I’m going to make a prediction about the next big thing. It’s going to be rocks. Well maybe not the next big thing, but sometime in the next few years rocks are going to be big in every home; they’ll be used for chairs and table legs and beds and bathtubs and stuff like that or couples will scatter huge boulders in the living room to make a statement.
Why rocks? Maybe it’s just that I see a lot of rocks, living in Norway, but think about it: people are getting really sick of electronic appliances as Christmas presents. It’s hard to get thrilled by a laptop or a camera that makes phone calls or a flat-screen telly. What gets us excited nowadays isn’t owning stuff, it’s owning lots of emptyness: Space, the final frontier and ultimate luxury. Yesterday I saw an advertisement for a double-height “suite” (= big cabin) on a new cruise ship. It had a grand piano in it, and I’m guessing it’s not because a lot of rich people are also pianists; it’s because a grand piano signals that you’ve got sooo much space that you’re obliged to try and find things to fill it up.
Rocks are incredibly heavy and serve no purpose. They are very labour-intensive to clean. They can really eat up space. Buy some rocks now.
A Bad Guide 
They are very labour-intensive to clean.
You do realise you just confided to the Internet that you are the kind of person who has opinions about the cleaning of rocks?
Better than getting everyone’s dirty rocks to clean.
Did I mention that we collect scholar’s rocks?
There you go. No, you did not mention it. We have access to many scholar’s rocks around these parts. They’re all over the place. How many do you want?
That rock looks like an old lion.
EXACTLY! Well done, Dearie. You win some kind of prize, perhaps a small porcelain figurine or something like that.
I took the picture because I thought the same thing and the last time I took a picture of a rock, Marie-Lucie said it looked like a tiger.
It looks to me like a rock.
I have heard that in Norway when a troll is hit by the rays of the sun, it turns to stone. There must be some rocks that look like trolls then. Or maybe the trolls look like rocks.
The one that looked like a tiger was a different one.
This one seems to be a hybrid: with the head on the right it could be a lion (or a troll), with the head on the left it looks more like a large, very tired dog with big ears.
A lion dormant.
opinions about the cleaning of rocks
In my youth I once spent a week harvesting grapes in southern France. One day my friend picked up some nice shiny rocks during our lunch break on day. The locals were happy that we liked their rocks, which seemed to be a source of some little pride, but they made a great point of telling us “It is not necessary to wash them!” We never understood why they said this.
“It is not necessary to wash them!” We never understood why they said this.
I think it was a joke: they were used to Northerners being very hygiene-conscious, for instance washing fruit before eating them, which the locals did not bother to do.
MMcM: we collect scholar’s rocks
Is there any way we could see a picture of the collection? I keep small rocks on the windowsill by my desk; I currently have ten of them, but it varies. When I get a macro lens I’ll take pictures.
Looking at the rock in broad daylight, I now see a third possible animal, with its head on the left but turned back towards the right. I am not sure what it is.
m-l, that would be a basset hound. Passing the actual thing today I saw it as a rabbit, but the shadows are different in the photograph.
Yes, it quite resembles our beloved old basset hound Guinevere in the years before her demise, when she spent most of her time in just such a posture, slumped on the kitchen floor dreaming of past glories and emitting that distinctive odor that caused my mother to insist that we not get another basset.
Oh, I had thought that m-l’s first dog was the one with its head turned. Now I see: there’s also the dog with head extended and a nose like Snoopy’s.
Getting back to the other end, I see a figure of great strength and dignity, a sort of noble shaggy half-human/half-bovine king. Zeus as bison?
Who is that looking at the small rock? The shadow is cat-like but the hind quarters look doggy.
It is a dog, but the shadow of the head is foreshortened, so you don’t see the snout and that makes it look like a cat’s head. On the other hand, you can see the ears much better in the shadow, again contributing to its cat-like appearance.
our beloved old basset hound Guinevere
What a perfect name for a basset hound.
When I get a macro lens
I have discovered a macro setting on my camera. It looks like the silhouette of a flower and works very nicely.
rampant.
That’s lovely. I like the carved mahogany or rosewood base too. There’s a shiny spot that looks as if there’s the imprint of a fossil on the back of the neck. I have a not dissimilar-looking piece of shale in front of me that my daughter dug up in the garden, left over from when the garden was below sea level, and it has all sorts of tiny pebbles and flora caught inside.
