Weekend Update with Photos

There's nothing much adoption-related going on right now. We were supposed to have the second homestudy visit last week, but it was postponed to next week due to the worker falling sick with a cold.

Saturday morning, my husband and I went to Scott Antique Market, which is held once a month in a large exhibit hall. The stuff there is fairly high end, so we go there more to look than to buy. There's a regular dealer there who sells items from Turkmenistan.

Most Americans have only heard about Turkmenistan due to the recent death of its extremely crazy supreme dictator. This is a guy who named a month of the year after his mother and erected a giant gold statue of himself that rotates every 24 hours. The Turkmen people are also known as great jewelers. Many other Central Asian peoples also have great jewelry traditions, but the Turkmen style is my personal favorite.

Turkmen work is usually in silver with some gold washes for contrast. It incorporates stones such as carnelian and lapis lazuli, or else colored glass. The designs strike a balance between simplicity (basic geometric shapes, repeated and transformed, very limited color palette) and sophistication (borders, dots and ropes and chains tying the shapes together). Here is a Turkmen website with lots more pictures of this amazing stuff. Turkmen jewelry is also featured as part of a permanent exhibit at Fernbank Museum in Decatur, Georgia. The picture to the left is of a headdress that the dealer ("Nuristan") kindly let me photograph.

I didn't bother asking how much the headdress cost. I did buy two very small pendants, each of which cost $40.00, which is quite a cheap price. I'm planning on making them into matching necklaces for my mother and me. The photo to the right isn't very good and doesn't really show the nice gold wash on the left pendant.

Driving back from the market, we saw a Lady Liberty muppet attacking a taxi:







The rest of the day was very relaxing. I tried to finish reading American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America by Chris Hedges. The chapter on conversion narratives was very good, but the book wasn't coming together and really felt more like a series of articles I'd already read before. My snapping point was the chapter on creationism. Even though it's not Chris Hedges' fault, I read something so stupid there that I just could not continue reading. It's a young earth creationist who works for the "Creation Museum" using the Bible to argue that Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian... or, actually, a fruitarian.

"People say, 'Wait a minute -- but T. rex has those incredibly shap teeth.' And indeed, T. rex had six-inch serrated fangs -- perfectly designed for ripping and tearing into watermelons and cantaloupes and cabbages and all kinds of fruit.

"You see, you think of a watermelon as soft. But in order to get to the soft stuff on the inside, you have to cut through the hard outer exterior. But not T. rex. He was quite ready to eat it off the vine."

The mental image of a T. Rex savaging a watermelon is stupid enough. Then when I typed up the quote I realized that there's yet another layer of stupid, because he lists the cabbage as a fruit with a thick rind.

The next day I went to Unitarian church with my mother. We go every Sunday now. A guest minister from a Unitarian church in Transylvania gave a sermon on what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy meant to her life as a Hungarian minority. Our church has a "sister church" in Transylvania so we hear a lot about that corner of the world. The regular minister also briefly but firmly reminded us of MLK's anti-Vietnam war stance and encouraged everyone to take part in upcoming peace demonstrations. I'd like to go to the big one in DC on January 27th.

Later I did a bunch of gardening. I planted a rosebush and some dianthus flowers in the front yard, and a native azalea in the back. In a few minutes it's off to my mother's house with my husband and a friend of ours. Speaking of dictators who personally name months of the year (like July and August), we're going to be watching the season two premiere of Rome tonight. I love this show so much. I'm a huge fan of any kind of ancient Roman thing, as long as it isn't too silly. "Rome" is really top quality though; it has some of the best acting and plotting since the groundbreaking "I, Claudius" series.

Vale, blog readers!