days of the week

Where once it was galling, these days it is the new normal -- checking with a reliable source as to precisely which day of the week it is. So this morning I confirmed with my son that it was Thursday and not some other moniker.

The reason I started doing this was to assure I'm taking the proper pill dosage on the proper day and thus to address the various mental collapses that come with old age.

Much as I might have found it galling once to ask, now it seems reasonable: What serious reason is there for tagging a particular time in a particular way? It's pretty much arbitrary and useless outside the framework of a stated goal (in my case, pills). But I am so habituated (a lifetime) to 'knowing' what day of the week it is that not-knowing can still seem to be something of a lapse or failure. Now, by contrast and in general, I am on the other side of the fence -- marveling that anyone might allow their credibility to be swayed by a "Thursday" or whatever.

Thursday is somehow brighter and lighter by nature of the fact that being Thursday is not a serious possibility... or at any rate a flimsy one. Perhaps I will designate days as animals: Elephant, giraffe, turtle, bear, right whale, jaguar and triceratops (assuming I wanted to keep things at a customary seven).

Pourquoi non?

marine photos in Guardian

Complete photo array from the Guardian

The ornate and the magnificent by Jeff Rotman

Peeping out of the gloom, a shrimp perches on its fortress-like refuge – a magnificent sea anemone, at up to a metre (3ft) wide, the second-largest of all sea anemones. It’s a powerful picture created by an extreme low angle and gentle lighting that adds polish to the structure and a glow to the 2cm ornate anemone shrimp. The magnificent sea anemone is indeed the shrimp’s citadel, providing shelter and protection from predators, which won’t try to catch it when it’s tucked in among the umbrella of tentacles with their stinging cells.’

Photograph: Jeff Rotman/Unforgettable Underwater Photography/NHM

Opening to the underworld by Christian Vizl

‘The view from below in the still water of the Aktun Ha cenote in Mexico is like looking into a magical aquarium. A natural summer algal bloom colours the top layer of water green, and though the undersides of the ageing lily leaves have been lit by a low light from strobes, they are truly pink. Their stems reach up several metres from the bottom of the wide cenote pool, but though most of them never reach the surface, for much of the year the water is so crystal clear that there is enough light for them to photosynthesise.’

Photograph: Christian Vizl/Unforgettable Underwater Photography/NHM

Big fish fight by Jordi Chias Pujol

‘These two huge dusky groupers are in a violent struggle. The prize, overlying an undersea volcanic pinnacle off the Azores, is a strip of prime spawning territory into which the owner can attract females. It encompasses a rocky retreat, but the key aspect is that a strong current runs overhead – ideal for carrying away fertilised eggs. Males start out as females, but when they get to be 10-15 years old, and if there aren’t too many males around, they change sex.’

Photograph: Jordi Chias Pujol/Unforgettable Underwater Photography/NHM [emphasis added]

green hair, breathing through its genitals....

It sports a green mohican, fleshy finger-like growths under its chin and can breathe through its genitals.
The Mary river turtle is one of the most striking creatures on the planet, and it is also one of the most endangered.
The 40cm long turtle, which is only found on the Mary river in Queensland, features in a new list of the most vulnerable reptile species compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
Despite the turtle’s punk appearance – derived from vertical strands of algae that also grow on its body – its docile nature made it historically popular as a pet. [The Guardian]

between the things in the room

The first job I ever had came at age 15, when my father, a Smith College professor, wangled me a job stacking books in the college library. It was tedious work, returning books to their allotted slots on the endless rows and occasionally I would take a break and read some of what there was ... especially aberrant-psychology stuff that had some wild and sexy bits.

And it was in that goofing-off mode that I ran into a book called "Language and Schizophrenia" in which there was a line that has lingered in memory -- a line from a patient. I think I have it pretty much right or maybe it's only close-but not exact:

The air is still here, the air between the things in the room. But there things themselves are no longer [t?]here.

Even today, I wonder what reality or irreality the line addresses. What did it mean to the speaker? Was it really aberrant or utterly on target? Was it too close to true to be labeled false/aberrant or was it somehow so false/aberrant that someone thought it could only be labeled as false/aberrant? Was it incoherent or truly coherent? And was I crazy for even wondering-and-yet-being-drawn-in?

