Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

If you're reading this elsewhere than DW, you're not seeing the icon version of this. That's okay, it's just the image below, scaled down to 100 pixels tall.

If I have my own Jolly Roger, does that mean I have to become a pirate?

(A tambourine, a pair of zills (finger cymbals), a keychain-sized set of panpipes, and two soprano recorders, using a black skirt as a backdrop. Yes, one of the recorders is awfully brightly coloured, isn't it? That one's not mine.)

"My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person, [...]" -- Ted Frank, 2011-01-10, PointOfLaw.com; quoted by Peter Finocchiaro in Salon, 2011-07-08

Sometimes I feel so ... 'overwhelmed' isn't the right word; 'engulfed' perhaps ... by the sheer amount of wrongness and brokenness in our world, from politics to crime to mental pitfalls built into us. Problems that one group resists any attempts to solve while another group tries 'solutions' already proven to have the opposite effect. Inequality, greed, disenfranchisement, a sea of stupidity and evil everywhere I turn (or at least on every news site or channel).

And then I remember that the German word for one type of bagpipe is 'dudelsack'^[1], and according to some sources 'doodlesack' used to mean the same thing in English^[2]. And after I mutter "dudelsack, dudelsack, dudelsack" a few times, I decide that for all its upfuckedness, a world in which the word 'dudelsack' means 'bagpipe' is a world that has some powerful rightness in it as well. It does not remedy a single damned evil in the world, but it reminds me that there are some things that are not broken.

[1] According to at least one source, 'dudelsack' properly refers to one type of bagpipe, but apparently is pretty commonly used by German speakers, technically incorrectly, for bagpipes in general. Another source just says it's the German word for bagpipe.

[2] And apparently had (has?) coarse, non-musical meanings as well, which I didn't know until I Googled both spellings for a reminder as to which was the correct spelling of the German word I was thinking of.