In the News
According to the front page of the main Ghanaian newspaper, the founder and leader of a church was taken to court for failing to return a generator he had rented. His defense: dwarfs had stolen it. (Not actual midgets, but small, invisible beings from the spirit realm. The belief is that the dwarf’s feet point backwards, so if you try to follow the footprints of one, you will actually end up where he started.)
The belongings of several pupils at an elementary school went missing (mostly just ‘small money’). One teacher, in order to find the culprit, presided over a trial by ordeal in his classroom. He cut himself and put some blood onto a rock. Students were told to lick the blood-smeared rock. If innocent, nothing would happen. But if guilty…When this came to the attention of parents and administrators, the teacher was fired (and I think he was charged with something criminal).
A 73-year-old Kenyan grandfather pulled the tongue out of a leopard, killing it, after it attacked him as he was working in a field.
Ducks don’t actually quack; they make a sound closer to ah-ah. They cannot, in fact, make constantans. Dogs say er-ruf. Cows go eh-muh. Cats are the animals that most closely say what we claim they say: meow. These findings were the result of a $290 million project, funded by the Australian government.
In My Book
I was recently reading “The Namesake,” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Halfway through the book, the protagonist ends up attending Yale. I read with pleasure names and places familiar, yet distant: JE, Commons, High Street, Cross Campus. Though I can control my geographic distance from Yale, it hit me that I can’t halt the temporal distance that insists upon asserting itself.
According to the front page of the main Ghanaian newspaper, the founder and leader of a church was taken to court for failing to return a generator he had rented. His defense: dwarfs had stolen it. (Not actual midgets, but small, invisible beings from the spirit realm. The belief is that the dwarf’s feet point backwards, so if you try to follow the footprints of one, you will actually end up where he started.)
The belongings of several pupils at an elementary school went missing (mostly just ‘small money’). One teacher, in order to find the culprit, presided over a trial by ordeal in his classroom. He cut himself and put some blood onto a rock. Students were told to lick the blood-smeared rock. If innocent, nothing would happen. But if guilty…When this came to the attention of parents and administrators, the teacher was fired (and I think he was charged with something criminal).
A 73-year-old Kenyan grandfather pulled the tongue out of a leopard, killing it, after it attacked him as he was working in a field.
Ducks don’t actually quack; they make a sound closer to ah-ah. They cannot, in fact, make constantans. Dogs say er-ruf. Cows go eh-muh. Cats are the animals that most closely say what we claim they say: meow. These findings were the result of a $290 million project, funded by the Australian government.
In My Book
I was recently reading “The Namesake,” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Halfway through the book, the protagonist ends up attending Yale. I read with pleasure names and places familiar, yet distant: JE, Commons, High Street, Cross Campus. Though I can control my geographic distance from Yale, it hit me that I can’t halt the temporal distance that insists upon asserting itself.
posted by Jill at 6:57 PM
1 Comments:
great post! when they interviewed the elderly kenyan chap about his leopard experience, was he tongue-tied, perhaps?
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