Good birthday.

Cute!

Exploration

He's smiling because he knows their destiny...and how good that will taste.

The children seem to believe the camera will take their souls.

And the kids got to take home neck braces as souvenirs.

Just a theory

Here's a theory I've been working on for the last few weeks:

The number of words (synonyms) available to identify something in a given society reflect the relative predominance of that thing in the society.

Here are some examples from the American English language (since I have some familiarity with that one). These are just off the top of my head, and of course done without the aid of a thesaurus.

Weather of all kinds have ridiculous numbers of descriptive words, but rain in particular seems to get a lot of attention. We have rain, showers, drizzle, spitting rain, cloud bursts, thunder storms, heavy rain, light rain, driving rain, etc.

Need we even get into the number of words for the male genitals or sex?

We have a few words for money: buck, dough, cash, and I think they used to also call it "bread", but I don't think we really use that any more.

I'm no linguist, but I understand that the Greek language has three words for "love" and that Hebrew has three words for "God". Again though, just a thought.

The Christian revolution in the society of fruit has begun with the raspberries. Many thought it would be the chinaberries leading the way, what with all the mission work in the last 50 years, but that turns out not to be the case.

Festa Mutante

We somewhat recently went to a street fair here in Boise. They call it a street fair, but I believe a more accurate name would be hippie carnival. It's really a carnival without rides, a lot of booths selling incense, and of course the strong smell of marijuana. They also have some things only a hippie carnival would have, such as a petition for legalizing marijuana, and a booth for the local atheists group, which came complete with bumper stickers like "Born OK the first time".

There was also a "comedy" troupe there that went by the name Circo Mutante. This is apparently a group of young adults (listing toward very hippie) who travel around the country in a bus that runs on vegetable oil and perform skits at these street fairs. The fact that they were far from comedic doesn't really need commentary. However, it was very interesting that when this group announced at the beginning of their show that their bus ran on vegetable oil, they got a big round of applause.

At first I was confused as to why this would be. These people have done nothing extraordinary or courageous. If we're going to clap for someone, let's clap for single moms who work two jobs so their daughters can go to gymnastic practice, or the good public servants, or the volunteers, or the father who does excellent work in the face of a mundane job, or the good soldiers of the world, or the people on the ground in the fight against hunger, aids, human rights, or illiteracy. Young adults without direction driving around in a bus to produce bad comedy are low on the list of those deserving positive recognition.

But I then realized the people were not clapping for the young adults, but for the sacrifice they had made to the god of the environment. That particular god is so powerful in our culture that anything done seemingly in its name is deemed good, right and admirable almost without regard to the actual content of the act. I think it's what would be termed "fundamentalist" behavior if those people happened to be attached to a publicly recognized diest religion.