Showing posts with label hafla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hafla. Show all posts

Monday, June 04, 2012

3541 Challenge

Monday, June 4, 2012

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
-- George Bernard Shaw --

-----------------------------------------------------------------

June!  Agh!  Already?

-----------------------

The GPS says my city house is 29 feet above sea level.  Not enough, I think.  Next time I go to the country house, I'll have to check there.

------------------------

I went to a small hafla last Friday evening.  Some kids were selling raffle tickets at 20 cents each for some charity.  I bought five.  I won.  First time I've ever won a raffle.  Each of the vendors there had contributed something to the raffle, so I won a shopping bag containing a tiny glazed mirror exactly the right size for the sink in the half bath, a CD from the group who performed the music, a nice jingle hip scarf, a plush camel, two long sexy yarn hair doflinkies, an anklet, and a couple other things I can't remember now.  After I got home I found a card entitling me to a hula hoop - which annoyed me because I'd actually considered buying one from the vendor.  (After reflection, it has occurred to me that said vendor, knowing there was a coupon in the bag since the hoop wouldn't have fit, should have searched out the raffle winner.  Hey, there weren't that many people there.)

--------------------------

Sumthin' else I don't understand:  Howcum if God tells you to do X, like join the priesthood, marry a particular person, or run for national office, then you can publicly claim God speaks to you and many people will believe you and consider you favored by God.

But if God tells you to do Y, like kill a particular person, set fire to yourself, or bomb a building for political reasons, then the courts and public opinion consider you insane if you claim God told you to do it.

Who are we to decide what God will or will not tell a person to do?  To whom He will or will not speak?  Who are we to ascribe motives to God?  If Man did not create God, then how can Man define God?   We can read God's mind?  We know what He's likely to say, and to whom He's likely to speak, and what His ulterior motive is for what He says to them?  If He says only things we want Him to say, then we have created God in our own image.

Read the Bible.  That God ain't necessarily nice, doesn't always play fair.

--------------------------

I've been playing "Every Word" on the Kindle.  I'm not good at it, but I figure it's good for me.  They give you a bunch of letters, and you have to find all the words that can be created from those letters to rack up points, and at least one word that uses all the letters to proceed to the next level.

Yesterday I was given W S T O G H R  on level six (of ten).  I had to find 34 words of 4 letters or more, including one using all seven letters.  (The program, by the way, doesn't accept proper nouns or abbreviations (a lie!  It accepts things like "prof" and "ref") or a a lot of other perfectly good words.  There's this "list".  So if you find more than 34 total, some of them weren't on the "accepted" list.)

Anyway, try it.  

I worked at it forever, handed it to Daughter, and she got the seven-letter word almost instantly.

Um, no, I don't remember what it was.  Sorry.  Take a whack at it in the comments.  (I'll bet Becs gets it first.)
.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

816 Dance Photos, 4 of 4

[Later Edit - Yes, this is Daughters of Ishtar, not Alchemy.]

I think this might be the Alchemy Dance Theater, but then again it might be Daughters of Ishtar (help?) Whatever. The have the prettiest cholis (tops). They look like they might be made from sari silk.


At one point (before the rain) I was looking at some belts one of the vendors had, and she asked if I was a dancer. I laughed and said "Once upon a time, 30 years ago." She (a youngster) said "Wow! I bet the dance has changed a lot since then." I said yes, it has.

It has probably changed more in the past 40 years than in the preceeding 2,000 years. Movies and tourism have had their effect.

There are subtle things. When you look at the photo above, the ladies are doing a hip (lift and) thrust, and the way they are doing it looks very nice. But back in my day, isolation was all. We would not have leaned the upper body like that. We would have got the same hip extension, but we'd keep the shoulders parallel to the floor, and the rib cage perpendicular to the floor. When we did hip movements, the upper body was kept out of it. Nowadays, there's more flow.


Willow was supposed to dance early in the evening, but when she was asked if she'd like to dance, she declined. So, near the end, when she decided to dance after all, I'd used up all my film. These are photos 25 and 26 on a 24-shot roll. As often as I have seen her dance, I never had a camera with me before, and this time I did, and I was still caught short. And they are terrible pictures. Oh, well, photos never do her justice anyway. You have to see her move.

This is an example of how NOT to photograph a bellydancer - catch her in the middle of a belly roll.
Her floor work is incredible, but she was dancing on a squishy sopping carpet, so no one expected her to go to the floor, but suddenly she leaned back, and we all held our breath, and whoop! She did a turkish drop right into the wetness. Audience pleaser to the core.