Elysium Meadows Design

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

If anyone has been in any doubt about what Anathema was thinking the line that would have made it utterly clear would have been..

...the "two consenting cycle repairmen".

In the UK the 1957 Wolfenden Report recommended that 'homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should be no longer a criminal offence'. And the phrase "consenting adults" became a euphemism for gay men once the recommendations of the report were put into action and male homosexual acts were decriminalized. (It took a decade and happened in 1967.)

This year, on the 31 March, we lost Gilbert Baker, gay artist and creator of the gay pride flag. Today we would celebrate his 66th birthday. Let’s remember him as the wonderful person he was.

Alright, I'm breaking character for this one because it involves me personally.

Again, as far as I know, saying tarot is endemic to romani culture is akin to saying moneylending is endemic to jewish culture.

As far as I am aware, the roma are not the only people to divine with tarot cards, and they did not invent the practice.

And again, the author of this blog is ethnically Romani. Although I am fairly isolated from the culture, I have access to people who aren’t. When I asked my culturally romani family members about this, they said they had never heard of this concept.

Now, that doesn’t inherently mean I am correct. I am completely open to the fact that I may be wrong about this. However, it does mean that I am going to have to ask for proof beyond “I saw some people say this somewhere“ because as far as I know, the earliest citation for romani people using tarot for divination people is from Elphias Levi’s Key of Mysteries (1861), and the earliest citation for divinatory tarot as we know it was from by Jean-Baptiste Alliette in approximately 1780, when he and Antoine Court published a guide for performing cartomancy with the Tarot of Marseilles.

Additionally, philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, in his book The Game of Tarot. "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy.”

Yes, the Roma people did read tarot for work, especially when there weren’t many other jobs available to them. No, they did not invent the practice. Occultists in Europe did, several centuries after the oldest tarot cards we know about were made and spread across Europe as a card game (the oldest deck is from like 14th century Italy for a game called tarrochi, and in the 16th century, the Marseilles deck spread through Europe by the thousands as a game deck which at the time was called tarau, but I could have spelled that wrong)

In the 1780s, there was a revisionist movement among Occultists to find the “secret origins” of tarot which would unlock the secrets of the universe (sourced from Robert M Place’s the Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination). This meant that every popular and mystical worldview/belief system at the time, including Kabbalah and Hermeticism, were attributed to tarot, and the Roma people were believed to have brought the decks to Europe from Egypt (which, as I mentioned...isn’t true). The cards ARE believed to be descended from Chinese money cards (in the same family of games as Mahjong) and Arabic Mamlûk cards, but those were introduced to Europe WAY before tarot was used for divination

Do Roma people have their own traditions and practices regarding tarot? Probably. I’ve heard that from at least one person claiming to be a Roma tarot reader. But I don’t know for sure because if those traditions do exist, they would be closed to me so I wouldn’t have access to them. The cards themselves are not closed, though

If you want books recs to start looking at the history of tarot, Place’s book that I mentioned is great, as is Paul Huson’s Mystical Origins of the Tarot