Another probable etymology.

A "thimble" is a little thing that goes on your "thumb".

2 probable etymologies.

It always surprises me how these everyday words we use in English are actually opaque in etymology.

I mean, we say "throw up", but do we ever really think that it means to throw something in your belly up and out onto the floor or the street or into the toilet or wherever?

Likewise, a "saucer" probably once meant something that held sauce, but do we ever think of that?

Dinner with Whoever.

The other day I was thinking, if I had to pick 3 people, living or dead, real or fictional, to have dinner with, I would pick -

1) Lorenzo Valla
2) Tom Paine

-and-

3) Origen

- though I don't think my Latin or Greek would be good enough to talk with Lorenzo Valla or Origen, so we'd probably have to write shit down for each other, which wouldn't be very fun.

Also, no women on my list!

4 things that happened on the recent visit of my one Dutch friend’s one Dutch friend, who is now also my friend (IV of IV): Martinis.

Because his flight was cancelled, we ended up going out to the martini lounge, and he brought his (female) friend who lives on the subway line going out to the airport, who he was staying with.

I got to the martini lounge a bit early, though, only to discover that the Swinger couple I know were sitting at the bar with friends, and when I went up to say hi, the Swinger Lady immediately hopped off her seat and hugged me and was like, “Oh, it is so great to see you here!” and introduced me to all her friends, saying “Isn’t he so cute? I love him!” after introducing me to each one.

Then, when I sat down next to them, she was asking me how the after-party for the famous sex advice columnist was that I had gone to the other week.

(He had been in town for a lecture and I had seen in the free city newspaper that there was an after-party where he’d be making an appearance at a local club that night, so I texted a shitload of friends and my one friend with the cat said she’d go, which she did, and she brought along a letter of hers he’d published years ago to get signed by him, but another friend who I’d texted invited me to stop through a movie night earlier that same evening put on by people related to the sex documentary series... It was at the apartment of the one guy who had worked for a nationwide sex magazine and was now starting a website that was like Facebook for kinky people, and the Swingers had been there, and some other people, including the BDSM activist who was the original organizer of the series, who’s back in town and working on developing scripts for role-playing games, and some friends of the host, who when I’d talk to them and be like, “So how do you know him?”, they would hem and haw and say things like “Through work” or “Through friends”, which I took to mean through massive orgies... One was this done-up, slightly fat but not unattractive Chinese girl with a really tough accent to understand, and she was telling me and the museum coordinator of the sex documentary series about how sex is all repressed in China, not like in the U.S., so Chinese guys want it just as much as American men but are sneaky about getting it, but here a guy will walk up to you and say, “I like your tits,” which she found liberating.)

So, I told her that the famous sex advice columnist had signed a print-out of a letter that had been sent in by my friend years ago, and he was very gracious and had signed it “Nice to meet you in person,” but otherwise the crowd wasn’t as cool as we had expected, it was just the club’s typical crowd.

“What was the letter on?”, the Swinger Lady was like.

“How women should shave and take care of their pussies if they want cunninlingus, and how guys should have to learn how to pleasure a woman by careful experimentation, since a woman can’t tell them how to do it better, usually, unless she’s experimented with women herselves.”

“Oh!”, the Swinger Lady was like, “That was a whole famous series of letters! I really respected him for starting that discussion up, he started it by saying he was gay and had to turn to his readers for advice on how to eat pussy.”

Then, she added that the best thing she ever learned was to douche yourself with a combo of half mineral water and half hydrogen peroxide 2 hours before you expect to get eaten out, and we talked a while about whether that was healthy, and she said her partner’s brother is a doctor and said it’s fine.

And, since she and her partner with there with 3 friends and we were wrapped around the corner of a bar, we were rather far away from each other, and had to shout out that entire conversation.

After it ended and there was a slight pause, her older (gay) friend turned to me and was like, “So what do you do?”

“Oh,” I was like, “I’m a Ph.D. student down at [---] and I’m studying [---]”

“No,” he was like, “I meant for before sex.”

Right around that time, my one Dutch friend’s other Dutch friend, who is now also my friend, and his friend he was staying with, showed up, and they joined the group and we all drank a few martinis and talked...

Later, when the Swinger Lady was pretty hammered, she was shouting to me down the bar how she hoped that the sex documentary series would screen a film on bestiality, since it turned her on.

I mentioned the infamous Linda Lovelace short film, and she got all serious and inward-focused and turned on, and was like, “Oh, I’ve seen that,” and then she snapped out of it a little and, still looking a bit aroused, was like, “You know, a lot of people’s first sexual experience is with animals. Mine was at the age of 12, when a dog licked my pussy. I didn’t know what it exactly was at the time, except that I liked it.”

