Taomeow

I vote for The Master and Margarita. Now I may be repeating myself since it came up before, in which case ignore the rest: I don't know if the latest translation (which is said to be better than the prior ones) can do it for you at all, hoping it's good enough to make an impression. For me, it's one of the few books I've re-read -- I usually don't since there's still so many unread ones! -- and not once but at least twice. I read it for the first time when I was 17 -- and then a decade or so later it was a completely different book, and then another decade later, a different book again. I don't know many that are like that. Most books you love in your younger years, you try to re-read later and find awful! -- at least in my case it's often like that.

One extremist in this respect was Umberto Eco who collected a home library of 50,000 tomes and couldn't possibly have read all of them.

Unpleasant I'm sure, but not dangerous (despite that Godfather vibe.) Probably wouldn't have been a huge deal for me -- I prefer to not encourage in myself the shrinking violet/pearl clutching conditioning many women have been subjected to. Besides, in a lifetime of living with cats, this was the first bird a cat of mine ever dragged in. (My grandmother's cat from my childhood did catch birds, but she ate them on the spot.) WIth cats, like with everything in life, you gain some, lose some.

Me too.

My cat, who normally exercises her hunting instincts on insects and Amazon delivery people, moved up the evolutionary ladder yesterday and caught a sparrow. She brought it home unbeknown to me, as she also usually does with June bugs because she's afraid someone might take the bug away from her and let it go. Those green metallic things are built like tanks, and even those that have visible dents on their wings from cat teeth fly away nonchalantly if you remove them from further involuntary games with said cat and take them outside. So when she dragged in the sparrow, I wasn't aware of it until the poor thing was dead, whereupon Monkey put it at my feet and declared, with ear-splitting triumphant meowing, that I won't starve today because she brought me a gift of fresh food. I later discovered feathers all over my bedroom and bathroom -- but I wasn't aware of anything going on there, the murder was committed in complete silence and secrecy. Which reminded me that here a popular brainwashing-induced belief is that cats must only be kept indoors in particular because they kill birds and are a threat to the bird population. All kinds of horrifying figures are typically pulled outta someone's/media's ass to confirm it -- one can can kill a million birds, cause the extinction of a whole species, yada yada. But... over the years, I've been noticing there's scarcely a cat in sight in San Diego, feral or otherwise -- months can go by before you encounter one outdoors -- yet the bird population has been declining. Whereas in June I was in Corfu, Greece, and there were cats upon cats everywhere, nobody's cats, somebody's cats, cats hanging out in the restaurants in hopes of a bite from a patron's plate (I myself fed several every day, and saw some other people do likewise.) Yet there were many, many birds. More birds than what we have. Way more. Here's some Corfu cats I encountered.

Small world! I used to be friends with him on FB. Haven't seen him in ages -- though I don't remember if he somehow gave me a reason to remove him or merely fell through the cracks. I suspect the former, he was messing around with my Sacred subjects or something, taking on interpretations of Taoist Sciences without the requisite qualifications. And now let's complify the above: Metamorphoses of orthodoxies are not interchangeable with orthomorphoses of metadoxies.

It used to not be considered rude even to come visit friends without calling. And gen Z etiquette experts are reported to have a new way to answer the phone. They cancelled Hello, instead they just pick up and keep silent waiting for the calling party to start speaking. Now that's rude far as I'm concerned.

I'm not sure the heading is quite correct -- e.g there's an exact English equivalent for #18, Schadenfreude, to wit, epicaricacy -- though it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily, which is why English speakers tend to know the German word but not the English one for this phenomenon. Perhaps there's more, haven't looked at all of these closely. #21, the Russian toska, which can be mistaken for depression, is not the same -- depression is a lingering state, while toska may refer to either a lingering state or a fleeting mood of the moment, might describe a boring meeting or a dull movie, and with the preposition po, the state of missing someone or something badly -- a person or an animal, a place, a time, or one's native land. In this last case it becomes exactly synonymous with nostalgia. Depression doesn't begin to cut it for any of these.

and who's to stop me from deriving "Overcomplexicate" from it.

Too late... he already started a thread titled "Complify." Not "Complicate," mind you -- to complicate is too simplified for him. No sir. "Complify."

I think it's a hexagon. A popular shape in nature, a building block for many things. Benzene is structured something like this... And beehive cells: And of course all snowflakes.

Buttons were originally only decorations, and from the moment they were invented it took humans five thousand years to invent the buttonhole and start using buttons as fasteners. So buttons are simple enough, while buttonholes had to wait for a genius who would be the first one to see their true potential. I suppose this genius was a woman, perhaps a mother mending a hole in her son's shirt and suddenly putting two and two together. I can see her squint at the hole on one side of the shirt, notice that a decorative button, by sheer accident, is right across, on the other side... the explosion of Knowing in her head as acute and indisputable as any revelation, any enlightenment... koan solved, the periodic table aligning its elements in neat rows, E = mc2, the benzene ring looks like this: and the button fits in the hole

One version I've heard asserts that the hut stands on the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Its front faces the clearing in the forest -- the world of the living, and its back, the deep dark forest that's the world of the dead. Baba Yaga, according to this version, is someone straddling two worlds, an intermediary, sometimes a guide who can send visitors toward life or toward death. Sort of like the Greek goddess Proserpina (Percephone to the Romans). And of course the hut is able to turn in either direction, like a revolving door of life and death. So when Baba Yaga comes back after visiting the world of the living, she commands the hut to turn its front to her so she can enter. And then apparently she turns it around again, so when a visitor comes who wants to come in or to talk to Yaga, they have to verbally command the hut to turn its front to them. Here's an episode from a 1964 children's movie where Baba Yaga and the visitor, Ivan, who's seeking her help in finding his abducted bride, get into an argument about which way they want the hut to turn. (Don't attempt to use the AI generated subtitles, they are total gibberish -- and the scene is clear enough without the translation):

Advice = add vice? and... what does a Vice President preside over??