Are all scholar’s rocks figurative images?
a macro setting on my camera
Lucky you, I guess you used it for your toads. I had requested one for Christmas, but now it looks like my wife’s allowed to borrow one from her job. That means if everything works out I’ll get the OED instead (but really as well).
Toads, snakeskins, walking sticks, slugs, and lately I have found it useful for copying recipes. When you’re visiting you don’t want to spend forever copying (especially if you don’t really cook, but just read the recipes), you want to spend time with the people, so all you do is set the little flower symbol, and the one that keeps the flash from going off, and when you download it you will see it perfectly in focus. It wasn’t an expensive camera either, around $100, and it will even do videos of toads hopping. Now for the same price you can probably get 10 megapixels instead of 7.1, not to mention much better image stability.
Last week when I was at the Oriental Institute for Arab Heritage Week,
http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/special/meresamun/
I couldn’t help but stop at Powell’s used bookstore next to the U of C. While checking out the offerings in Arabic, I overheard someone say “compact dictionary, ha, ha, ha” and sure enough, there above the recipe section or somesuch where I never would have wandered by myself was the 1971 compact OED with the two volumes and the magnifying glass in a cardboard case. Lovely thing it is.
At the same time I saw a couple books about the history of English and picked up L.M. Meyers, The Roots of Modern English. It seems clearly written, which is more valuable to me than something comprehensive or technical, although 1966, who knows if it might be dated. No matter, when will I have time to read it? Anyhow, this first page of a book review is reassuring:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/374444
The reviewer criticizes it for not using IPA and for not taking Chomsky seriously enough. I think I can live with that.
Oh, AJP, check out these images:
http://www.spirit-stones.com/category/types-of-scholars-rocks/
Nijma, I have that OED Compact (gloat, gloat). My wife can read it without the magnifying glass – not me.
I can just barely read it without the magnifying glass, but it isn’t very comfortable. The glass doesn’t really help that much, but I was able to look up Sig’s thing about light and apertures and copy it pretty easily.
Last summer when I was in Minneapolis, I was in umpteen different “Half Price Books” used bookstores, not to mention several bookstores by different campuses and I only saw one compact OED, without the case and without the magnifying glass. $80 they wanted and I reluctantly decided I wanted some other book more than I wanted those. When I told my cousin about it, he gave me his two volume SOED which he said he didn’t want anymore. [Actually the one I got wasn’t from Powell’s, it was yet another bookstore across the street, the “antiquarian” one next to Florian’s restaurant.] And since Americans like to talk about getting bargains, I have to say the price was much, much better too.
I think it was a joke: they were used to Northerners being very hygiene-conscious, for instance washing fruit before eating them, which the locals did not bother to do.
They may have been pulling our legs, but it didn’t seem like a joke. It was more as if they earnestly thought that our attempts to get the soil off the crystals would ruin the natural lustre or something. And of course we were not Northerners; we were North Americans. Quite exotic from their point of view, I think.
I know some stones like opal are fragile. There are stories about people taking an opal ring off their finger only to have it fracture right away. The heat or oil or something from the hand is supposed to protect it. And I heard to store opals in oil if you can’t wear them–don’t know if there’s anything to it besides folklore. Crystals for religious ceremonies are supposed to be treated differently–anointed in rain water or somesuch to keep their karma pure.
Americans like to talk about getting bargains
Do we? In any case, the word reminds me to say that I heard the word “cheapening” today in a sense that would have been completely new to me if it had not come up somewhere — here, or at LanguageHat? — not long ago, in connection with the origin of the name “Copenhagen”. In a passage from Virginia Wolfe. Here, I found it:
Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning.
Nij, I had a hunch that “anointed” and “rainwater” didn’t mix, so I checked Wikipedia. OK, maybe you’re right: anointment doesn’t have to involve that greasy kid stuff. But what really made me glad I looked was the sentence:
Because of its “smeared on” root, the word is also used for the unique practice by hedgehogs of coating their quills with a froth when encountering new smells or tastes in their environment.
Woolf
My dear Graf! You’re prescient!
http://lovelylisting.com/2009/12/this-house-is-rockin.html
There you are.
Buy your rocks now, while stocks last.