This is about the best parody I've ever seen!

Regarding the Pronunciation of my Name

 Morgen le Fay by Mari-Na

When I first decided to change my name, I chose the spelling as M-O-R-G-A-I-N-E  because I wanted the numerology to work with my birth name.  I decided to pronounce it "MOR-gun" however.  Over the years many people have pronounced it "mor-GANE" with a long 'A.' I have recently stopped correcting them, figuring that they were probably right.
I recently came across some validation though, that my way of pronouncing it is correct. The following is from an article by SCA-dian Heather Rose Jones. In short, Morgaine is how the French spelled 'Morgen' (as in 'Morgen Le Fey') and they pronounced it "Mor-gen." It has no connection to the male name 'Morgan.'

Morgen And Geoffrey Of Monmouth
Now we come to the Great Confusion. Geoffrey of Monmouth was a historical writer in the 12th century. He took a number of traditional historical tales and "dressed them up" for new audiences. One of the things he did was to provide names for a large number of characters that apparently had been left unnamed in previous versions of the stories. Without going into the details, we can determine that Geoffrey took these names from a variety of sources. Sometimes he used names that were being used in Britain at that time. Other times, he borrowed names from written sources that had once been used, but which he didn't recognize. And there are a number of clear examples where he mangled those names, either through ignorance or indifference to their original form and meaning. A characteristic case is that of the name Guendoleu, a man's name from early Welsh poetry. Geoffrey not only misread it as Guendolen but used it for a female character. [Hutson]
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the first stories that describe the Arthurian character we now call "Morgen le Fay", who first appears in his "Vita Merlini" ("The Life of Merlin,") written in the 12th century. Geoffrey calls the character Morgen, and identifies her as the chief of nine sisters who preside over the "isle of apples", i.e., Avalon. [Bromwich] Although it is possible to see a motivation for using this name in the "sea/Mor" connection, there is no reason to assume -- based on many of his other choices -- that he had any particular motivation at all. And while it is possible to extrapolate from the fact that the Irish cognate Muirgen was used for both men and women, and hypothesize that the Welsh Morgen may also have been in ordinary use for both men and women, we have no direct evidence of this. Given the example of Guendoleu/Guendolen we have no reason to believe that such a consideration would have been important to Geoffrey.
It is almost certain that Geoffrey knew the name Morgen from written sources rather than from hearing it used. At his time, the pronunciation would have been "MO:R-yen" and based on other examples in his work, the names he was likely to have heard spoken are rendered more phonetically, rather than retaining the conservative Old Welsh spellings. (A typical example of this is the name of a local saint, which Geoffrey renders phonetically as Duvianus, but which would have been Dubianus in the written sources he was using. [Hutson])
Geoffrey's work became the source for virtually all following Arthurian material, so the names he used -- for whatever reason - - were widely perpetuated.
Morgain(e)When Geoffrey's stories and the names within them made their way to France, any possible connection with the original Welsh pronunciation was lost entirely. The French saw the name Morgen and guessed that it would be best represented by Morgain (pronounced "mo:r-ge:n"). This became the standard French spelling of the characters name. [Bromwich] Later, the form Morgaine evolved by analogy with other French women's names ending in -e.

Leaving Facebook

I did it, finally. I permanently deleted my facebook account and am now solely dependent on tumblr for my social networking. The pic below explains why.

Basically, on Facebook people are able to post death threats and hate speech without being taken down - as long as it's against certain groups of people.  There has been much discussion about this on the pagan Facebook pages, and hundreds of people have brought these sites to Facebook's attention, and they are still up. 

I haven't found out much about Tumblr's track record - good or bad - but I'm hoping they'd do a better job of enforcing their own policies regarding calls to genocide.

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UPDATE: I was given a two-week grace period during which I could come back and still keep my old account settings. Sadly, I did come back to Facebook. I have family and other people there that I can't seem to contact any other way.  Finding other ways to protest. Most likely Facebook neither noticed nor cared that I was gone, or why.

