lightcastle

This is something I've wanted to ask about for awhile, and another conversation has reminded me about it.

I've never liked "tribe" as it gets used by people for their group of friends/community/etc. There's the issue of its use in Native American political structure of course. That's a big part of it. But there's also the fact that it has from the very beginning been linked to blood and exclusion, specifically.

I do like the idea of a word for these sorts of self-chosen communities of friends and intimates or at least like-minded individuals, but "tribe" always rubbed me the wrong way.

So, does anyone have other words they like for this sort of thing? Clique seems too exclusionary. I seem to remember having once done a search and come across Clade as an option, but now I can't find any backing other than the biological nomenclature, so perhaps I am thinking of another word. Nakama seems too intimate, for instance.

Stairway to Gilligan's Island


In an alternate universe, The Beatles performed Stairway to Heaven




And, finally, the original lyrics to the Star Trek theme.

Beyond
The rim of the star-light
My love
Is wand'ring in star-flught
I know
He'll find in star-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never
His star trek
Will go on forever.
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.

A nice short story about memory in Nature.

I would love to read these.

The Might GodKing does the work for you in three connected posts.

I knew there was a rather long tradition of doing so, but had never heard of Junias before.

Junias is a character in some translations of the Bible.

More specifically, he’s a character invented by translators and inserted into the Bible. He’s a made-up person with a made-up name.

Junias never existed. And Junias’ name never existed.

But despite that, you can read the non-existent name of this non-existent person right there in the Bible — provided you have the right Bible. Or, rather, provided you have the wrong one.

Seems the problem was that in that part of the Bible, Paul was greeting important people.

In the long list of people Paul greets at the end of his letter to the Romans, he gives special notice to the husband and wife evangelical team of Andronicus and Junia (Rom. 16:6-7), whom he calls “my kindred” (suggeneis mou). … The supreme accolade comes when he calls them “outstanding among the emissaries.”

[...]

But sometime in the Middle Ages, apparently before the ninth century, it was decided that a woman apostle was unthinkable. This offended the male monopoly of church offices and honors that had grown up by that time, so Junia had to be erased from history. It took only a little smudging to do this. Paul uses her Greek name, Iounia, in the accusative case, Iounian. A mere change in accent markings (a circumflex over the last vowel) would make it the accusative form of a hypothetical male name, Iounias. But there is one problem here. “Junias” is only a hypothetical name — it never occurs in all the ancient literature and inscriptions — whereas Iounia is a common name, occurring hundreds of times.

Decided to try that middle picture in monochrome.

At the end of Eva's birthday brunch yesterday, Kendall threw her into a hood and made her stand in the fading daylight.





This shot didn't quite work overall, but the way the silhouette came out, I wanted to try and do something with it.

No, not the Superbowl commercials, I will spare you those. (Although the Canadian-only rec league hockey one is lovely.)

Instead, some random video links I've collected of late.

Holy crap, a grizzly bear fighting a wolf!

American Sign Language music videos. I had no idea this existed as a genre.

The First Question. (Honestly, the fan trailers and such this 50th anniversary have produced are going to be so much better than what Moffatt will give us.)

130 years of global warming.

Swarming quadcopters