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"You should live your life in such a way that the preacher doesn't have to tell any lies at your funeral" (Anyone know who gets credit for this saying?)
And to my Muslim friends: may God give you blessed month. (I'll admit to still being slightly confused as to whether Ramadan started today or yesterday.)
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~j
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Hey, I added you to my friends list. Was doing a random search of SCAdian/music people in Maryland since there's a high probability I'll be moving there in December. Hello!
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I love ECD (playing and dancing)! So does
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As for cheap plastic instruments, the two major brands of those are better than some of the cheap wooden recorders that cost more (though not as good as nice wooden recorders ... I once played a wooden Yamaha soprano that made me sound like a lead-melody player, which I'm really not). I'm playing plastic sopranino, soprano, alto, and bass (Aulos sopranino, the rest are Yamaha) and a wooden (Koch) tenor.
Racketts are cool, as are ... oh bother, I'm forgetting the name of the instrument that's just down-and-back inside, not as "folded" as a rackett. It sounds like "cortal" but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's spelled. Got a note on it someplace, and photos of a couple of them. Argh.
Kortholt
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preacher doesn't have to tell any lies at your funeral""
I'd rather cross out the doesn't have to part - preachers like clean-living, conforming good Christian little boys and girls. Most dull and rather limiting! Cool quote until you think about it...
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Not sure about the funerals, but it does seem to me that a colourful life ought to produce a more interesting wake than a conforming life, eh?
(I've long said that if I have a "dying words" situation, I want my last words to be some utterly awful pun, so that my friends will be shaking their heads saying, "I can't believe we have to quote that as Glenn's last words.")
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Ramadan
As I understand it, the reason for the variations in the start of Ramadan are that the Muslim months are lunar, and begin specifically the first night that the crescent moon is sighted by two trustworthy Muslim witnesses (or one, by some interpretations.) Astronomical calculations may be used as a guide for when to look, but these alone are not supposed to determine the date.
In theory, the testimony of two trustworthy witnesses anywhere in the world is supposed to apply to all once they get word of it, but it appears that in practice, imams in various countries declare the beginning of Ramadan for that country. This doesn't seem to be a big deal, because the texts talk about starting it the day you first see the crescent, even if it's been obscured by the weather and you know it happened on an earlier day (if you don't hear about it from someone else, that is.) So the situation seems to be that you should trust a call from anywhere in the world, but there's a long pre-mass communication tradition of local decisions, and everyone observing Ramadan faithfully is more important than petty disagreements.
I thought this was a pretty good summary.
Re: Ramadan
What I don't understand yet is how one schedules appointments beyond the end of the current month in that calendar. I don't recall seeing that addressed on the calendar web sites I've read so far, and I keep forgetting to ask.
Re: Ramadan
As to the future months, I'm not sure that the start of calendar months in general depends on sighting the new moon, or just the beginning and end of the Ramadan fast. (Some of the quotes from the texts I saw indicated, not surprisingly, that they well understood that the next moon would come 29-30 days after the previous one, and for non-holy months, the sighting of the moon functioned more as a resynchronizing mechanism. But I'm not at all sure about that.)