Exoteric.
Comprehensible to or suited to the public.
Current among the outside public; popular, ordinary.
Pertaining to the outside.
Compare with Esoteric.
Designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples.
Communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated exclusively.
Pertaining to a select circle; private, confidential.
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
[Richard Francis Burton]
Children in the dark cause accidents … accidents in the dark cause children.
[Thoughts of Angel]
Menstruating women give off harmful fumes that will “poison the eyes of children lying in their cradles by a glance.”
[13th century De Secretis Mulierum quoted by Kate Clancey at Context & Variation]
Children conceived by menstruating women “tend to have epilepsy and leprosy because menstrual matter is extremely venemous [sic].
[13th century De Secretis Mulierum quoted by Kate Clancey at Context & Variation]
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it.
[Pierre Gallois]
Number 9 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.
Something I Like: PhotographyNot a lot in the way of quotes this week, although those that follow are relatively chunky, as we’ve spent 4 days over the weekend running an international literary conference (more of which anon, I hope).
I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention – himself – has been his only interesting role.
[Matthew Parris, The Times, March 2006; quoted in Oliver James, Affluenza]
Tea Pigs uses only whole leaf teas, whole herbs, whole berries and whole flowers. No dust in sight. Served in biodegradable tea temples.
[https://www.teapigs.co.uk/]
I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
[William Blake, Politicians and Politics]
So there you are … politics diluted with tea. What could be more British?!
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
[Bernard Berenson]
This week’s accumulation of leaf-mould …
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
[Martin Luther King, Jr]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[Steven Weinberg]
What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
[Anthony Robbins]
The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
[GK Chesterton]
The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
[Carl Jung in a letter to Freud, 30 January 1910]
Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
[Susan Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage]
If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
[Peter Ustinov]
When we were kids, our mums used to write our name in our school uniform. Now we are adults, we have other peoples names on the front of our clothes!
[Thoughts of Angel]
An educated person would be expected to have an active vocabulary of about 30,000 words, whereas to read The Sun newspaper you require a vocabulary of just 800 words.
from AC Grayling, The Form of Things
Some odd bedfellows this week …
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
[Robert Louis Stephenson]
Your car is Japanese. Your vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers are Arabic, your letters Latin. And you complain that your neighbour is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!
[Seen on Facebook]
‘chav’ (vogue label of 2004, originally a traveller’s term of address or endearment, from a French nickname for a young fox), who represents an imagined social grouping, a troublesome, truculent, feckless, shameless underclass delighting in petty criminality and conspicuous consumption (of, inter alia, illicit substances, electronic stimuli, pimped technology and ‘bling’).
[Tony Thorne, Jolly Wicked, Actually]
An eye for an eye makes the world go blind. A tooth for a tooth gums up everything!
[Thoughts of Angel]
Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands … It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly.
[Paul Theroux quoted in Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn]
I had a friend at university who used to propound this latter theory that sex was (and should be seen as) not necessarily more than an expression of sincere friendship and that why should one not have sex with ones friends just as one might have a beer with them. Not sure he ever managed to put it much into practice though.
Hoatzin
A species of colourful, remarkably saurian, chicken-like bird, Opisthocomus hoazin, found in swamps, riverine forest and mangrove of the Amazon and the Orinoco deltas of South America. It is notable for having chicks that possess claws on two of their wing digits; the chicks are also able to swim and climb — useful when you’re a pheasant-sized bird which nests in trees over water!
It is brown in colour, with paler underparts and an unfeathered blue face with maroon eyes; its head is topped by a spiky, rufous crest. The Hoatzin is herbivorous and has an unusual digestive system with an enlarged crop used for fermentation of vegetable matter — broadly analogous to the digestive system of mammalian ruminants. It’s common name of Stinkbird is due to the strong smell produced by the bird, perhaps due to its consumption and fermentation of leaves.
Despite its striking plumage, unwary nature and poor flight it seems to be only rarely hunted by the indigenous peoples of its native range. Consequently it is not endangered. It is the national bird of Guyana.
Here’s this week’s usual eclectic and eccentric mix …
Biologists and philosophers have pondered for generations the ways in which our modern lives may be disconnected from our pasts, out of synch … When you look beside you in bed, you notice no more than one animal (alternative lifestyles and cats notwithstanding). For nearly all of our history, our beds and lives were shared by multitudes.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
The moment that made us human in that series of happenings was not the language, the gods, or even the ability to draw Rubenesque women in stone. It was when we decided that when a leopard stalked the cave, we ought to go after it and kill it. When we decided to kill a species not for food or in self-defence, but instead in order to control what lived and did not live around us, when we did that, we were then fully human.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
Grasses and cows were not the only species we favored. We also came to choose species that were beautiful to our senses … tulips and other flowers are shipped around the world at huge expense. Goldfish live in houses in nearly every country. Dogs, which appeal to our social sense of appeasement and connectedness, were brought into our beds. (Cats – well, no one can explain them.)
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
Anyone offering subtitles for the following?
[It’s] amazing how the secondary endosymbiosis has left its signature in the topography of plastid membranes like in dinoflagellates and cryptophytes.
[“fer” in a comment at The Loom]
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
[GK Chesterton]
There are more fools in the world than there are people.
[Heinrich Heine]
Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?
[Thoughts of Angel]