A Rose by Any Other Name

  by  NatalieMaynor 

Did anyone ever wonder why this blog is called "Philosophidian"? Or why the title is "Insert Something Pithy Here"? No?

Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.

I have a blog on LiveJournal that I've had since 2003. Sometimes, over there, I would come up with a blog topic that was too serious. I try to be either ranty or entertaining (or entertainingly ranty) over there. I wanted a place where I could write at length about longer, more serious topics. Posts I would have to work on for a while. Essays, as opposed to quick posts.

But it needed a name.

Now, I'm into puns. And I'm into Kaa (the snake from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling). I've been 'Kaa' or 'KaaSerpent' online since the early 90s. If you see a user 'kaa' or 'kaaserpent' on an online forum, there's a good chance it's me.

This was before the days when Google and Facebook and other sites were absolutely hell-bent on associating everyone's real names with everything they ever do online. I wasn't necessarily trying to hide, but I didn't necessarily want everyone I knew (or are related to, or work with) to know I had this blog, either. So I didn't pick my name or a variation thereof.

For the same reason, I also didn't necessarily want this one connected to the LiveJournal one. I was afraid that people used to seeing me be entertaining (at least to myself) might be annoyed or completely uninterested in seeing me be serious. Especially since I espouse a philosophy on life that is contrary to a good number of my friends and all of my family. i.e., that whole 'Atheist' thing. It makes some people touchy, for whatever reason, like they expect me to start chanting in Latin backwards or something. I can be pretty plain-spoken about the topic, here, whereas in my other online blogging homes, I am less in-your-face about it.

So my pun-loving mind starts to percolate names involving 'philosophy' and 'Kaa.' Nothing comes to mind. Until one day I was looking at a list of synonyms for both words and it hit me.

A snake is an ophidian. The presence of 'oph' in both 'philosopher' and 'ophidian' hit me, and thus was born 'Philosophidian.' Philosophical snake.

And I literally could not come up with anything for the title of the blog. I toyed with a lot of things, and finally, just to put something in the space, I typed 'Insert Something Pithy Here,' and it has remained that from day 1.

You'd be surprised at how many people use exactly that or something very close. Or at least I was. I thought I was being sooooo original. So funny. Laugh's on me. :)

If you want to see how my other two blogs got their names, you can click here (LiveJournal) or here (Wordpress).

---

This post is in response to The Writer's Post Blog Hop 2014 #4 prompt, Explain the Name of Your Blog. The host is Suzy Que. Other entries are linked from her blog post.

Facts

  by  Krista76 

I heard something disturbing on my way in to work this morning.

I listen to a podcast called A Way With Words. The hosts talk about language and take calls from listeners (it's also a weekly, syndicated radio show). One caller had a question regarding something the teacher taught his daughter.

He was taking his 8-year-old daughter to school, and she was reading the packaging of some product or other. She was going down the "page" saying "Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact."

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Practicing identifying facts."

"What do you mean?"

She replied that the teacher had shown them how to identify facts. And then she explained that the teacher had told her that "facts" are statements that could either be proven true or false. (They're doing a section in her third-grade class on fact vs. opinion.)

"Whoa!" he thought. "That isn't correct. Maybe she just misunderstood."

So he spoke with the teacher about it. The daughter hadn't misheard or misremembered. This public school teacher told this concerned father that the word 'fact' has changed its meaning so that it now means . . . a statement. Or perhaps an assertion. That could either be true or false. That the entire requirement of truth and provability is moot. The hosts disagreed, and so do I.

Every dictionary the hosts checked—and that I've checked—disagrees with this . . . monument to everything wrong with our education system. A "fact" must be true/exist. That's in the definition. If this idiot is teaching kids that a "fact" can be wrong, that explains so many, many things. (The media springs to mind.)

Has anyone else encountered this? Please say it's isolated . . .

NO! I DON'T LIKE IT!

