Korean Language Lesson

"From this point on, little children and pregnant women should not watch—because it won't be good for their education."

A book for all children

Just discovered this and had to share the marvel:

Are you a writer?

A few years ago I bought John Hodgman's The Areas of my Expertise, where he discussed "The Six Essentials" of being a writer. I'll quote the pertinent bit here:

Even once you have chosen a Dramatic Situation, however, writing a book can still be a tedious process. According to my own observation, every writer must have six essentials at his command. Some are born with them. Others must develop them over many years, or hire a professional to provide them.⁷ They are...

Figure 5: Can You Describe Capt. Thompson's Facial Hair?

empathy the willingness to endure solitude the belief that the world cares about what you have to say the ability to describe facial hair accurately a large desk in a quiet room of your own in which to chase your demons (preferably a circular room, so that the demons have no place to hide) special stationery with pictures of typewriters and/or quills on top

---

7. This is most common for "empathy," and it is not unusual for even the finest novelists to hire a ghost empathizer for their third or fourth book.

While there are many today who test their writerly mettle by participating in things like NaNoWriMo, by Hodgman's standard the real test is in writing about this event! How do you fare? Are you a writer? As a quiz, can you describe this lot?

In other matters of pogonotrophy, today I also discovered this chart on "The Trustworthiness of Beards"—and discovered that according to this chart and my g/f, I'm something of a "questionable" sort! Pity for the gents in the above images, many of them don't seem to rate at all.

Zogis

I have often heard of, and indeed seen, many—examples of "fundamentalist" types taking elements of their belief or practice rather too literally, but I must say this is the first time I've seen yoginah being quite so overly literal:

शवआसन—śavāsana, the "corpse" posture (Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

It's "Zombie Yoga"; more images and examples of which may be found on Flickr under that tag.

My only question: Is this intended for the health conscious or spiritually-minded zombie—or just an example of kitschy marketers ("The event was sponsored by Skyhorse Publishing to promote The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead")? Perhaps someone misunderstood "viral marketing"?

"The figo for thee!": Humanity's favorite finger, 4000 years and going strong

[Extracted from a letter to a friend]

But now, as they say, for something completely different. Clicking on that link to your dreams tag, I ran across quite a few that I don't recall having read before—one of these days, I'm going to have to go back and read from the beginning: I seem to have missed quite a lot during my '04-'05 absence—but while I haven't had a chance to read all of them, one in particular did stand out to me. Not the dream part, so much, but the comment about the Bird in the ancient world. This, as my perverse nature would have it, is something I've investigated in the past, so I thought I'd close with a little ramble on the same. Hopefully it will lend itself more to humor than annoyance!

Beginning, as I so often do, in the Bible, there's a line in Isaiah 58:9 that, though some modern translations (like, sadly, the JPS Tanakh) render it as a "menacing hand", Jerome translated "digitum extendere", and some have interpreted that extended finger to be the same "shameful" sign seemingly known throughout the world and history. Jerome himself, in one of the letters to Marcella (27), makes a remark about causing "everyone to point at me the finger of scorn" (admittedly, I'm using that popular translation for effect; literally, he only wrote "cunctorum digitis notor", which could just as easily mean he was being pointed out or talked about around town—though the context of both his letter and the City would support that they probably were giving him the gesture [and that Jerome goes on just a couple of sentences later to begin quoting Horace and referring to his "two-legged asses" (bipedes asellos), suggests, at least to me, that it's likely what he had in mind]). A browse through the literature will turn up several references to the digitus impudicus, digitus infamis, digitus lasciuus or digitus tribadis, among others. Juvenal, the tenth satire, lines 51–53 read "ridebat curas nec non et gaudia uolgi, | interdum et lacrimas, cum Fortunæ ipse minaci | mandaret laqueum mediumque ostenderet unguem."—"He would laugh at the cares and pleasures of the crowd, sometimes even at their tears, while for himself he gave ill-Fortune a noose and the finger." Martial opens II.28 with "rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinædum | dixerit et digitum porrigito medium." ("Heartily mock who calls you catamite, Sextillus, and give them the finger.") Suetonius claimed that Augustus expelled the entertainer Pylades when the latter flipped off a heckler, and there's a tale in Gestures (Morris) that says Caligula got a kick out of making people kiss his digitus lasciuus. But these lads are far from the oldest references. The Greeks have a specific verb for giving the finger, σκιμᾱλίζω, which (who else) Aristophanes enjoyed (it appears in "Peace", alongside Hermes remarking on flatulence, for example). There's also the incident in "Clouds", between Strepsiades and Socrates, ll. 645–656 or so, where Socrates is trying to educate him on the matter of metre, and having mentioned the dactyl, is interrupted thus by Strep., "The dactyl? By god, I know that one!" (κατὰ δάκτυλον; νὴ τὸν Δί', ἀλλ' οἶδ'.) Soc., "Tell me, then." (εἰπὲ δή.) Strep., "What else but this? [showing a finger, Greek dactyl] | On the other hand, I've used this one [showing another] since a boy." (τίς ἄλλος ἀντὶ τουτουὶ τοῦ δακτύλου; | πρὸ τοῦ μέν, ἔτ' ἐμοῦ παιδὸς ὄντος, οὑτοσί.) Soc., "You're a stupid bore!" (ἀγρεῖος εἶ καὶ σκαιός.) [Oddly, given the terms used, Socrates could just as easily be calling him a left-handed farmer—I suppose that gives us an idea of what the Greeks thought of sinister rustics.] But going back to our Isaian passage, while it seems the thing to avoid even the hint of "vulgar" meaning in a "holy" passage, the language would seem to support it, and it's not unknown—the same word used here for "finger" is attested in Middle Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic, Ge'ez, Akkadian and possibly others: there's an old Babylonian passage even, including an occurrence in the Hammurapi code, úbanum eliša itariṣma (ú-ba-nu-um e-li-ša it-ta-ri-iṣ-ma), meaning to point or extend the finger in an insulting or accusatory way, with sexual connotations from the extant examples (in the Law Code it seems to have been an accusation of adultery), where úbanum is considered to be related to the Hebrew term used in Isaiah (אצבע). Apparently the Egyptians (from the Hebrew telling) thought this was equivalent to sending a plague of lice, since Exodus 8:19 has the pharaoh's magicians declaring "This is the finger of God!"