I still don't know, but I do like the line.

boundless luck

Snickeling, tickling, softly descending ... there's a bit of snow today.

If each snowflake contained a strand of loneliness, would there be more or less loneliness in the world?

And the same goes for singing.

I guess everyone should take a moment to reflect how lucky they are that some questions simply do not require answers.

What if all questions were like that?

Boundless luck?

the fires of reminiscence

Shainberg

Strange to think there was a time when some facet of my being was positively desperate for actual-factual, in-the-present reflections/reminiscences about Zen Buddhist personalities. Somehow, those small tales helped to mortar the bricks of my own ascending brick walls of Zen credulity and personality and satisfaction. Hearing historical and largely-hagiographical tales of the dead was useful, but hearing tales in the present or near-past in first-person cadences ... ahhh, that was meat on the bone.

Kyudo

The springboard for this thought-thread arose this morning when a friend sent along a 2014 talk about my Zen teacher, Kyudo Nakagawa, a man who was also lecturer Larry Shainberg's teacher. Whereas once I might have gobbled and ingested and delighted in and swallowed-whole, now I only managed about half of the video... with some skipping involved.

God, how I once loved this stuff! But this morning, it was a bit like homework I knew I could do but could find no particular reason for doing. True, Frank, my friend, had sent it along on the off-chance I hadn't seen it (I hadn't), so it was a gift and I did want to honor Frank's effort. And true, I had used a lot of my life following the slips and slides of Zen Buddhism and its practices, so of course I might want to revisit .... blah, blah, blah.

The truth was not that I felt so exalted that I could dismiss the past out of hand but rather that it was a part of the past that felt gently irrelevant ... or perhaps relevant in ways that seemed thin gruel on the reminiscence meter. If I had to choose between this video and recollections of my first serious girlfriend or the strands of music woven by David Oistrakh in a UCLA-Berkeley gymnasium, the girlfriend or the music would win my ravenous teaching-attention hands down.

Where did all that ravening for spiritual mortar disappear to? So much longing woven with, I imagine, the dread that spiritual adventure might suddenly collapse and reveal itself as a terrific pile of nonsensical shit. I needed-needed-needed the mortar back then. Now it felt comically like a bit of cement appended to the cement shoes some hitman welded to my feet on my way into the Hudson River. A little more cement/mortar didn't mean much one way or another -- either way, I was sunk.

The fever of reminiscence can be so fiery and also so banked. It can roar and yet it can also nudge: "Ask me if I give a shit." Well, maybe not quite that flip ... but pretty close. I wonder where the line is. I can do all the parsing about "unresolved issues," but still I wonder where the fire goes when it goes out.

Fox network bruises its own, uh, cred

It ain't fake yet but in this era of error, you can only imagine how the right-wing 'news' organization will spin it:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Fox News inadvertently posted a graphic showing it lagged other cable news networks in trustworthiness.

It happened during a segment Sunday on "Media Buzz." Host Howard Kurtz was talking about a Monmouth University poll about whether the media regularly or occasionally report fake news.

But the graphic on the screen showed results from another question about what cable news outlets do respondents trust more. Fox News was last at 30 percent.

Kurtz realized the mistake. He said "that is not the graphic we are looking for. Hold off. Take that down, please."

the wicked warriors of language

It must be a hundred years since I last used the word "cantle" and yet there is was this morning as I woke up -- free-standing, without associative references, a single chunk of in-your-face rock ... sort of like Stonehenge minus the other rocks.  "Cantle."

Since I am not a horse-y person, the likelihood that I might employ the word -- which is defined as the rear portion of a saddle ... at the other end of a front called the "pommel" -- dwindles. Lately, I guess, I miss even the useless things that dwindle. "Cantle" is just a small enrichment of language that is hardly diminished by its absence. And yet, I guess, I miss it. A place to rest or brace your ass.

I suppose there will be people who use the word without a backward glance, but "cantle" for me seems an enrichment of sorts ... not a big deal and yet a small brick in the hundreds of other linguistic bricks. Something to liven up the stew. Sometimes these days, language seems to be a deflated commodity ... the ugly sister cowering in some corner.

