Everything Humans Do Is Art

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

Gandalf: so, are you going to visit your counts on fingers brother's second son, Merry?*

Aragorn: splutters in confusion

—got confused about why I’d never been a boy scout because he forgot i was trans

—told me he was gonna get top surgery scar tattoos to match me after i get mine

—laughs at all my trans jokes, even if they’re supremely unfunny

—calls me big dog (and him little dog) even though he is about as tall as two of me

Then he said "You know, I completely forgot you weren't always this way. Femininity really suits you" and let me tell you I started tearing up

Posted by The Library of Congress on Facebook:

Once more, due to annual popular demand, we like to share Rosa Parks’ pancake recipe on National Pancake Day. Jotted down on an envelope, it came to the Library along with the rest of her papers, a gift made possible by the generosity of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation in 2016. Learn more about the Rosa Parks Collection: https://www.loc.gov/.../rosa.../about-this-collection/...

Here is the Library of Congress page for the recipe!

And the full transcription (text) of the envelope!

And the recipe itself:

Featherlite Pancakes Sift together:

1 C flour

2 T B. Powder [presumably baking powder]

1/2 t salt

2 T sugar

Mix:

1 egg

1 1/4 C Milk

1/3 C peanut butter melted

1 T shorting or oil

Combine with dry ingredients Cook at 275° on griddle

-----

Cool, so you want natural fiber costumes with no/nuanced corset slander, people wearing colors, historical hairstyles, people wearing hats or headcoverings and long sleeves outside during the day, no potatoes or pumpkins in pre-columbian Europe, actors with textured skin and wrinkles, minimal makeup, consulting HEMA groups and weapons scholars for all the weapons and fight scenes, a good soundtrack that includes traditional instruments?

then they get to the botany bay and she's immediately driven to distraction by how horny she is for ricardo montalban under a thick layer of extra-dark foundation. sorry i'm gonna compare montalban with and without the makeup because it is SO distracting

also she refers to sikhs in the past tense implying that at some point in the last two hundred years there was a genocide that they're just glossing over. since she also calls them a warrior race it's also possible that she's just racist and somewhere on board the enterprise there are sikh crew members who dislike her as much as kirk does.

Laura: So like...sisters?

Carmilla: Your obliviousness is exhausting.

Laura: Are you a boy donning a disguise to woo me in secret?

Poetry is an art that -- as with all writing -- is very effective in depicting the insides of processes, beings and experiences.  

Poetry is also extremely memorable.  It is much easier to recall poetry than prose.

Music as an art is evocative of feelings and transformations of awareness.  

Poetry and music can blend neatly because both make use of rhythms.  

Entangling the rhythms of the verses with the rhythms of the music makes an art (Song) that is evocative, memorable, and communicative.  

Song is one of the most successful entanglements of arts in the entire broad expanse of human art-making and enjoying.  

Dance, illustration / cartooning, and acting with writing are some other highly effective art entanglements.

But while it is true that song is the entanglement of poetry and music.  

It seems pretty clear that song evolved first, and poetry and music as we understand them today separated out later.

Song is memorable. In societies that are not writing-centric, song (including rhythmic recitation) is often the primary means of sharing and passing on knowledge of history, religion, geography, and methods of making and understanding art.  

Most songs are learned by listening to them and singing along with them.  

Poetry, separated from song, evolved with writing.  

Most forms of writing started out as accounting practices -- tallying and recording how many sheep and how many shepherds there were in a given town, for example.  Poetry writing came as an expansion of this process, allowing for writing as a backup process to sung memories.  In other words, the written poetry is the equivalent of storing information on a hard drive to be pulled up and sung later in case of error or loss of direct transmission.

From our writing-centered perspective we look back on ancient poems, such as the Iliad, and assume that they were presented in book form that people read from.  

That’s not how it worked. The Iliad is a backup for a part of a song cycle that many different poets would present live to crowds of people.  It was for concert presentation, not for people to read alone to themselves.

Indeed, until very recently all reading was expected to be done out loud, often with people listening in.  The ability to read silently was once considered so miraculous that it was attributed to saints.

So how is it that we now have the idea of poetry as fundamentally written?  How is it that I can be a poet when I didn’t learn to sing until I was forty?

I think the answer is printing.

Before printing, people singing to crowds were the most efficient ways to spread the moving, insightful memories of song. 

But printed books can travel spread faster and to wider audiences than skilled singers.

This was true for a few hundred years, enough to make two distinct skills out of poetry and lyric writing.  

I write a fair number of poems, some of which could be but are not set to music. My only musical training is in music theory (which is quite fun but is not the same as compositional skill).  

Two things happened in the late 19th and 20th centuries that made it easier for people to get the majority poetry from song again: sound recording and radio.  

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when I was young, I read poetry and listened to radio, record albums, and cassette tapes.  Most of the people I knew didn’t read poetry except as class assignments, but they did a lot of listening.  Song was overtaking written poetry.

And now in the 21st century, songs and recitations are as easy to access online as written poetry is, with the advantage of someone else (usually a skilled singer or a practiced reciter) doing the work of making audible art out of the written works.