Omorka's Lair

Another reason I should not read fandomsecrets: I was unaware that someone had back-formed 'maja' as the feminine equivalent of 'mojo'. Now that I know this, I would really like to smack someone for it.

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I had given up on James Lileks when he reproduced and immediately transformed into a crazed conservative warblogger. It was really a shame, because his work before that was really quite funny, even if it was the strange sort of mild but quietly desperate Minnesota humor that always strikes me as one step away from embarrassment squick.

He's also one of the foremost purveyors of Weird '50s Kitsch. Which is, I suppose, how he happened on the works of Art Frahm. (No thanks to panthyr for tipping me off to this thing's existence.)

Er - um - what - Lileks, what the hell? What the frelling hell?

I'm going to go look for Five/Master slash fanart now. It's a far healthier use of the celery.

I stumbled across a new word! (This is a relatively rare phenomenon for me, so I try to journal about it when it happens.)

Propertarians - broadly, those who advocate the legal private ownership of property; more specifically, those who believe that all zero-sum goods can be and should be owned, and that the right of ownership is the most fundamental (or one of the most fundamental) human rights.

This strikes me a much more honest name for it than "libertarianism." It also distinguishes the basic philosophical justification from the larger kludge that is Objectivism, with all the muddiness about perception and reality. (Really, when your capitalism has gotten into your metaphysics that deeply and that many times, it's time to put the lid back on - it really doesn't taste all that great.)

And so at TV Night there was a moment when Captain Jack became confused by late 20th century/early 21st century slang - "Wait, bad means good, right?" This is, of course, a terribly old joke, as sources as diverse as Laugh-In and the first cohort of Sesame Street will attest.

Older than we knew.

The word "good" comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ghedh-, which literally means "to bring together." In other words, "good" means "fitting" - literally and figuratively.

The PEI root that actually means what we mean by "good" is - ya ready for it? - *bhad-.

Yeah, I'm not amused, either, especially since the distinction between bh- and b- was already lost by the time we got to Germanic. Anyway, if you ever wondered why the comparative forms for "good" didn't look anything like it, it's because they're descendants of that second root, "better" in particular coming directly from it (and "best" being an intensification of a Germanic word descended from it.).

I don't remember the contex in which this came up, but during the course of spending the afternoon hanging out at memeslayer's house with most of his social group, someone (cheshirebast, I think?) came up with the concept of "Kawaiinoqatsi" - "Life of cuteness."

Gods help us, we're mashing together Japanese and Hopi now . . .

(As I mentioned before, this doesn't happen very often for me.)

palingenesis: rebirth from the ashes, as a phoenix is reborn