What ever happened to the spirit of  William F. Buckley, Jr., the man who founded the conservative magazine National Review and was given to using without apology or explanation words that many of us had never heard. His languid, well-educated, unapologetic, patrician arrogance was generally infuriating to liberals like me and yet ... well shit! he was fun. Where are the people these days who can be quoted as saying such things as extracted by Wikipedia, whose parameters I imagine Buckley might have excoriated:

-- Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

-- The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

-- I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

The man was as smooth and agile as liquid mercury on a Formica-topped table. Are there any left like him? Sure, there are guys who can used long words because they're too stupid to do anything else. But I mean people who assume the throne and D-double-dare-you to try to dislodge them?

Not that I would put "cantle" into that realm. "Cantle" is just a flake of mild pepper in a world of Wonder Bread flatulence. And I am reduced, in a diminishing time, to relying on the words of others -- a sure sign of a reduced capacity to giggle and weave. 

"fake news" from here

Perhaps the above example of an exhibit of mane-shaking horse photos best depicts my whirligig state of mind this morning. A state I am utterly unwilling to take responsibility for ... it's a mess. Nuff said.

It started in quasi-innocence.

Somehow, I got sucked into reading about Vladimir Putin's use of proxy/mercenary troops in Syria. By using mercenaries, he does not have to report those who have been killed ... which might dent his political popularity. There was, for example, the tale of a former Russian cop who could not feed his wife and son well and so joined the mercenaries ... and was paid 12 times what he could make as a civilian ... and was killed, but not hailed. And then there was the exhaustive and exhausting Reuters investigation of mysterious flights out of Russia and into Syria (and vice versa) ... middle-of-the-night flights composed of men with camouflage gear who were listed on no manifest, were disinclined to identify either themselves or their mission, boarding 20-year-old American civilian aircraft that had artfully been transferred .... and there's more and more and more weird shit.

So, Russia has its mercenaries.

As I believe the Americans do too.

Blackwater Security, now soothingly renamed Academi by its private investors, continues to dangle bait in the water -- the kind of bait that may have helped inspire the Washington Post to lead a 2007 article with, "It costs the U.S. government a lot more to hire contract employees as security guards in Iraq than to use American troops." That lead fails to nod to the political price Vladimir Putin might prefer to sidestep -- the political price of Americans in body bags. Heaven forfend that Americans should die or be grievously wounded in a shooting war.

Further and further down the rabbithole I slid this morning. And that has prompted me to post what I consider largely "fake news" -- the idea that eventually mercenaries will be fighting mercenaries and there will be no war, no blood, no deaths, no price, no tears. Drones and mercenaries will allow everyone to lay claim to plausible deniability.....

But I can't prove it and lack the energy to do much more than shake my mane in utter overwhelmed-dom. It's all real and it's all bloody but the precise nature of "it" is somehow missing. Putin wants his access to the Mediterranean and a slice of the oil pie. America wants its access to oil and strategic bases in the event of a more full-frontal war.

I haven't got the energy or the smarts. I hope someone else does, but I am not holding my breath.

I do notice, faut de mieux, that the sun is shining and the sky is blue. My eyes defend my conclusion. I can't say the same for my political analyses/blather.

tree-climbing goats

Essaouira, Morocco

Tree-climbing goats feed on an argania spinosa, known as an argan tree, in Essaouira. By eating the fruit and spitting out the seeds, the goats help to propagate more argan trees for oil.

Photograph: Mosa'ab Elshamy/AP

WWJD

What would Jesus do? (WWJD)
What would Buddha do?
What would Mohammad do?

Perhaps the most commonly used in my country is "what would Jesus do," as if, by enunciating the question and coming up with a suitable answer, a particular course of action could be or would be sanctified in the spirit of someone who is enshrined in tenderness, dearly loved and possibly worshiped.

In dicey or confounding situations where there seems to be no easy or comforting answer, "what would Jesus do?"

And I wouldn't get snarky about it. Any time anyone can stop and reflect, under whatever auspices, strikes me as a good thing.

But I guess it's the next step that muddies the waters. If an answer occurs and if it is accredited to Jesus' account, the one who has arrived at the conclusion may feel not only correct, but also empowered: If this is what Jesus would do and if I'm doing it, then surely I must be right and, ipso facto, others are wrong, sinful, fucked-up or whatever.

