Cravings

What's known of cravings? Pregnant women have them (I did), but what's the current belief of people who are scientific? What are some of the folk beliefs about cravings?

The reason I ask is that I'm making pork for the third time in one week. Never in my life have I had a pork craving, but it seems I'm having one now. Could be coincidence, but I thought someone might come by here with some knowledge or theories or humorous speculations.

Once when Kirby was feverishly delirious, and was three or four, he kept saying he wanted "red food." We tried, guessed, asked, called friends he had visited to see if they'd fed him something red. When he was well he couldn't remember.

With the slightest little google search I found this:

Explains what food cravings mean and how to curb cravings naturally...

Should food cravings be curbed rather than indulged? Should people listen to their bodies just enough to say "no"?

Pork is a weird one for me. It's browned and in the crock pot with green chile and tomatoes, and it smells like cumin, which I love.

Same but different

Except that I scooted the top leaf over a bit, the only difference in these scans is that for the first one I put a solid cardboard box over the top of the scanner table, and for the other one I put the scanner lid down, "the right way."

These are from the fruitless mulberry tree right out my back door, the same tree from which this odd leaf came a few years ago:

I like scanner art. I have other things in a couple of places. Click for more:

Battleaxe or a Pike?

I've had a note in my desk for years that says "Find that battleaxe thing."

Today I found it. What "it" is is a post from 1998, on a forum that doesn't exist, but I printed it out then, so I'm transcribing it here.

Subject: Re: Calling Sandra Dodd...
Date: Tue, Sep 29, 1998
From SandraDodd

<<Oliver is looking over my shoulder, and he needs clarity on the difference between a battleaxe and a pike.>>

A battleaxe is a cranky old woman and a pike is a fish.

A pike is longer and has to have a pokey thing on the end (speartip). An axehead is optional.

A battleaxe is heavier, shorter, and the pokey thing is optional.

I'm saying this without looking in a book or calling my many knowledgeable friends. BRB. (Did you know I was gone?)

I would ask my husband but he's off buying a caster for my kick stool (because I'm short), which brings up the question what is the difference between a caster (or is it castor? they do make that oil...[just joking]) and a wheel?

Okay. I called my friend Jeff [a.k.a. Duke Artan MacAilin in the SCA]. He's a word-freak and medieval combat practitioner. I read him my definitions and he said "that's it."

I wanted to say something about knowing everything. I had a family visit my house last weekend. It was like an unschooling factory tour. I was showing them toys and telling stories about how if kids have played with all kinds of things and thereby gotten scientific principles down in a sensory and intellectual kind of way, after they're older all that's left is the vocabulary, the terminology.

I bought a dictionary with my own money at the age of nine. I've been accused of being a know-it-all my whole life, but what I mostly know is words. If you know the name for an alternator, if you know the difference between an alternator and a generator by definitions, it will seem you know about the electrical systems of cars, and you WILL know more than if you didn't know that.

So because I've read about the Middle Ages for fun all my life and then hung around guys who talk about and make and use weapons, I just know. Same way people can tell a poodle from a greyhound (terminology) people gradually add to the details of their knowledge every day that they live.

That's why unschooling works. That's HOW unschooling works. Because someone cares about the difference between a pike (the word "pike") and a battleaxe (the word and the parameters of its meaning).

Definitions. Look at the word itself, "definitions."

OKAY! If you read this post carefully you've just done more than many college courses in philosophy do in an hour. Congratulations, you unschooler!

pants, bum

I had chosen words for The Lyrics Game two months in advance, but the images weren't in them all. So I was in the U.K. when I searched google image for "bum," and turns out I got no photos of scraggly old homeless guys, but many female rumps. That made me more aware of words we use all the time in the U.S. that I don't even notice.

Then this ad from the Duluth Trading Company came, and I saw it in its way-too-American light. "Pants" and "bum" both in one place, with a free pocketknife.

Variations on English

English in different parts of the world... Links and comments are welcome! Because I'm going to England in a month and a few days, I'm reviewing how I could get myself in trouble or seem rude and tacky. This is one of my favorite sites about that:


The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary—A dictionary of British slang, written by a Scotsman living in America

It's been linked on my English Oddities page for a long time, and I was one of the contributors before it was a book, so cool! It's more fun that some of the other dictionaries I've seen, though I just love dictionaries and I love stories of words.

Hema Bharadwaj wrote recently that her son, Raghu, is having a hard time in India because the English is so different from what he learned in the U.S. My favorite part of watching "Slumdog Millionaire" was hearing the game show host's English.

I had lunch with my friend Charles Thursday. He's English, and told of a road trip to the Midwest last year or so, and of being in a restaurant with three friends of ours who grew up in New Mexico (one in Texas and New Mexico) who all ordered water and that was fine, but when he tried to order water, the waitress couldn't understand what he wanted at all, no matter how much he repeated it. That's because the main sound in the word "water" in that part of the U.S. is a heavy "r" and Charles has no "r" at all. Plus he pronounced the "t" in the middle of "water" as though it were, well... a "t."

Once I sang in a folk club in England. Maybe at St. Neot's, in a pub. Maybe in a different folk club meeting in a different pub. It was the late 1970's. I sang The Titanic, and showed them the singalong parts, and when they got to their part I laughed because I was used to "...to the bottom of the the sea" sounding like a southwestern U.S. "boddum" and got that very hard "t" from a group of Brits!

Getting jokes

Fractalpus

That's from Neopets.
It's not important.
If one gets the joke, it's like "passing a test," but if one doesn't get the joke life can still continue, the sun will shine, people will play and eat...

It did remind me of "...To Get More Jokes," though and I should link that with it. Here's a quote about an epiphany-esque moment when I was teaching:

I would be asked "Why do we have to learn this?" Sometimes I gave a serious answer, and sometimes a philosophical answer. Sometimes I made light of it. Sometimes the honest answer was "You don't have to learn this, but I have to try to teach it so I can get paid." Or "Only some of you will need to know it, but they don't know which ones yet, so I have to say it to everybody."

Then one day, the question came phrased a new and better way: "What is this GOOD for?" The answer I gave then changed my life and thinking. I said quickly "So you can get more jokes." I think we were reading a simplified Romeo and Juliet at the time. I could've gone into literature and history and fine arts, but the truth is that the best and most immediate use of most random learning is that it illuminates the world. The more we know, the more jokes we will get.

http://sandradodd.com/connections/jokes

Google maps views of medieval castles

Google Maps of Castles, Cathedrals and Abbeys

Imagine all the people in the past who would have been thrilled with this technology. It's pretty thrilling now, but think back to all the scholars, geographers, historians, kings and generals whose lives would have been different had such images existed in past centuries.