The Apricot Tree

Another essay I wrote for my comp class.

I was seven. It was late summer.  I was an only child and my parents and I lived in an old rental house in the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas.  It wasn't exactly “country” I suppose, but compared to the only experience I could remember – that of living on an Air Force base in Germany – it was rural enough.  I spent my days climbing trees and playing in a tree house my dad had built for me: two pieces of leftover paneling nailed onto parallel branches.  The dirt on those dirt roads was fine, like no dirt road I've been on since. It felt soft to my bare feet.

Our house had marvelous, climbable trees all around it. The field on the other side of our driveway was a wonderland. That's where my treehouse was. 

If I wasn't careful, in the summer, I'd wander into that field barefoot and be ensnared in the thorns we called ”stickers.”  They'd be everywhere, and they'd get all over my feet until I was trapped and couldn't move without pain. That was the only unpleasantness of those days though.

There was a little yellow house just up the road from us, owned by the same landlord that rented us our large, gray two-story house that was cheap because of the termites.  One summer it was unoccupied, so the yard was just an addition to my usual playground.

In the front yard of this little house, there was an apricot tree, with branches enticingly low. The apricots had become ripe and were falling on the ground.  I climbed that tree and ate apricots until I was bursting.  I remember clearly the sweet flavor, how the juice rolled off my chin and had to be licked off my fingers. Those days were paradise, and I was strong and free.

I move ahead in my mind to a time eleven years later. I was eighteen and staying with some friends in a little house just down the wash from an old mining ghost town named Jerome, in Arizona. My friends slept late and I woke up early and walked up the dirt backroad to town alone, hoping to get breakfast in one of the little cafes that catered to the tourists and the bikers.  The walk up the mountain was just strenuous enough to build a real appetite by the time I reached the paved road and vertically-designed houses and shops of Jerome.

Much to my dismay I'd forgotten the truth of a small tourist town: nothing opens until ten a.m. I'd woken up way to soon and was starving, walking the empty streets of the most beautiful place on Earth.

The road snakes up the mountain and doubles back upon itself.  Between one level of the road and another are the houses, some four stories tall. The road is so steep that a house may have a door opening on the ground floor, onto a lower level of the street, and another door opening onto the upper street, four stories above. If the mountain were a tree, the houses would be treehouses nestling among its branches, with ladders going from one level to the next, instead of stairs.

City Hall is accessed by concrete steps that wind up past a small park, which is also formed of steps, with green grass and trees and concrete retaining walls holding it up.  One level below City Hall, accessed by broken steps with an iron banister, there grew an apricot tree.

It was late summer, and the fruit was ripe and rich and falling to the ground.  I devoured apricots until I couldn't hold any more.  I think nothing had tasted as good ever before, or ever would again.

Looking back from fifty, I remember the delicious abandonment of those times. I recall the power of my dreams and the way the future was wide open.  Today I sit in the basement of the old house where I live with my husband and my mother-in-law.  I am not alone any more, and the future seems now to hold more limits than possibilities.

And yet, in the backyard is a tiny apricot tree. It's too small to climb, even if I still could. It's too young to bear fruit.  I don't know if apricots will flourish in our North End home.  I hope with all my heart that they will.

Halloween: Fear versus Fun

(Note: This is an essay I wrote for my Comp II Class)

Halloween is not what it used to be. Fewer parents allow their children to go trick-or-treating. The reason for this is that we don’t trust our neighbors anymore, and we certainly don’t trust strangers. Paranoia has ruined Halloween.

I personally have a very broad memory of trick-or-treating, having grown up in various places in the US plus Germany. Every year my friends and I – or my parents when I was little – would go around to neighbors houses in costume and beg for candy. There was always one adult who would ask us to do a trick. We travelled in the neighborhoods where we lived. The streets were always crowded. We ate as much of the candy as we could before getting home, because parents or siblings would lay claim to it after that. Nobody was afraid – well, make-believe afraid perhaps, but not really afraid, not of our neighbors.

