Joseph and Kant

The Schloss interwebs are not playing nicely today.
The weather got me all hopeful yesterday, the sleet became more snowy, then stopped all together. Now it's delightfully nippy, but the sky is clear.

Welcome to Rosalind, my friend Gail's new daughter. Good timing young lady, letting mum get out of hospital before Christmas. Congratulations to Gail, Ross and big sister Lily.

Ah...Christmas, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Now firstly, what exactly is it in the Jewish faith that passes through the female line? Just Jewishness I presume, not actual lineage, because otherwise, Mary would have had to have been of the line of David, not Joseph and also....isn't the point of the story that Joseph was NOT the baby daddy? You think it's simple, and then it gets really confusing.

We had the children's Nativity play at church today. It was called, 'Benjamin the little shepherd boy,' Benjamin being the only reliable Jewish boy's name anyone knows. So there was a toddler dressed as a sheep, with a little hat with ears on, cute beyond compare, except the sheep was not happy with his sheeply tabard, nor his sheeply headgear and went somewhat awol. I'm sure there was another story in there somewhere.

Austen told me a story that made me cry with laughter. Recently, there have been a couple of high profile faux pas in the British media, to do with the unfortunate mispronunciation of the name Hunt, Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary. Hunt, culture - what could possibly go wrong?

Now Arts presenter Mark Lawson was interviewing Germaine Greer on his late night show. Greer of course, is originally Antipodean, and her accent is slight, but still noticeable sometimes.
So, she says to Lawson that (The C Word) has fallen into disrepute and that we shouldn't ignore (The C Word), in fact we should all be talking much more about (The C Word). Mark Lawson, horrified, stopped her and said that although the programme went out on late night television, they simply couldn't say that on air.
Germaine turned and looked at him, eyes wide, mouth open,
'What?' she said, 'we're not allowed to talk about German philosophers any more?'