"Sparkling" © 2011 by Jason A. Samfield

I saw a comment somewhere--maybe it was on Twitter or maybe it was on Facebook; I honestly don't remember--that said, essentially, this: I don't have to actually read Twilight to know how stupid and bad it is, all I have to do is read all the stuff on the Internet about how stupid and bad it is to know that it's stupid and bad. And the commenter then went on to call the non-teenage, adult women who read and enjoy the Twilight books names, insult their intelligence, and make rude assumptions about their hygiene, living conditions, etc.

And I thought, "Why are people so vitriolic over a silly book?"

Seriously, folks. Why? Don't get me wrong: I live for the day when people all over the Internet so love/hate something I wrote that they're willing to yell and scream and call total strangers names. I'd eat that with a spoon.

I've been known to jump on the "VAMPIRES DO NOT SPARKLE!" bandwagon more than once, and frankly without ever having stopped to consider why it matters whether vampires--a mythical creature--do or don't sparkle in sunlight, or burst into flames (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Let the Right One In, others). Or disintegrate (Fright Night, 'Salem's Lot, others). Or cause all the "younger" vampires they "turned" to spontaneously combust (Queen of the Damned). (Question: When Anne Rice wrote this in Queen of the Damned, did people vilify her like they are vilifying Stephanie Myer?)

I think we need to take a moment. Sit back. Chill. Take a deeeeeep breath.

Back in middle school, a new girl joined my class. I'll call her Mary. She was that most dreaded of all things in the history of teenage ever: The Outsider. She hadn't grown up with the rest of us. She hadn't been there. She didn't know us. She didn't act right. I remember hearing two other girls talking one day and the conversation went something like this:

Susan: Ugh! Did you see Mary in the bathroom?

Jessica: No, why?

Susan: She's in there, sitting on the toilet, and eating an apple.

Jessica: Gross!

Susan: I know! I could never do something like that. That's just disgusting!

I have no idea why the conversation (the actual words faded, but the gist of it stayed with me) has stuck with me for so long other than that it illustrates something that I keep coming back to over and over and over again: people expect other people to think exactly like they think. And if they don't, it's inconceivable that there might be a reason for it, or that they might just have a different way of looking at things. It's just one of those little things everyone does, and maybe never thinks about.

Example: how many times have you heard a devoutly religious person say, "I don't see how people can be atheists! What's to stop them from just going out and raping and murdering and stealing? They can't be moral!"

It's the apple argument all over again. "If I could never conceive of doing something, clearly anyone who can conceive of doing it--much less actually do it--must be just wrong on some fundamental level." (One does wonder sometimes if the people saying these things ever stop to think what it says about what they, themselves, would do given the opportunity.)

I admit to the same degree of this as each of you reading it. I look at people with piercings through parts of their body that I don't even want to think about being near sharp objects, and people are getting them pierced and tattooed and scarred... And I admit, a too-great portion of me tends to hold onto the "there's something wrong with someone who would do that" mentality. Sorry, friends of mine who are tattooed and/or pierced in "those places," but there it is. :)

There are some scathing reviews of Twilight out there on the Internet. One has only to search Google to find more words about the book than there are words in the book.

It seems like an inordinate number of them are negative, and written by people who proudly boast that they've never read the book. Never want to read it. Because it's so obviously awful and bad and bad and wrong and wrong and ick-ick-ptui!

But I wonder why. Why do people expend so much energy actively hating something that they admit they're never going to read?

I'm reminded of numerous toddlers I've observed over the years. Picture it: A family sitting in a restaurant, trying to have an enjoyable night out. They have, of course, brought their toddler with them because babysitters went extinct sometime in the mid-80s. (Oh, do not even get me started.)

The waiter comes and the parents order for themselves and their child. Flash forward 20 minutes. The food arrives. The food is placed before the toddler and s/he screams (at the top of its considerable lungs) "NO! I DON'T LIKE IT!"

And what do parents literally around the whole damned world say at this point, in whatever language they speak? That's right: "How do you know you don't like it if you never tried it?"

How, indeed?

I have a housemate, now. A long-time friend who is getting a divorce (amicable) and needed a place to stay while she rebuilds her life in a new city. She's getting a place to stay, and I'm getting someone to talk to and she happens to be a very good cook. I've lost 25 lbs since she moved in. Because I eat at home and I eat less. But I digress.

