Happy Birthday Mrs. Radtke!

The thing is, I would probably not even remember it's my first grade teacher's birthday today were we not friends on Facebook. Obviously Mrs. Radtke's older than me, though not as much older than me as my then seven-year-old brain thought, whatever that was! When my own parents were I'm guessing ten to fifteen years older than those of most of my friends, it's easy to see an incredible age gap between yourself and any adults. And as Mrs. Radtke's the only elementary school teacher of mine I hear anything of on a regular basis, it helps to know I haven't totally dropped out of sight, and neither has she.


Larvae


The ancient Roman name for evil spirits and ghosts. Suetonius says that the Larva of the Emperor Caligula was seen after his death.


[From meaning a spectre, the word came to mean a mask and then a "disguised" or masked insect.]




I finished a book that's been sitting on my shelf for years last night. You'd think I would do a better job with that since mythology's one of my favorite subjects. I didn't start reading a lot of Greek and Roman until second grade, and I wasn't pushed into it like my kids may feel I do -- this is why I ask them to bring home books they read at school for their Reading At Home. A lot of what I read isn't really that hard just because it's mine, but it's a hard road to hoe to convince them of that. Though Sarah IS getting into mythology; we have one of her class assignments where she had to choose a Greek god of goddess as a school mascot and offer why. She chose Aphrodite, appropriate.


Lemnos


. . . The women of the island offended the goddess Aphrodite by neglecting her due rites and she, to punish them, gave them an offensive odor. Their husbands neglected them, finding more odoriferous bedmates in some captured Thracian women. The Lemnian women then murdered their husbands and their race would have died out had not the lusty -- and, apparently, unfinicky -- Argonauts come along and replenished the population. [It is astonishing that the cosmetic industry has not exploited this incident in their advertising.]




Oh, what was the book? Yes, Bergen Evans' Dictionary of Mythology, copyright 1970. SBN 44001979125 Although the majority of the book's given over to Greek, Roman, Arthurian, Norse, and a few figures each that you've probably heard of if never thought of as mythical -- that is, as useful for explaining how a particular people or culture saw the world as working. The longest entry hands down goes to Loki (Thor's brother, the trickster, kills Heimdall while he kills him at Ragnarok) and the author can't help intruding with some insights from his own classical education. Not required to enjoy this, even though it's a dictionary, but I couldn't help laughing sometimes!


Loki

The Norse god of evil and destruction. By birth Loki was not one of the Aesir but a Jotun, but a strange Jotun in that he was handsome and well-mannered. So much so that Odin (presumably before he had acquired wisdom from YGGDRASIL, MIRMIR's head, and the VOLVA) adopted him as a blood brother. And this, by Old Norse custom, made him a full member of the Aesir and rendered him free from attack by the other gods no matter what he did. And he was full of malicious mischief and was basically evil.


And that's the first paragraph of said entry! Last night the kids were at my in-laws' house for me to pick up this time! We got home, had cereal for dinner (hey, we're not big cooks) and settled in for our reading for the night and got everyone to bed on time. Tang is still my friend for I have a little cough that will not die -- besides, I love the taste! -- and this morning before getting the kids to school Sarah asked to use my phone to text Martha. She didn't tell me this part and got mad when I looked at my phone where she told her mom that she was feeling stomach and head pains and got Jeffrey to get mad at me too for they feel they can't tell Mom anything without me finding out ...


Don't you think I ought to know?


David