Measuring my life against the life of someone I elevate is part and parcel of the religious hymnal. Any religious hymnal. But at some point it is worthwhile to take stock and stop leading a life that is devoid of evil doings and evil doers but also -- because it amounts to the same thing -- stop leading a life inflated with good doings and good doers.

Second-hand living is not the teaching of any healthy spiritual persuasion. This is a hard lesson, perhaps, but I see no way to escape its lash. What a bitch: "What would I do?"

I've run out of steam ... it's not all that important .... but I guess I'll leave here what has already been written.....

Barbara Ehrenreich: "old enough to die"

Just spent some time being delighted with a profile/book promo for Barbara Ehrenreich, a woman who claims to have a keen bullshit detector and seems to have the credentials to go with it.

Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.
While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.
Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”

Her latest book  "Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer," is due out April 10, 2018. Much against my better instincts, I may be forced to go out and buy a copy. I had thought the propensity to buy books was in the rear-view mirror and that the dust-gatherers I already own were enough. Oh well....

Whether or not I buy the book, I liked the essay.

fish in the Palestinian barrel

Palestinian demonstrators shout during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest demanding the right to return to their homeland, at the Israel-Gaza border east of Gaza City April 6, 2018. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

KHUZAA, Gaza Strip (AP) — Thousands of Palestinians protested along Gaza’s sealed border with Israel on Friday, engulfing the volatile area in black smoke from burning tires to try to block the view of Israeli snipers and cheering a Hamas strongman who pledged that the border fence will eventually fall.
Israeli troops opened fire from across the border, killing at least seven Palestinians and wounding 293 others — 25 of them seriously — in the second mass border protest in a week, Gaza health officials said. Hundreds more suffered other injuries, including tear gas inhalation, the officials said.
The deaths brought to at least 29 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since last week.

moose lore, moose wisdom

My vote for quote-du-jour goes to:

I am not a biologist, but as a lifelong Alaskan I would advise people not to go around kicking moose.... If you get into a kicking contest with a moose, guess who’s going to win.

There is important stuff in life and then there is very-important stuff. The above falls into the latter category, I suspect.

being born...

... it's to die for.

a beautiful car

Are there any beautiful cars out there? Perhaps because my vision is going, I look at most of the modern conveyances and think, "Your taste is in your mouth." Where is the sheer beauty, the class, the ahhh? I can't see it.

Cars these days are rife with chrome-like substances. Not chrome, mind you, just gaudy shining bits and endless, useless bits of curvature. Gaudy? Yes. Beautiful? I can't seem to find it. You'd think that, if only by accident, someone would put something beautiful, something quietly elegant, out there. But I can't find it. Gaudy sells ergo gaudy is beautiful.

Age and crabbiness are all my fault, but still I find cars these days lacking in imagination and style. Beauty is not over-stated. Rather, it is quiet and precise and smooth and unapologetic. Today's cars are full of chrome-like apologies.

I'd love to see a car and think, as once, "I wish I had one of those."

OK ... taste is taste. One man's beauty is another man's trash bin.

And still I wish... if only to be younger, perhaps.

nailed me

It was sort of like catching myself looking at my reflection in a mirror -- mildly embarrassing to be considering something so long-lived-with, so obvious, so self-serving... a mildly-weird sensation after watching hunks of two movies on TV yesterday. Somehow, combined, the two movies nailed me squarely ... not completely, perhaps, but close enough.

"Chocolat" and "Trumbo," both long-since forgotten by others, perhaps, but new-ish to me. Both contain the beckoning-and-threatening warmth of social agreement mixed with the hair-raising threat of what happens when that warmth turns to vindictiveness and group-think. "Chocolat" adds a dollop of implied and explicit magic, which is one of my undeniable threads.

"Trumbo" addresses one of the most frightening times in my lifetime -- the communist-hunting days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a coarse and unkind man whose insinuations may have been a precursor to Donald Trump, but in any case hurt so many to the benefit of so few. Even as a kid, I could feel the tendrils of McCarthy's noose. Witch hunts are real where groups preside and they scare the crap out of me. And yet groups are warming. They are social and sociability is a human longing/trait.

