Mildly interesting news items

[heliopausa]

Not a long post from me today; I'm still being frugal with screen time.  So just a round-up of a few things I've found interesting lately.

Here's one about legends being true!  One legend, anyway.

I don't recall where I came across it, but I liked this blog post about the use, especially in political press releases, of the word "cost".   (I feel very crabby about how the word "reform" is used, too.)

I like dyed Easter eggs!   We do ours with onion skins - is anyone else dyeing or painting them? 

This article was part of autism awareness day, and is pleasant in terms of the father's calm, easy relationship with his son. But I was narked by the father's hint that it was random nearby women who should have been responsible for general awareness of what was happening:  "Maybe we need more netball mums - where was she when Freddie decided to do his first public art installation?"

Comments

[pulchritude]

How do you dye eggs with onion skins?

[heliopausa]

More or less like this: http://www.instructables.com/id/Easter-Eggs-Dyed-With-Onion-Skins-1/

except I use clean pantihose material, not cloth,and string, not rubber bands. You can get as ambitious as you like, putting coriander leaves or similar against the eggshell, to leave a pattern. :)

[pulchritude]

Thanks for the info! :)

[marmota_b]

Like you dye anything with anything natural?
Boil the skins in water until you get a thick coloured dye, submerge the eggs in the dye, let the dye set. Salt or vinegar to help with that? It's been a while since I've done that; we've abandoned dyeing eggs years ago, because the Czech tradition connected to their distribution is stupid. And you always end up with the problem of having too many eggs to eat.

A twist often done with onion-dyed eggs here in the Czech Republic is picking various interestingly shaped leaves and fastening them to the eggs by means of tightly wrapping the egg inside an old nylon stocking. The dye gets through, except where the leaves are pressed against the egg, and you get nice patterns on the eggs.
Another option is wax resist dyeing.
Or just painting with coloured wax (wax crayons) - it's a regular folk art.
EDIT: Heliopausa beat me to it, so here, have some Czech Easter eggs: https://www.google.cz/search?q=kraslice&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=P50eVfrCHITtaPnOgpgJ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ

[pulchritude]

Wow, that's really cool! Thanks for the info :)

Why do you find the tradition connected to the distribution stupid, though?

[marmota_b]

It's stupid mostly in the state into which it's evolved, I guess, although I personally believe it's stupid on the whole. Prepare for a rant.
It goes like this: Women prepare all the eggs. Men go and braid these whip-like things out of flexible willow twigs. Then on Easter Monday morning (up till noon), they go and whip the women's backsides with it, which is claimed to be because then the women will be fresh and healthy all the following year (like those twigs: a kind of magic the name of which escapes me now), and in return - as a reward - they give the men the eggs. There's a variant in the tradition that if the men come after noon, the women can pour ice cold water on them, but you can guess how often one gets the chance.
So it's stupid because:
a) we're Christian and that's a thoroughly pagan/non-Christian tradition; plus thanks to the 40 years of Communist rule, this ended up being the only thing associated with Easter, which in light of the following points is stupid;
b) it's sexist, and more so because it's just done because it's done, not because people would actually believe in its proclaimed effect on women; and all the annoying boys you know in your home town may take that as an excuse to be mean to you (a shy and sometimes bullied schoolgirl's nightmare);
c) random complete strangers can take that as an excuse to ring at your door and whip you, too, and expect to be given something in return;
d) but you'd never know how many people would come that particular year, so you may end up either getting whipped empty-handed, or with way too many eggs on your hands that need to be eaten in a short amount of time or go bad;
e) to top it off, in some cases, it's not just eggs that's given out, but also sweets or shots of alcohol. And the boys and men who go door to door of course always end up with way too many eggs, too. Draw your own conclusions as to how those eggs you've taken time and effort to make are treasured: every Easter Monday afternoon, you'd walk the streets and see broken eggs in the streets.
So, to wrap it up: a tradition not in keeping with our own beliefs, completely unfair (and even hurtful) to a household with four women in it and one man not really participating in it, a tradition which makes you put time, effort and money into something that may very well go wasted. With all this taken into account, we started our own Easter Monday tradition instead, and would always sneak away early in the morning to go on a wonderful hiking trip.

I like the Lithuanian tradition of doing a race with the eggs much more. It happens every Easter at the university me and my sisters went to, organised by the Baltic Studies department. I'd never managed to participate myself, but the gist is you'd send eggs down an inclined plane, and whoever's egg goes farthest, wins the other eggs in that round. Way more fun and way nicer to both sexes.

[heliopausa]

That's an astounding and so-easily-abused tradition! I'd be with you on the early-morning hike, for sure. The eggs themselves are beautiful, though - maybe take the eggs with you the hike? Cold hard-boiled eggs and bread for a late breakfast sound pretty good. :)

[marmota_b]

It's a weird one. It's like a twisted carolling idea. If you imagine it confined to a family or established couples and purely symbolic, it sort of makes sense (if you accept the explanation to begin with), but once you expand it to all-village or even to town setting, it goes horribly wrong. To top it off, I only learned of the purported purpose of the whipping long after I was first subjected to it, possibly because my father did not see the reason for it so he did it maybe once in my whole life, and everyone else would have assumed everyone knew (or they did not know either: we have much to thank Communist materialism for *wry*). So you can bet that by then I found it a very weak excuse!
The twist in the tale is that our mother was the one who would want to keep the tradition, maybe because she saw it as an opportunity to socialise. But all her daughters rebelled.

Yes, we did take eggs with us often, although often rather plain ones. :-)
The really pretty ones are usually actually made on blown empty egg shells (you break little holes on each end with a pin, blow all the egg insides out, wash carefully, paint/dye carefully). Some are also decorated with ornaments cut out of flattened straw. It's all incredibly detailed, precise work, and that at least I've always admired. These empty shells are often hung on a string or a ribbon, for Easter decoration.

And all this reminds me - how exactly do you do it?

[pulchritude]

Wow, that sounds like a horrible tradition! Your own sounds much better. :)

[marmota_b]

It is much better - many years, we would go to "conquer a hill", for which early Spring is an ideal time, when there are not yet so many leaves on the trees.

[marmota_b]

Ah, now I see it's actually two different methods. So take your pick.