CONCEPT
COMMENTS
– Oh, cheer up. If you look up, there are buds hanging on the trees and in less than a month they’ll be heavy.
– Yesterday, after the trials and tribulations of shopping and getting my hair cut (Arg! Cleen! Nooo! Connor no like hair out from face!) I went to Palm Sunday mass. I sat next to Josie, who artfully folded her palm into a tiny, gorgeous, and accurate rose (my two crosses were clumsy, and had to be held together with palmthread), and somehow got recruited to wash feet on Thursday and go out for coffee with Father Mike sometime in April. Both of which will be enjoyable and worthwhile, and neither of which I really expected. Afterwards, I picked up Jessica and we went to an Italian place downtown for a meal with some people from Jess’ Toxoplasmosis study. It was engaging and worthwhile conversation, which actually gave me some perfect discussion points for this blog.
– Such as: how do you perceive the regional differences in America and how do you define sophistication? But more on that later.
COUNTRY OF THE DAY
Northern Mariana Islands (Commonwealth in union with the United States).
WORD OF THE DAY
Orenda.
from the Old English Dictionary:
In Iroquois belief: a spirit or power thought to exist in all things.
1902 J. N. B. HEWITT in Amer. Anthropologist 4 33 (title) Orenda and a definition of religion. 1902 J. N. B. HEWITT in Amer. Anthropologist 4 37 This subsumed magic power is called..orenda by the Iroquoian tribes. And it is suggested that the Iroquoian name for the potence in question, orenda, be adopted to designate it. 1920 Times Lit. Suppl. 29 Apr. 264/2 Notions of the type of mana or orenda are of ‘a nascently philosophic order’. 1947 C. S. LEWIS Miracles xi. 100 It [sc. pantheism] may even be the most primitive of all religions, and the orenda of a savage tribe has been interpreted by some to be an ‘all-pervasive spirit’. 1971 J. VAN BAAL Symbols for Communication VI. 129 The trend towards mystic participation is expressed in concepts such as mana, wakenda, orenda, and so on, which give scope to the mystic connections underlying things and events. 2000 Beaver (Winnipeg) (Nexis) July V, Everyone was thought to hold a certain amount of personal power or orenda suitable for making offerings and entreaties to spirits for luck in battle, for protection of one’s home and family, or to encourage the season’s crops to grow well.
NEWS OF THE DAY
The Flint Journal: UAW: No GM Deal.
PICTURE OF THE DAY
2006 Buick Lucerne. Automobile Mag.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
Now, again not discounting states we’ve already lived in or been in, which 5 top off your list?