Beckoning and threatening. The marrow-deep longing to trust. The trust. The dues to be paid for trusting. Yes, I too would love to be cozied by one group or another and yet feel the lash of suspicion and fear ... turn most goodness on its head and what have you got? Turn evil on its head and what have you got?

I'm probably not describing all this well. These two movies just seemed to sum me up without even breathing hard. Magic and loving and horror and yet another crucifixion. I catch myself looking with some curiosity in the two-movie mirror which felt somehow as if I were a deer caught in the headlights. OK -- two movies caught me by the short hairs and I have to admit it.

Dontcha just hate it when someone or something nails your ass to the barn door? :)

time wasted/time well-used

Breanna, my younger son's lady friend, bounced into the kitchen earlier this evening.

"Where have you guys been?" I asked idly.

"We were at the gym," she replied.

"You look fit as a fiddle to me," I said. And she did.

Her face filled with a kind of incredulous surprise. "Say that again," she said almost breathlessly.

"You look fit as a fiddle to me," I reprized.

She ran through the back door and informed my younger son who was standing in the driveway of what I had just said -- a phrase she had heard for the first time earlier in the day. She had never heard it before: "Fit as a fiddle." Now she had heard it twice in a couple of hours. Pretty magical, I guess.

Does anyone else feel that if they had simply listened to the kernels of wisdom accumulated through growing up among friends and relatives, there would have been no real need for expansive adventures into philosophy and religion and sociology? All that study of Sanskrit or Hinduism or phenomenology or logic or a variety of trends ... well, the further I travel, the more I wonder if just sticking with what your grandmother told you would have created wide pastures of land on which to plant other, more useful fruit.

"A stitch in time saves nine."
"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
"Measure twice, cut once."
"You can't make an omelet without breading eggs."
"When an-eye-for-an-eye becomes the rule, everyone will be blind."
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link."

And no doubt there are a gazillion others tucked away, huddling and just waiting to be unhitched from the DNA strand to which each is currently attached. Second-nature stuff which covers the bases without a backward glance. If I had just paid better attention when I first consumed them, all that time spent on Hinduism or Buddhism or the Russian Revolution or William James ... well, shiieeeet!

I suppose it's not a perfect fit or a perfect equation, but still, what a lot of time might have been saved if I had paid attention and followed the Yellow Brick Roads already laid out, plain as paper, in front of me.

Better luck next time, Adam.

another version of Israeli apartheid?

Israel’s airports authority has refused to display adverts informing female passengers that it is illegal for airline staff to ask them to move seats at the behest of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.
The Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) had planned to display the billboard ads at Ben Gurion airport, near Tel Aviv, during Passover, the Jewish holiday that ends on Saturday.
IRAC’s ad campaign follows a court ruling in June in favour of an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, Renee Rabinowitz, who sued Israel’s national airline, El Al, for gender discrimination. Cabin crew had asked her to move when an ultra-Orthodox man refused to take his seat next to her.

modern slavery -- a thinking point

A Guardian opinion piece from yesterday targets the UK, and yet the reverberations echo, I think.

Society abhors exploitation but we are complicit. The cheap goods and services consumers expect makes exploitation inevitable

¡Viva Cherán!

At least one small Mexican community has

... found a simple solution to the vote-buying and patronage which plague Mexican democracy.
The indigenous Purépecha town of Cherán threw out all political parties after a popular uprising in 2011 – and it doesn’t want them back.“The only thing the parties have done is divide us,” said Salvador Ceja, Cherán’s communal lands commissioner. “Not just here – in the entire country.”

This is happening in a country U.S. President Donald Trump wants to wall off. And you can sort of see why... maybe there is an infectious quality to the mindset in Cherán.

Much of that antipathy can be traced back to the situation in the early part of the decade, when the surrounding area was dominated by illegal loggers, who clearcut local forests and hauled out dozens of truckloads of logs each week – with the protection of a local drug cartel, and the collusion of corrupt police and local politicians.
Eventually, the townspeople decided they had enough. Early on 15 April 2011, local residents ran off the loggers and blockaded the town. Then they kicked out the mayor and banished political parties, arguing that infighting was what had allowed the town to fall into crisis.

a little mind-bending photography

From The Guardian ... more pix in article:

Hotels on stilts, cribs on wheels and staircases through windows make up German photographer Frank Kunert’s playful microcosms

Flying High, 2016

 

Flood, 2015

 

Privacy, 2017

a teaching moment

Am I wrong or are today's teachers setting the table not just for themselves, but for all of us?

