First Looks category archive

Irregular shenanigans to resume shortly.

Celebrate yourself some Easter bunny hype:

Did you know that Easter was originally a pagan festival dedicated to Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, whose consort was a hare, the forerunner of our Easter bunny? Of course you did. Every year the fecund muck of the internet bursts forth afresh with cheery did-you-know explanations like this, setting modern practices in a context of ancient and tragically interrupted pagan belief.

The trouble is that they are wrong. The colourful myths of Eostre and her hare companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying rabbit, aren’t historically pagan. They are modern fabrications, cludged together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence.

The Eostre bunny is like the fairies those little English WWI era girls photographed–made up.

The real Easter Bunny is good enough, thank you.

Read the whole thing, It’s a nice commentary on modern mythology.

Read more »

Spring cleaning.

Every once and a while, teabaggers reveal what truly lies beneath their (you will pardon the expression but in some ways it is most accurate) movement.

My container roses survived the winter quite nicely.

Also, light bloggery.

What Atrios said. (Though the voting profile doesn’t apply to my state. Wish it did, but doesn’t. Southern Strategy and all that.)

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

H/T Susan for the pic.

Off to drink liberally.

Your tax dollars at work:

Via Delaware Online.

Addendum, Later That Same Week:

Thoreau recounts his mother’s experience. A nugget:

So, to recap: They barked at a middle-aged woman who was recovering from shoulder surgery and didn’t raise her hands fast enough while they were taking naked pictures of her.

And via Thoreau, a Raving of a Feral Genius.

Struggling start-up needs your help for fun and fellowship. All you have to do is show up and pay your tab.

Think of Drinking Liberally as a support group for liberals.

When: 6 p.

Where:
Jack Quinn’s Irish Pub
241 Granby Street
Norfolk, Va. (map)

More about Drinking Liberally.

Back when Ed Koch was mayor of New York and I was working for the railroad, Koch decided that it was okay for the homeless to spend their nights at Penn Station.

For the mayor, it got them out of sight of most of the populace by foisting them on the railroad. (We always wondered why he didn’t invite them to JFK Airport–at least that was city property.)

The three railroads that used that station and their customers and employees didn’t think much of the idea; they did not look kindly to camps being set up in the nooks and crannies of the station (Penn Station is a very large place stretching under several city blocks, with three public levels and many more private ones; it has lots of nooks and crannies). It was not uncommon for employees to come to work to find someone sleeping on the floor in front of their office doors.

I recall one of my co-workers referring to the railroad police’s efforts to deal the situation as “playing water polo with the homeless.”

Now Virginia Beach has taken up water polo with the homeless (there is much more information at the link):

Raymond Strand built a small cabin in a wooded area off Loretta Lane and furnished it with a bed, a stove and a closet. He lived there until a month ago, when Beach officials told him and more than 20 other people to vacate the “tent city” they called home.

Strand since then has moved his belongings just a half-mile, to another wooded lot. It’s a much smaller tent city, but the 62-year-old former Army engineer said he had no other options.

All I can say it that the city’s motto seems to be, “Move ’em up, head ’em out.”

Afterthought:

There’s not enough money to help the homeless, but there always seems to be enough money to “partner” with a developer.

At Comically Vintage.

Offered without comment:

A small, private Floyd County (Va.) school has closed for the week after more than half its students became ill with whooping cough.

At least 30 people associated with Blue Mountain School have been diagnosed with the highly contagious disease, also called pertussis, including 23 of its 45 students, said Shelly Emmett, the alternative school’s director.

(snip)

The outbreak was caused by not properly vaccinating people against the disease, O’Dell (Dr. Molly O’Dell, director of the New River Health District–ed.) said, noting that a subset of the population does not follow vaccination recommendations.

Stephanie Wraith, Contra Costa Teen Correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News, considers prom fashions and asks, “When did hooker chic become in style for prom?”

She suggests some remedies. Here’s one:

Mandate that all chaperones purchase their dresses for the evening from the local prom retailer, too. One glimpse of that history teacher in a strapless minidress should have most girls swearing off such attire for life.

See the rest at the link.

The end of the interminable, pointless, and corrupt college basketball season.

Every since Operation “Odyssey Dawn” started, this song has been stuck in my head.