Santiago (de Compostela) is a town of about 100,000 people in the northern Spanish province of Galicia. Santiago is the local Galician evolution of Vulgar Latin Sanctu Iacobu or “Saint James”.
“According to a tradition that can be traced back at least to the 12th century, when it was recorded in the recently stolen Codex Calixtinus, Saint James decided to return to Holy Land after preaching in Galicia. There he was beheaded, but his disciples managed to get his body to Jaffa, where they found a marvelous stone ship, which miraculously conduced the apostle’s body and the disciples to Iria Flavia, back in Galicia. There, the disciples asked for permission to earthen the body to the local pagan queen, Lupa (‘She-wolf’); she, annoyed with the newcomers, decided to the deceive them, sending them to pick a pair of oxes she allegedly had by the Pico Sacro, a local sacred mountain where a dragon dwelt, hoping that the dragon would kill the Christians., but at the sign of the cross, the dragon exploded. Then, the disciples marched to pick the oxes, which were really raging bulls which the queen used to punish her enemies; but at the sign of the cross the bulls calmed down, and subjected to a yoke, carried the apostle’s body to what now is Compostela.” — Wikipedia
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Lame Night Jokes
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says she has dirt on Newt Gingrich, but so far she’s keeping her lips sealed — because that’s how the last surgeon left them.
A new website just came out that’s designed to calculate how long it takes Mitt Romney to earn your salary. So from now on, whenever Mitt Romney is running late, he can call there and say, “I’ll be there in five teachers.”
President Obama gave his annual State of the Union address last night in Washington, D.C. Did the Supreme Court justices really need to wear their robes to that?
There’s a new episode of “American Idol” on tonight. Tonight’s auditions were held in aspen. Where else better to find talent than a snowbound town that’s 400 miles by icy road to the nearest city?
Facebook users probably know, in September, the site unveiled the Facebook profile page, which they call “timeline.” Or more fittingly, “waste of timeline.”
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This always cracks me up. From Obsidian Wings.
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Aurora Borealis from the last solar flare.
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Best spam comment of the year so far: “See baby eat. See baby burp. See baby turn over. See baby make moral judgments based on a congenital code that enables him or her to distinguish right from wrong?”
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Look out, Newt: “Narcissists, by definition, have an inflated sense of self. And while maintaining an unwaveringly high opinion of one’s self sounds nice, new research suggests that narcissists are actually more stressed than others, putting them at risk for a slew of cardiac diseases.”
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I laughed out loud at “and he quit smoking.”
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More of Elisa’s extremely cool and always interesting perfume talk: “Woody ambers, like synthetic musks and other large aromachemicals, tend to be perceived differently by different noses. Some people are completely anosmic to them, others are highly sensitive. People who are sensitive to woody ambers usually describe them in auditory (high-pitched, screechy) or tactile (spiky, abrasive) terms. Molecules that fall into the “woody amber” category include Karanal and Ambrocenide.”
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How true. One of my pet peeves: “Linguists warn Erard that some self-proclaimed polyglots may say they speak any number of languages, when in fact most of them know only a few grammatical rules, and have only a smattering of ready words and phrases. True polyglots, we are told, find it difficult to say precisely how many languages they speak, since their many languages hover unavoidably at different levels of proficiency. And what does fluency mean? Does an American who has learned Polish as a second language need to be able to pass for a Pole in Warsaw to be considered fluent? As Erard notes, this is a feat very few can manage.”
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“Rectum? Damn near killed him.” (Grade school joke punchline).
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Does anyone really need 36 megapixels?