A new wave of teacher strikes has highlighted a growing problem for all US workers – growing health costs which have become a “hungry tapeworm” on Americans’ wages.
In the most expensive health system in the world and the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare, more than 177 million Americans get health insurance through an employer. But insurance is rarely free.
“They’ve shifted the healthcare costs and the pension costs on to employees, so employees are making less and they’re spending less,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.7 million members. “It’s a double whammy.”

the ultramarathon

They are an almost-impossible test of the human body and spirit, yet the number of ultramarathons has increased 1,000% over the last decade. Adharanand Finn asks what’s behind this rapid increase – and whether racing 100 miles or more is actually good for you....

But are ultramarathon runners doing it to be healthy? No one I spoke to cited that as the reason. Hoffman followed up his research with a fascinating question posed to another 1,394 ultrarunners: “If you were to learn, with absolute certainty, that ultramarathon running is bad for your health, would you stop?” Seventy-four per cent of runners responded: “no”. -- [The Guardian]

Reminds me a bit of a Zen Buddhist chum who was skeptical, in the meditation practice, of what he called the "samadhi junkies."

molten chains

Do not bind yourself
In molten chains,
However golden the glow.

Torture is easy
Freedom is hard.
Forswear the the crime and the concomitant virtue.

Rest beneath
Some well-placed tree
And listen to the flowers grow.

John Oliver on tots as lawyers

Passed along in email this morning is/was John Oliver's take on the nitty-gritty of immigration courts ... including the idea that tots might be forced to defend themselves or others in the courtroom. It's funny, but it's not. Why do I have to see this shit on a comedy show when it's so clearly news, not comedy? I do hope that somewhere some news organization is massively ashamed, but that's probably asking too much.

aluminum foil molding

Passed along in email:

April 1

Passed along in email on this Easter/April Fools Day was the following:

Scientists have developed an astonishing mind-reading machine which can translate what you are thinking and instantly display it as text.

They claim that it has an accuracy rate of 90 per cent or more and say that it works by interpreting consonants and vowels in our brains.

The researchers believe that the machine could one day help patients who suffer from conditions that don't allow them to speak or move.

dressed in all your clothes

Canadian photographer Libby Oliver’s striking portrait series, Soft Shells, is a playful exploration of how people express themselves through clothes. It features individuals swathed in every item from their wardrobe, flashes of body parts only just visible. “Clothing is an immediate social cue,” Oliver says, “and one of the few things we have visual control over with ourselves.” The subjects range from Ava, four, to Oliver’s grandma Florence, who is 88.
Oliver started the project last summer and now has people itching to get involved. She hopes the series can develop internationally, to explore other cultures and catalogue “the varying masses of clothing and textures in the world”. She does, however, admit that the enthusiasm of her subjects has its limits. “I have to move quickly, because those piles of fabric are quite suffocating!”

deference to the most high

Perhaps, in the end, it would be best to honor everything or nothing as the most-revered, the top of the heap, the king among kings, the talisman beyond all talismans, the worthiest among the worthy.

One culture may value the $100 bill, another a text, another the conch shell, another the dragon with five toe nails, and yet another the duck wearing a scarf. It's a serious business for those who take it seriously. And yet how, in the end, is anyone to take it seriously ... or not seriously at all?

A golden silk shirt woven more than 1,000 years ago, which was among the greatest treasures of the nomadic Sogdian people, is coming up for auction valued at up to £500,000.
The garment features a pattern of ducks wearing fluttering scarves – a sign, with the jewelled necklaces they carry in their beaks, that they belonged to the royal household.

To some, of course, the $100 bill is the very-god among very-gods. To another, it is a bit of paper good for starting a camp fire. To some, the text comes down from on high where it may be regarded by others as mere scribble-scrabble on what passed for paper back then. And the imperial dragon is the cat's pajamas here but a bit of fanciful fancy there.

Who knows who will venerate what when? In parts of the Middle East, you can lose important extremities for failing to show sufficient deference to the Quran.

OK ... a duck with a scarf. Why not?