t waves

it must be relatively recent because Japan has had some very important Empresses.

Back many posts to the Princess Aiko thing...the Japanese folks who are claiming to be "conservative" and opposing a female Empress are fervent, but a bit lax in their history. Prior to the US setting up the rules of How Japan Works after WWII, the Emperor could be either male or female. So oddly, their conservative resistence should be phrased as "We want to keep doing things just like the US said!" instead of "We want to keep doing things like they've always been done!"

Most opinion polls in Japan show that the Japanese would be okay with Empress Aiko, but the royal family is addressing and prepping the people now, which is smart.

Of course, this is a country where you can buy schoolgirls' undies from vending machines, so who's to say if a female monarch would be a good idea.

Is it cute or slightly disturbing that your cars have matching names? If anyone here calls their car Amy Acker, I'm going to vote for disturbing.

Well, I bought her the week after "A Hole in the World". And she was blue. It all fit!

HEE! We actually discussed this after the dinner out night for the Beantown leg of Nilly Tour 2004.

In may case, she's a blue Honda Civic, on it's second owner, and while not quite as strong as she used to be, still quite a good car given that she's a decade old. What else was I going to call her?

Maybe I should call my decade (okay 11 years) old blue Honda Civic Amy.

Son of a Bitch! Our rent pays for snow removal, and my roomate and I have been sitting right here in the living room all morning. The plow guy is supposed to honk when he gets here so we can run out and move our cars for him. I don't think he likes to wait the approximate two minutes it takes us to get on boots and get outside, so he just doesn't honk, and completely plows us in. Rat Bastard!!

ETA:

We actually discussed this after the dinner out night for the Beantown leg of Nilly Tour 2004.

That's right, we did figure out the car thing then, didn't we?

Gronklies all!

Just in the awfice for half a day today, as I have the afternoon off to run around and do paperwork errands. Thrill! We're having a farewell lunch for one of my colleagues and I may have to miss it.

I just had to explain the math behind lotteries to a co-worker. Why me? I'm an English major.

Bummer, Lilty. Not taht I really know your pain, as I have never lived in a place that had these "snow" and "plows" you speak of, but it certainly sounds bad.

My blue Toyota Corolla is totally not an Amy.

awfice

I think that the plowdude is actually the brother of the bitch upstairs. I bet she gets a break on her rent AND a nice phone call before he gets here. She always acts like a saint because she shovels the sidewalk out front. Which, OK, but she's the only one who uses it, and if she waited for a few hours, the town would do it anyway.

I'm usually the quiet and meek tenant. I think I have repressed neighbor anger that the snow is bringing out.

The book I mentioned yesterday, Same Sex Unions in PreModern Europe, is a fascinating read. The first chapter, "The Vocabulary of Love and Marriage," is a little frustrating, though. He's trying to explain the differences in meaning between Greek terms and modern terms, and some sort of familiarity with non-English things is pretty necessary. He's not transliterating the Greek because the transliterations have assumptions tied to them, so the text has things in the Greek alphabet scattered through.

The discussion of the words "brother" and "brotherhood" is fascinating. In older times, your brother (male with same parents) frequently shared the same household with you because wealth belonged more to the families than to individuals. "Brother" therefore held connotations of interdependency that modern times don't share. My husband is reluctant to even call his sibling "brother" because there is such a lack of mutual support and respect between them. (Yes, the author mentions the lack of a female-specific term for these sorts of relationships, but, as he says, he's not going to create terms that don't exist. He mentions a feminist colleague of his who published an accusation that he had deliberately not produced documentation of female-female relationships--although he stated clearly that he found no such documentation. He says in a footnote that he'll refrain from naming either the collegue or the journal in which she published her accusation.)

There are apparently several examples of rituals in Greek and Latin that refer to two men "becoming brothers" to each other (I haven't gotten that far yet to find out the details). Before the High Middle Ages, it was typical to use words like "brother" and "sister" to stand for husbands and wives, to indicate the mutual respect and support aspects of the relationship. Being in a marriage also assumed a degree of physical attraction, and I think the book is going to explore the logical connection between a "brother-brother" relationship and the assumption of a physical relationship.

Damned fascinating. And I'd put good money down that this book is going to disappear from the shelves of the local library as soon as it comes to the notice of Certain People.