Nowadays they have car trick-or-treating in church parking lots. Children are encouraged to get their treats x-rayed before eating any. For the past several years, there have been no children coming down our street, even though we live in a pleasant neighborhood. The few children that still do the traditional trick-or-treating are driven over to Harrison Boulevard by their parents, partly because it is a prosperous neighborhood and known for its abundance, but also because it’s considered, ‘safe.’

Parents worry that their children’s’ costumes are too tight, and they’ll choke, or they’re too loose and they’ll trip. They worry that face masks will make their children blind to moving cars, or that drivers won’t see them. While these concerns are legitimate, it may be that parents are worrying too much and taking the fun out of the holiday.

One reason for the decline in trick-or-treating is the fear that our neighbors will poison or otherwise desecrate the candy that they give us. Apples will have razor blades in them. Candy bars will have pins and needles.

The actual evidence for random adulteration of Halloween candy is virtually nonexistent. A woman in 1964 made some ‘joke’ bags with marked boxes of rat poison in them that she handed out to older teenagers only. No one was hurt. In 1970 a boy died after getting into his uncle’s heroin. The parents put heroin in the candy to draw attention away from the uncle. In 1974, a father poisoned his eight-year-old son by putting cyanide in his candy, and tried to make it look like a random poisoning (Robinson, 2003).

The fear is fueled by certain religious groups and individuals promoting the idea that Satanists (by which they mean also Wiccans and other Pagans) use Halloween as a time to foist their evil schemes upon an unwitting community by randomly poisoning children. Do a web search for “Satanism Halloween” and you’ll see all kinds of testimony about this supposedly happening. As a Wiccan, I can attest that Halloween - or Samhain as we call it – is a major holiday of the year for many Pagan religions, but we have more important rites to attend to than the adulteration of children’s candy.

B. A. Robinson, a writer for Religioustolerance.org, states that, “A sad byproduct of these urban folk tales is that parents develop anxiety over a threat to their children that does not exist, or which exists at a very low level. Many children pick up the fears of their parents. Both end up believing that they live in a society that is far more violent than it really is (2003).”

The reason that we are so willing to believe these urban myths is, I believe, due to the fact that we are more afraid in general twelve months out of the year. We are afraid to let our children play outside alone; we are afraid to let them walk to school. Recently a man sipping coffee near a playground evoked frantic text messages and calls to the police (Rochman, 2012).

So what is to be done? I concur with Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids. “We can kill off Halloween, or we can accept that it isn't dangerous and give it back to the kids. Then maybe we can start giving them back the rest of their childhoods, too.”

References:-Robinson, B. (2003, November 2). Adulterated Halloween Candy: “Razor Blades in the Apples” Hoax.    ReligiousTolerance.org. Retrieved from http://www.religioustolerance.org /hallo_ap.htm
-Skenazy, L. (2010, October 27). ‘Stranger Danger’ and the Decline of Halloween. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com.
-Rochman, B. (2012, June 11). Stranger Danger: Are Parents too Paranoid about Safety? Time Healthland. Retrieved from http://healthland.time.com/2012/06/11/stranger-danger-are-parents-too-paranoid-about-safety/

Because this is a steampunk-themed blog, I just had to post this:

from previous blog. Category: General

13/03: A flash from the past

Category: General 

Posted by: morgainebrigid 

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I found some of my old, old enterprises on a Carbonmade site I created years ago.http://morgainebrigid.carbonmade.com/

14/12: The most inspirational thing I've heard in a long time.

Category: General 

Posted by: morgainebrigid 

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This movie explains something that I've known instictively all my life, but my employer have not; that people are motivated by more than just money. Well worth ten minutes of your time to watch.

14/12: My favorite Christmas song for 2011

Category: General 

Posted by: morgainebrigid 

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