioche, with probably less sugar than most commercial cinnamon rolls (I mean without glaze). We had some friends over, so everything disappeared before I remembered to take a picture of any of it. The only thing left as of this writing is some potato salad and one mug of gumbo, so a picture of that will have to do. However, if you want the recipes for any of the things I made, just follow the embedded links!
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