This friend whom I'll call Velda (because that's one of her online aliases) is very into the Twilight saga. Writes and reads fanfic, has all the books, has seen all the movies, etc.

I never realized just how pervasive the "Twilight hate" is out there until I became aware of it through her. I'd go with her to friends' houses and the topic would come up and literally everyone in the room—none of whom have read a single word of the book—would start trashing it and all people who read it. I introduced her into one of my writing groups, and basically the same thing happened.

I immediately rethought all the times I've said "VAMPIRES DO NOT SPARKLE!" and made derisive remarks about the books, having never read a single word, myself.

So I asked Velda to loan me the first book, Twilight. I started reading it, expecting to just hate it.

Do I love it? No. Am I going to become a total Stephanie Myer fanboy? No. I'm about ten chapters in, and although it is definitely not my style (I've never been a girl, and while I have been a teenager, I was not a teenage girl, :), it does draw you in. It does read a bit like a Mary Sue. But if you just read for enjoyment and not to analyze, I can understand why so many people are so drawn to the books. The main character thinks she's ugly and clumsy, but apparently she has something that makes five very different boys fall head over heels for her, two of whom are a vampire and a werewolf. And who doesn't want to imagine desirable members of their preferred gender falling all over themselves to impress you? (People who read Playboy/Playgirl for the articles, I'm sure.)

And there are certain problems with the narration as well that I won't go into. Suffice to say that while I don't hate the book, I don't love it, either. I am finding it entertaining. I do intend to read it all the way through if for no other reason than to have a common ground to at least discuss the book's strong points and shortcomings with others who have read it.

So how 'bout we make a deal? Instead of saying, "That sucks!" if you haven't ever tried it, why not try it first? Then, if it doesn't appeal to you, you can at least say, "Yeah, I read that, but it wasn't to my taste. To each their own," instead of looking like a toddler yelling, "NO! I DON'T LIKE IT!"

"Writing" Tools

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking over some of the details of an urban fantasy novel I'm tentatively calling Death Scene. It will be the second in my urban fantasy series set in Atlanta, only magic works.

As part of the story, one character has to convince another to leave Atlanta and go somewhere "nearby" that is still within reason for people to travel kind of on a whim, but has places remote enough that, say, a body will not be found for three years. You know, just for example. :)

And you don't want to call up the forestry service and say things like, "So, I'm an author doing research. If I were to want to dispose of, let's say, a body, where would it be least likely to be found for a few years? Hypothetically."

Or maybe you do. I have no idea. I've never done anything like that. :)

Google Maps...is okay, but it's limited in what it can show, so I started casting about for some tool to help me figure out where to set the scene.

I thought, "I could buy a really detailed map of Georgia." So I searched on Google for "detailed map of Georgia."

And what came up was Google Earth.

Now, I've resisted the siren song for a long time and just never found a good enough reason to want to install it. But, that day I thought I'd give it a chance.

Oh. My. God. :)

I'm completely hooked. Not only did I find some nice "wilderness" areas in Georgia (which gives me an idea where to concentrate my research, even if I have to go there), but now when I hear a place mentioned, rather than just looking it up in Wikipedia, I call up Google Earth.

I was listening to a podcast just now where one of the hosts was talking about his volunteer work several years ago on the island of Fogo in Cape Verde. I've never heard of Cape Verde, much less Fogo.

So I whipped out Google Earth and typed in "Cape Verde" and it zoomed into an archipelago off the coast of Senegal in west Africa. Fogo turns out to be a little volcanic island dotted with settlements and a couple of larger cities. And I can zoom in on those population centers and see how they're laid out. Or I can click on YouTube videos or pictures people have uploaded that are tagged with GPS coordinates that put them in that area. It's...just astounding.

I highly recommend Google Earth.

For writing, that is. Yes, as a tool for writing. Not wasting time zooming in on places you've never been and never expect to see with your own eyes.

Research. Yeah, that's it. Research.

[Crossposted to my new site.]