Friday Morning Latin Lesson, Vol XLII

I hate to continue being the Debby Downer (apologies to all those Debbies out there...never mind, they're too busy in Dallas to read this blog), but since today is Eric's funeral, I thought maybe I should at least continue to be respectful. However, as much as it pains those of us who have lost a friend and loved on, we must continue on. Life continues. And part of life means the useless highly interesting study of a language that has been swallowed by history.

In a time like this, I would normally go into a long, boring highly interesting description of Roman funerary practices. However, they were...well, funerary. Suffice it to say, the Romans believed in an afterlife, even in the pre-Christian days. They also believed in ghosts. In fact, the Latin word for ghost is lemur, lemures (pronounced "lay-myoor, lay-myoor-ace"; ghost, ghosts). Linnaeus, he of binomial taxonomy fame, chose the name "lemur" for the prosimians found on the island of Madagascar because, like ghosts, you saw lemurs at night. Ha, take that, King Julian.

Okay, all this talk of ghosts and such is sad and more suitable for the end of the month. *sniff, sniff* I smell a Halloween-oriented Latin lesson in the offing! I can feel you all trembling with anticipation.

No, instead of focusing on Roman customs surrounding the dead, I'm heading north and west, to that island filled with those savage Hibernii. Yes, it's true, the Irish are a bit touched in the head, but we love them nonetheless--mostly because they're too short to do serious harm. Aw, little red-headed savages, swinging away feebly against the air while we hold our palms on their foreheads.

Dammit, did I get off track? That's so out of character for me.

Anyway, we all know how the Irish deal with death: they lose to Michigan! Wait, wrong Irish. Rather than focus on the sadness of the loss of a friend or family member, the Irish celebrate the life of the individual who has shuffled off this mortal coil. And they do that in the only way the Irish know how to celebrate: raucous drinking.

Now that I've worked through the mourning and the sadness, it's time to focus on the happy memories that my friend brought me. And, to that end, I say:

"Vivimus et memoramus, gaudeamus igitur."
Pronounced: "Wee-wee-moose ett may-mohr-ah-moose, goh-day-ah-moose eeg-eet-oor."

Translation in the hovertext; and, yes, Eric was a fan of comics and anime, so I thought this cartoon conveyed both the intent of celebrating his life and honoring his memory.

I wanted to take a moment and thank each of you for your thoughts and prayers and support through the past few days. It's been terribly sad and, despite the fact that we've never hung out (with a few exceptions), your words of love and support have been very much appreciated.

When one writes like that, pouring raw emotion into words, trying to capture the feeling, it's difficult for the author. On one hand, you know that others have felt this same pain and loss, and yet, while you are writing you try to capture your hurt, as if you're the only one, as if the loss is yours and yours alone. I truly appreciate how all of you lent me a virtual shoulder to lean on and handed out some sweet lovin' hug action. Thank you.

Tomorrow, things will return to a more normal atmosphere. Well, as normal as I let it get around here...

Pop the Champagne! It's Celebration Time!

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Totally Blowing Shit Up Tuesdays: For Adrienne

In case you missed it last Thursday, tucked into the tail end of the post about some phone sex gone awry, Adrienne became my 100th stalker follower. She even announced it with a little bit of confetti and fireworks.

And, I say, that's not nearly enough. For 100 stalkers followers, we need to throw some kind of celebration (I realize there is 101 now; sorry, Jeney, had you been a day earlier, all this hubbub would be for you). So, today's post is dedicated to Adrienne, who is my 100th stalker follower and for Gwen, who was my very first stalker follower, and for the 98 other folks who have given me their time, attention and patience. Oh, and we'll include Jeney, so that she doesn't feel left out, and because I hear she has excellent taste in college football teams.

(Yes, I know I have 102 followers, but I'll be dealing with 102 in his own, special way. Plus, 102 signed on after I had originally written this.)

So, let's shoot off some fireworks!

Thank you, Canada, for giving us Sue Johanson, Poobomber, and that awesome fireworks display we just saw.

