[Sca-cooks] Fw: ***A Message From Bish. I'm O.K.

[Jeff.Gedney at Dictaphone.com]

> >Why only gay and bisexual SCAdians?
because it's not. this is one of those generalizations in the SCA that
are not founded on any facts, just a observation of a subset of the
clerical persona.

"if x is gay and has a clerical persona
and y is gay and has a clerical persona
therefore all clerical personae must be gay."

This is of course a logical fallacy of immense proportions.
The attributes of a subset cannot adequately describe the attributes of the
full set.

Adamantius, remember Ernst? or rather Father Erno Scrumalhi?
In another SCA life, I myself was a participant in a household that was
based on an English Abbey, and had a monks persoa. Still have the garb. I
know quite a few people who have studied and recreate the religious life,
and frankly I resent the blanket statements that a) the religious persoane
in the SCA are "joke" personae, or b) they are gay.

There is a lot more to monks and the monastic life than the denial of sex.
Adamantius.
The Contemplative life has its attractions.
Especially in light of the hurleyburlyrusheverywhereanddoeverything
atmosphere of the rest of the SCA.

Brandu
AKSCA Brother Osric of Rhode Abbey



"All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical
observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet
manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety -- and simply
breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300
syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx -- or
supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it-- and, by variously
pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the
manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff into a series
of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutterals, and other minor
atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of
sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words,
sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand
what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and
the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of
mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the
listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high
pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally
associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse.
Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed."
- Bill Bryson, "the Mother Tongue, English and How It Got That Way"