his business card reads:

raynor ganan
universal philosopher of absolute reality

to my cyber flock: thank you for helping me once again find direction in life by voting in an online poll daddy poll. while i was initially fearful that the trolls on 4chan might start a troll campaign for mother superior, i am as excited as carbonated holy water to add the title, universal philosopher of absolute reality to my many degrees and fake accreditations.

for the record, here is the proper protocol for addressing me (it will stand from now until the rapture):

face to face greeting: your potency
envelope address: most universal philosopher of the most absolutely real, raynor ganan of cantabrigia
letter salutation: his preposterousness, raynor ganan, philosopher
formal closing: your cæsarian majesty’s very humble servant and vassal who kisses the royal hands and feet of your majesty
abbreviations: raynor ganan, u.p.o.a.r.

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many blessings to my spiritual adviser, the most rev. andy sturdevant for guiding me through this long, metaphysical odyssey.

the right reverend raynor

it’s going down like this: a friend is getting married this june and asked me to officiate her ceremony. it turns out that i can become cyber-ordained and—presto loopholio—legally allowed to officiate weddings. so yesterday, i became a reverend of an online, religiously-impartial, deity-indiscriminate, church-styled corporation. finally!

this is where you come in: help me select one of the many titles recognised by my “church”. it will appear on both my ordination certificate AND the wedding program.

your options: [POLL CLOSED]

• angelic messenger
• astro-theologian
• flying Missionary
• lay minister
• life facilitator
• metaphysical teacher
• metropolitan
• minister of dance
• mother superior
• mystic warrior
• professor emeritus
• qoheleth
• the very esteemed
• universal philosopher of absolute reality
• wizard

will i wake up on wednesday as the very esteemed raynor ganan, or raynor ganan the flying missionary? should i finally become a professor emeritus or continue being the minister of dance that i am? i leave my fate in your highly-capable, adequately-moisturized hands.

bonus power: i now have the ability to absolve your sins.

mrs. jack

the above image by john singer sargent is a portrait of boston’s grande dame isabella stewart gardner, here is another:

Mrs. Gardner didn’t drink tea; she drank beer… She didn’t go sleigh-riding; instead, she went walking down Tremont Street with a lion named Rex on a leash.

She gave at-homes at her Beacon Street house and received her guests from a perch in the lower branches of a mimosa tree. Told that “everybody in Boston” was either a Unitarian or an Episcopalian, she became a Buddhist; then when the pleasure of that shock had worn off she became such a High-Church Episcoplaian that her religion differed from Catholicism only in respect to allegiance to the Pope.

Advised that the best people Boston belonged to clubs, she formed one of her own named the “It” Club…Warned that a woman’s social position in Boston might be judged in inverse ratio to her appearance…she picked out her two largest diamonds, had them set on gold wire springs and wore them waving some six inches above her hair like the antennae of a butterfly.

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from: the proper bostonians by cleveland amory (1947).

the roman god of hot wet doo-doo

i don’t like discussing religion on the ragbag because i don’t believe in words that end in -ion. but from time to time i do make an exception. today is one of those times because i just learned about sterculius, the roman god of hot wet doo-doo.

for a poo god to make sense, one must understand that the early romans were deeply agrarian and that feces was then (as it still is all these many years later) a dependable fertilizer. thus, to pray to sterculius was to pray for a bountiful harvest. in fact, there was an entire of pantheon of kooky field gods:

Collina [presided] over the hills, and Vallonia over the valleys. Epona had charge of horses, Bubona of oxen. Seia or Segetra looked to the seed and the springing corn. Runcina was invoked when the fields were to be weeded; Occator, when they were to be harrowed. Sator and Sarritor presided over sowing and raking. Robigus or Robigo was worshiped to avert mildew.

there you have it, the next time that you spot some gnarly mildew in your fraternity house shower stall, drop robigo a quick prayer and hopefully everything will get cleared up in time for your next round of hazing.

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picture: the god sterculius as depicted in an old beavis and butt-head episode.
source: the mythology of ancient greece and italy (1854).

forgotten gods

this pantheon has been reduced to little more than impotent grotesqueries because nobody—not even kooky new age cults—worships these gods anymore. let these forgotten mascots, especially the bulls-conjoined-at-the-penis god, be a case study for the p.r. departments of today’s trendiest religions.

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source: egyptian mythology (1918) by w. max müller

he has 2 and they dangle nicely

as many of you know, i spent my formative years living in a trappist priory. while i am no longer affiliated with that order or the religion that it practices, i am still besieged from time to time with mnemonic flashes of arcane catholic lore. take yesterday for example when a friend of mine who restores antique furniture showed me his chaise percée, and all i could think of was the pope and his dangling holy testicles.

according to catholic rumormill, after the [potentially] mythical pope joan started giving birth to a baby during a papal mass and everyone realised that they had a reverse crying game situation on their hands—the college of cardinals had to devise some scheme to authenticate the masculinity of the next pope »

All subsequent popes were then supposedly subjected to an examination whereby, having sat on a dung chair containing a hole called sedia stercoraria, a cardinal had to reach up and establish that the new pope had testicles, before solemnly announcing “Duos habet et bene pendentes” — “He has two, and they dangle nicely.

while two such papal chairs do exist (one is in the louvre and the other is still in st. peter’s basilica), nobody—not even snopes dot com—can say whether or not this comically absurd practice is true, untrue or mega-true. 

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see also: deuteronomy 23:1

the flag for constructed languages

since we are on the topic of the tower of babel, i should point out that because of its association with language, the tower features prominently on the (æsthetically pleasing) flag of constructed languages. apparently, a right of passage of a fabricated language is having genesis 11:1-9 (the tower of babel section) translated into it.

while the ziggurat/devo hat icon is totally badass and the colour fills a conspicuous void of purple among flags of the world, i find it kind of ridiculous that a concept this abstract merits its own flag. where is the flag for binomial nomenclature? what colour is the flag of trigonometric functions? who gets to fly the trochaic pentameter flag?

for wunderkammer: an “in god we rust” quarter—a die error on some of the kansas state quarters led to this amusing happenstance.

if you’re havin’ algorithm problems, i feel bad for you son

think your latest algorithm problem has got the best of you? consider the formulae and tables needed to determine the exact sunday on which to observe easter. this calculation is so convoluted that the very act of forecasting the date was given its own name—computus—and was considered by many to be the most significant calculation of the middle ages.

for you to engage in computus requires that you perform a series of complex calculations that factor in the (idealized (ie. integerized)) cycles of three heavenly bodies—the earth, moon and sun—through duodecimal and sexagesimal numbering systems and various other (religious and time) constraints initiated by the likes of hindus, jews, christians, sumerians, babylonians, greeks, and romans over the course of several millennia. even the great carl friedrich gauss° had a hard time nailing down the formula in the 1800’s when computers were only able to run windows 3.1.

for much more, including what the above image is all about, there is wikipedia.