One thing that has always fascinated me was the colors of the fireworks. In general chemistry, we always did labs where you take a salt solution of a certain metal, dip a copper wire in it, and then burn the wire to see what color the flame of the Bunsen burner turns. It wasn't until I was a junior and was slogging through quantitative analysis that I made the connection between flame absorption spectrometry and the colors of fireworks. In case you were curious, I looked up the recipes and found this site. Accordingly, they list the colors and the metals used to create said colors.

Red comes from lithium and strontium salts. Orange comes from calcium. Golden hues come from burning iron along with charcoal. Yellow comes from sodium (this I knew, thanks to Dr. Awesome back in undergrad). Barium gives you green and copper gives you blue (which, for chemists, is a big, fat 'duh'). And for the silvery white, you can burn either magnesium or aluminum. Mixing the various amounts of the salts will give you different hues and shades of your desired colors.

So, there's all you ever didn't wanted to know about fireworks and their colors. How about some confetti? Or maybe just household items made to look like fireworks? I'll go with the latter, if only for the presence of Peeps.


I cannot tell you how happy I am that Peeps decided to expand their line of awesomeness to year-round. Something about the orange sugar they use to coat the marshmallow pumpkins makes them twice as delicious--and gut-bustingly awesome--at Halloween.

I Was Right

Do you guys know what I like? Well, yes, boobs. And butts. Oh, and legs. Don't forget college basketball. And bacon. Sweet, sweet bacon. *drools Homer-style*

Sorry, got off course. Helmsman! You're fired.

While I like all of the aforementioned--some, a little too much *slaps belly*--one of the things I like most is being right. If you go back and read the last paragraph of my previous post, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I'm going to backtrack a little here. When my sister died in September of 1997, I was a sophomore in college. Now, I went to a small, midwestern Catholic college where the community was fairly tight-knit. Yeah, there were some douchebags who went to school there, but most of the people there were good, kindhearted people. I learned this the "hard" way. My aunt and uncle got the call on that Tuesday morning with the news about my sister and they sped off to St. Joe's to pick me up and bring me back home. My school was only a few miles up the road from Purdue, where my cousin Scott attended. My aunt and uncle had often said they might pop in to visit me on their way to visit Scott, so I thought nothing of it when I saw them in the hallway in front of the cafeteria. Of course, a couple minutes later, I knew why they had come.

Being that it was a small school and fairly tightly-knit, and that the news was delivered to me in the cafeteria, people knew something was up. I finally found the strength to drag myself to the computer lab to email my professors and let them know I would be gone for a few days--bawling the whole way, despite the fact that I have this illusion about myself that I'm the emotional rock that others can cling to during a storm. Apparently, while I was in the computer lab, the news spread as to why I had been reduced to tears like that and...wow...the caring outreach that was offered by people I hardly knew and--guiltily--didn't really like struck me hard. Every person who came up and offered kind words or a hug or offered to help in any capacity caused me to choke up once more. In fact, I'm a little choked up now.

The reason why I tell you this is because I had the exact same reaction whenever I got a new email telling me that one of you, dear readers, had the same effect. I knew it would. I knew you all would be absolutely as kind and wonderful as you were. And still, it choked me up to no end.

Thank you. Thank you all. That's all I can say. I would go back and thank each and every one of you personally...but let's be honest here. You know I'm lazy. Plus, it'd be really boring to say "Thank you" 30 times. Just, please, know that I am eternally grateful to all of you, but, best of all...I was right about you all. And that made me happy.

The funeral for little John McMillan was today. My wife read at the funeral, and she said it was one of the hardest thing's she's ever had to do. Couple that with the fact that she is coming off a nasty cold, and her voice is pretty hoarse, to the point where she sounded like a teenage boy going through puberty. I told her if things got too bad, she could just bust out with "When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange." For some strange reason, she declined...not sure what was going on there. I guess the funeral was beautiful and awful at the same time--beautiful because it was so well done, and awful because he was a baby. So, now we're all going to begin the coping process knowing that he's in a better place now where he doesn't have to suffer any longer.

So, once again, thank you all. You're the best friends a blogger could hope to find and please know that your kind words and prayers and thoughts were received warmly and that they made me feel better over the past couple of days. Tomorrow, I'll try to get things back to normalcy around here.