MuseBlog

This is an experiment: a thread with required reading, Huston Smith’s book The World’s Religions (known in earlier editions as The Religions of Man). If you really can’t find Smith’s book, we’ll accept The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions as a substitute. It’s not very good, though.

For the background to this thread, see https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=349.

Now discussing: Hinduism.

Samantha Sordyl’s friend Pat Dahl has agreed to come on board the blog and talk about your ideas for a Muse movie. He works in Hollywood (in TV, but knows a lot about movies) and has read Attack of the Smart Pies.

(For those who came in late, planning and lobbying for a Muse movie is Cedar’s big project. You can read more about it at Muse Movie? and Muse Movie? Part 2.)

It’s been almost a year since we started the last thread on this topic, and the fans are getting restless. Here you go.

(Suggested by Axa.)

Version 2006.3 is ancient, and FantasyFan says she feels the need to rant. Rant away, one and all–carefully, of course.

Two pies in every face! A trebuchet in every garage! He’s a candidate whose time at last (alas) has come.

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves, quoth the raven, “Nevermore.” A continuation of the poems and songs thread because Kuai Zi Angel Pentatonikk asked. A place for your creations or others’.

So much for what you were going to read. What have you read, and how did you like it? Tell the world!

Tired of the standard catch phrases? Help is at hand. For centuries, English speakers (mostly young ones) have invented new ways to express useful concepts (mostly “good” and “bad”). Here’s a place to try to squeeze new life out of those bygone idioms, or to invent new ones.

(Gwendolyn of the Eastern Seas deserves credit for this totally funky-fresh thread.)

It’s been three months since v. 2006.2. So here’s yet another chance to find out what other Musers think about anything you feel like asking about.

Closed to comments; continued on v. 2006.4.

Lewis Carroll’s Mock-Turtle called it “drawling, stretching, and fainting in coils” (drawing, sketching, and painting in oils). How many MBers are artists? What are your favorite media and implements? Any technical suggestions? Here’s a place to spill it all.

This is the opposite of a random thread. Once a topic is chosen, posts must stay on the topic until someone decides to change it, and a GAPA agrees. GAPAs will zap as necessary to keep things on track.

NEW TOPIC:
Architecture again
Birds
Soccer
Architecture
Plants
Origami and Paper Folding
Musicals
Camp
The May/June 2006 issue
Sheer Joy
It starts at Comment 1.

…on Wednesday, June 21, at 7:26 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. So saith the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Irish poet, 1865-1939.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

More about Yeats at http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/

Skipper Nancy’s idea for a thread. Is it a Good Idea? Time will tell.

Thanks to Gwendolyn of the Eastern Seas and Jadestone for suggesting this thread.

Love him or loathe him, he’s a huge landmark on our imaginative landscape. So break out the tantalus and gas up the gasogene. The game is afoot!

Reports from Towel Day celebrants throughout the galaxy — at Ebeth’s request.

While people finish the required reading for the World Religions thread, here’s a place where MuseBloggers can warm up by talking about their own religions or other religions they’ve experienced.

A forum for practicing archaic English, foreign languages, and other off-the-beaten-track forms of communication. The original Coy Woodnesse thread may be worth a look.

(Coy woodnesse means “quiet madness” in Middle English, the version of our language spoken about 600 years ago.)

Useful resources (additions welcome!):

Accents to paste in:
à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ù ú û ü ¿ ¡

“Chaucer’s Middle English” site at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Librarius has another Middle English glossary and a load of information about Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales

There’s an admission fee for this thread: to post, you must have read at least one chapter of Huston Smith’s book The World’s Religions (known in earlier editions as The Religions of Man), and preferably the whole thing. Here’s why:

• It’s a good book–fair, readable, and full of fascinating information. In a word, Muselike.
• It’s a topic that most people care about but don’t know much about.
• It’s something they don’t teach in school.

Suggestion: read the introduction, then skip to the chapter about your own religion, if any. See if Smith gets it right. Then read the rest. You’ll want to.

*** NOTE (22 May): Some MBers say they’re having trouble finding Smith’s book. For them (and others who find Smith’s book hard to follow), we’ll accept The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions as a substitute.

It may take a while for discussion to get started on this thread, but that’s fine. What are summers for?

Other possibly useful sources of information: The Cartoon History of the Universe; and Wikipedia, for example,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Society_of_Friends (Quakers)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam

Copper Bigfoot’s idea. She says:

I like Perals Before Swine, Foxtrot, and Mother Goose and Grimm.

Mother Goose and Grimm is hard to type out…. anywoof, I loved how they made fun of the fact that the new nintendo is going to be called “Wii” pronounced “Wee”

An experiment: the opposite of a random thread. Once a topic is chosen, posts must stay on the topic until people someone agree decides to change it. GAPAs will zap as necessary to keep things on track.

(Thanks to Pink Stalking Penguin of Penzance and Purple Panda for the idea for this thread.)

Architecture
Plants
Origami and Paper Folding
Musicals
Camp
The May/June 2006 issue
Sheer Joy
It starts at Comment 208.

Idea by Emogrl, who says she has 713 theories of her own. Not all at once, please.

Gwendolyn had something to do with the inception of this thread, too, but we’re too lazy to go back and find out exactly what.

It’s in this week’s issue of that other magazine several MuseBloggers like. What do you think of the editors’ choices? What would a Muse 100 look like?

(Thanks to Erato for suggesting this thread.)