A Theory of Nearly Everything and Next to Nothing at All, continued

March 12, 2015
Flagellation

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else, so yesterday a hare is run over by a truck on Highway 2 approximately 39 km west of Okayama, and today the temperatures inches above 80°F in Lima, Peru.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish that were so. It sounds as if it must be.

i

The Japanese word for hare is ウサギ [usagi, pronounced with a hard g, o͞o 'sa gē].

ii

Stalking rabbit stew.

The ingredients of Grape Nehi are as follows: carbonated water; high fructose corn syrup; artificial flavors; phosphoric acid; citric acid; potassium benzoate (preservative); red 40; blue 1.

                                       iii

from Madame d’Aulnoy’s Memories of the Court of Spain (1691):

     "The  first time I saw them I almost swooned. . . .Imagine a man coming so near you that he spatters his own blood on you: c’est là un de leurs tours de galanterie.  [Still] there are rules for performing flagellation in the correct way; masters teach the art as they would dancing or fencing. The penitents are oddly dressed. They wear skirts, tall sugarloaf hats, masks, and shirts that leave great patches of the back bare. They scourge the bare spots until the blood runs down in streams. They walk slowly through the streets till they come to the house of the lady whom a penitent wishes to honor, and then he scourges himself while she peeps through a hole and contrives to give him a sign of her gratification."