Sometimes when you google something you get this thing where several inquiries show up before the sites. If you click on them you get some short answers and that's where I got that Lutherans and Methodists did lent, although I think it also came up in a wiki article. Maybe it's one of those things where it is somewhere in the doctrine but nobody bothers to do much with it, like those laws that Beagles wants to see enforced or repealed.
Wiki agrees with Beagles that 40 days is a number the bible throws around and likely in the day when the bible was being written it was just a way for saying a long time. The palms that accompany palm Sunday are the ones that are burned and go on foreheads on Ash Wednesday. The connection between lent and Easter remains nebulous to me. I expect it is something that got tacked on in those early councils where they outted the heretics.
Inspecting my paczki I was a little disappointed it appeared to be just another jelly doughnut, but upon eating it revealed an unexpected smooth and hearty texture and the filling (lemon I think) was also of a pleasing smooth and substantial texture. Overall very nice, but I don't see what the fanaticism is all about. And indeed it is more of a Polish thing, though I often saw the Polish/Bohemian appellation attached to it. We Bohemians ever exist in the shadow of the Poles because there are so damn many more of them.
Somehow The Princess Bride made its way into my Netflix queue. I had heard the name before and garnered that it was well-liked and likely some kind of classic, but I did not like it all. Well who outside of pre-teen girls would like it? It was just a fairy tale with some little jokes mildly pointing fun at the genre to presumably give the adults a chuckle. Right from the start I knew I wouldn't like it, but wasn't sure why, but slowly it came to me, Disney.
You knew nothing bad was going to happen. The good would be rewarded and the bad punished and there was no real suspense when the good guys were in trouble because you knew they would come out unscathed. Well there are a lot of movies like that, but Disney has kind of taken it to an art, everything is so stereotyped and bloodless while the whole is infused with this treacly goodness. Ugh.
I knew nothing of kid's lit before I began subbing. The little libraries were crammed with books and to my surprise many of them were pretty good, but when it came time for me to read to them and I let them choose a book it was all too often a Disney book.
Every now and then the kids on Homan Avenue would get together to trade comics. We were savvy enough to look for that Approved by the Comics Code rectangle in the upper right and if it wasn't there then that comic immediately went up in value. Comics used to be better, but now they weren't so good. Hansel and Gretel was so much better when the kids ended up in the oven than when they tricked the witch and she ended up there. Hum, internet research reveals that maybe the kids shoved the witch into the oven even in Grimm's version. Well even then it would have been better if the kids had ended up in it and the witch had a hearty meal.
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