I think I remember hearing of a nearby lower peak that's a much bigger figure in Tibetan folklore. (Possibly because it's a lot more landslide-y than Everest and tends to kill people who try to climb it...)

I'm not sure if it's Tibetan or Nepalese, but I think no one's yet reached the absolute summit of the third-highest mountain because the locals regard it as a holy site. Expeditions just get within spitting distance and leave it at that.

I remember a PBS special by Michael Wood about the Himalayas, with an incredibly holy mountain, where you do a pilgrimage of walking around it. One of the stories was of Krishna's bride taking him there for their honeymoon. It's one of the highest mountains, but it was more isolated--thus walk-around-able--and nearly perfect in shape.

tends to kill people who try to climb it

Which seems only fair.

PBS special by Michael Wood

My secret boyfriend.

Yay fluevogs and thrift gods!

I bought so much stuff at the thrift store yesterday. Tried to start Marie Kondo-ing my stuff, but "useful" and "sparks joy" have very little relation to each other.

Then went to see "Diary of a Teenage Girl" with a friend. It was weird. Interesting setting but good lord awkward. Now I'm trying to convince myself to go work out. I got dressed. That's step one. Now to get to the gym...

The Yangtze River is actually known as Chang Jiang in China, which means literally "Long River". Beijing is the literal translation of "Northern Capital"; Shanghai mean "On-the-Sea". And all their months translate as "Month 3" or such like. One might be grateful Everest was named by Tibetans.

This cracks me up. I knew about the Yangtze and Beijing, but didn't quite grok the whole trend towards highly literal naming conventions. Oh the mysterious Orient!

I spent about 4 hours today working on the grant I'm writing. My brain is fried like a piece of toast. Egad. But other than that, very productive! And I came home to wine, so there's that.

Apparently all Denali means is "tall." Which, points for succinctness, but I like my mountain names to have a bit more cosmic resonance.

Denali means, in full, "the great one" (the rest of the local Native Alaskan names for the mountain translate to either "the tall one" or "the high one" - Athabascan/Dene names tend to be very matter-of-fact). To be fair, there are a shedload of mountains around that area, especially from the northern side (which is where the people live that we got the name Denali from).

I'm just waiting for the inevitable bitching and moaning about Obama changing the name to some Kenyan/Islamic word from people who are completely ignorant of Alaska's push to recognize the indigenous people's name.

Lung~ma seems apt for Everest.

I'm not very creative, so I kind of don't understand how anything gets anything other than the most obvious name! "Which mountain?" "You know, the tall one?"