Thankfully, he'd mellowed out rather a lot by the time he gave Jesus the bird at his baptism.

You're right, I think, that it does sound like a great topic for a class. For the humanities, maybe, you could do a bit on The Role of Gestures in the Ancient World, and use it as an excuse to let the students know how you feel about them.

I imagine it would become an immensely popular thing—for instructors if not for students!

For sourceworks, de Jorio's Gesture in Classical Antiquity (HB or paper) touches on it (along with many other gestures, from friendly to foul), including citing another bit of Martial [VI:70, "ostendit digitum, sed impudicum"]; Corbeill's Gesture in Ancient Rome also touches on it, often conjoined to the ficus, where it can both be taken as a threat or insult as well as a means of warding off the evil eye ("fuck you, evil eye!"?) or chasing off unclean spirits ("a figo for thee, satan!"—alternatively, "PISTOL: Art thou his friend? HENRY V: And his kinsman too. PISTOL: The figo for thee, then! HENRY V: I thank you: God be with you!", Henry V, Act IV, scene I.) In Daniel Matt's edition of the Zohar (volumes I, II, III, IV, V), he discusses how tradition holds that when Moses raised his hands to defeat the Amalekites in Ex. 17.8-16, he was actually giving them the finger—"Take that, Amalekites!" If so, given that he held up his hand in that fashion, according to the passage, the whole day till the sun went down, even, after tiring, having Aaron and Hur hold up his arm for him, and given that the place was, on that account, named YHWH nissi, or the banner, or sign, of YHWH, does that mean that the YHWH nissi is actually the Finger, not the magen Dawid? That would be some national flag, wouldn't it?

Better than fiction

Okay, I can’t really pass this one up.

Native Doctor Nabbed for Rituals

A female native doctor Alice Yaga and Lucky Agadaemo, both residents of Igbo-Nla in Epe area of Lagos, are now in police net for allegedly killing one Mr. Ezekiel for ritual purposes.

[…] Ezekiel, who had been nursing a big sore that defied orthodox medications, approached Lucky Agadaemo who promised to take him to a native doctor who could solve the problem.

[…]Lucky took Ezekiel, accompanied by his wife, to Yaga on the 18th of last month.

[Yaga] promptly attended to Ezekiel […] and immediately […] water and pus began oozing [from] the sore.

Convinced [she could] cure the ailment, Lucky and Ezekiel’s wife left him in [Yaga’s] custody.

The sick man was nowhere to be found the following day when his wife visited [Yaga’s] home.

[Yaga] claimed she did not know his whereabouts, [saying] all her children and Ezekiel slept on the ground.

The case […] was reported to the Baale of Igbo-Nla [and] eventually Ezekiel’s corpse was discovered in a shallow grave in the forest.

[…] an autopsy carried out showed that the deceased was strangulated.

Okay, is it just me or shouldn’t anyone know better than to go to a Yaga for “treatment”? Especially accompanied by her “Lucky” αγαθοδαιμων? Or Agadaemo, excuse me. Beyond that, who in their right mind reports the crime afterwards to a Ba‘ali (yes, baale is as valid a transliteration of בעלי as ba‘ali).? Does that really help? Or just encourage them?

 

Other recent adventures in News Out of Africa:

• There was the article about a school being closed and a man imprisoned after the local children were “attacked by his demons” (I’ll cite the article, but it seems it’s now been archived behind a paid-access part of the site :/—actual quotation: “‘I wonder why people really acquire demons and resort to bewitching others.’ [Margaret] Kasaija [, resident district commissioner] lamented before she cautioned the public against acquiring demons.”).

• Two priests and twenty-eight others were arrested after police recovered more than twenty human skulls and one corpse in a shrine and more than fifty mutilated bodies in an “evil forest” (the “chief priest of the dreaded shrine”, “said to be over 100 years old”, “was not arrested on account of age”; “Nigerian media reported that businessmen and politicians from the economic capital Lagos were among the clients of the Okija witchdoctors”). Note that Lagos is also the setting for the Yaga article cited above.

• In another part of the country, the police “advised the family to consult with spirit mediums” about “stones” that were apparently falling out of the sky wherever a certain woman went.

Not that Africa’s alone in the prevailing weirdness by any means. Only a few days ago it was reported that two women, aged 50 and 55, were beaten to death and their bodies burned… for being witches. In public view of the whole village after having been dragged from their homes into the square. Or, less violent though no less weird, who could forget the Nepalese rice-farming women who took to farming nude in order to appease their rain-god this summer?

It’s like a global Unknown Armies larp.