After that conversation faded out, we talked more, and I guess my friend talked with her some about Dante for some reason, and when the Swinger Lady and her partner and her friends went to leave, she got up and came over to give all of us hugs, and she whispered in his ear that it was great talking to him and that when he had said that Dante was dark and sexy, that she agreed, and hearing him say that had turned her on.

4 things that happened on the recent visit of my one Dutch friend’s one Dutch friend, who is now also my friend (III of IV): Cancelled Flight.

When my one Dutch friend’s one Dutch friend, who is now also my friend,’s flight was cancelled due to weather and he was rescheduled to a flight early the next morning, my one Dutch friend advised him that now was the perfect time to locate a beautiful woman who lives somewhere in the vicinity of the airport.

NEWS FLASH - Another Cold.

I got up with another cold on Sun. morning.

When I got up on Fri., I felt a little stuffed and used my neti pot, and a little chunk of greenish brown had come out from deep inside, but otherwise I was fine all day, and all day Sat., until I was at a party and felt very tired all of a sudden towards midnight.

I was sniffling all the way home and took some NyQuil so I could get to sleep, and woke up with a dry sore throat and a big head full of dried brown snot, and the same happened today again. This sucks...

I realized I haven't been this sick since I posted that -

PERFECT HEALTH
is my
NATURAL
STATE OF BEING

- note on my mirror years and years ago, so I made up a new one and put it on my mirror yesterday... I had forgot to put up the sign again after my move. I wonder if I had done that, if I would be sick right now.

4 things that happened on the recent visit of my one Dutch friend’s one Dutch friend, who is now also my friend (II of IV): Coffee.

When we went to get coffee afterwards, we were talking more academic stuff – he studies a topic close to mine, but specializes in a different period, so it’s always helpful to get his take on things – and I was realizing I was asking this serious question that must have sounded jack-assy and pretentious to anyone sitting around us, if they were listening (something like, “So do you think that previous treatments of the Complutensian polyglot bible have failed to fully appreciate its apologetic stance toward the text of the Vulgate?”).

Anyhow, I then added that I had been thinking that when I was reading this otherwise good book I had come across, and then found someone had written in the book saying the same thing.

“Did you check the book out of the university library?”, my friend was like.

When I said yes, he was like, “Was it written in pencil?”.

Then, when I said yes again, he was like, “I think it was me.”

4 things that happened on the recent visit of my one Dutch friend’s one Dutch friend, who is now also my friend (I of IV): Lunch.

My one Dutch friend’s one Dutch friend, who is now also my friend, was in town right before Thanksgiving for research and to see people before catching a flight to spend Thanksgiving with my one Dutch friend and his wife and baby son. So, we caught up the day before Thanksgiving at lunch downtown...

First, he suggested we go to this restauarant that Pakistani cabdrivers go to, which is only a 15 minute short walk from the most chi-chi part of town (which is where the library he was doing research at was located), right on the outskirts of an industrial section where there are a few storefronts tucked away under overhead railroad tracks and amidst vacant lots. We walked up to the restaurant door and there were a ton of people inside in white robes and those little white cappy things, but the door wouldn’t open, so we walked to one side of the building and saw fence stretching out forever around the block, and then to the other side of the building and saw fence stretching forever around the block, so we went back to the door to try it again, only to have one of the serious-faced Muslim-dressed guys inside raise his hand and do a “go around!” motion with his hand.

So, we went around the fence to the right, and eventually there was a gap to a parking lot filled with nothing but 20+ cabs, and a small entrance in the back of the building that we went into... There was a pile of free Pakistani community newspapers right inside the foyer, as well as a bulletin board full of handwritten ads asking for taxidrivers. Once past the foyer, you were right in front of the main counter, where there were two old Pakistani guys in front of a magic marker board with like 7 or 8 different dishes of the day written up there (though no prices), and behind them you could see into the kitchen, and there were a few brown guys (Pakistanis? Mexicans?) slaving over giant silver pots on the stove. Me and my one Dutch friend’s Duthc friend, who is now also my friend, decided to get this goat-rice thing, which they ladled out from pots in the back immediately, and served up on this huge plate along with a bowl of some yogurt sauce and a small plate of giant slivers of chopped raw onions and a few lime wedges, to mix and squeeze into the rice.

There were like at least 15 people in the restaurant, all male, and one of them was getting up to leave as we sat down and came up to us and was like, “Welcome, enjoy, the food here is very good!”, but as we sat down in a booth and were about to eat, pretty much everyone got up and left, and me and my friend just started looking at each other, since it was very weird.

Then, the counter guy behind the counter just burst out into the call-to-prayer, and we realized that everyone must have gone to an adjacent room where they had mats and could pray at noontime...

The food was great, but my one friend said he liked it when they were in the location across the street, which was smaller and little more than a shack with insulation, and had 3 clocks up – one labelled with the name of our city, the second with “MADRAS”, and the third with “MECCA”.