Then the charioteer wheeled his chariot round and Medb went back again, when she espied a thing that surprised her: A lone virgin of marriageable age standing on the hindpole of a chariot a little way off drawing nigh her. And thus the maiden appeared:

Weaving lace was she, and in her right hand was a bordering rod of silvered bronze with its seven strips of red gold at the sides. A many-spotted green mantle around her; a bulging, strong-headed pin of gold in the mantle over her bosom; a hooded tunic, with red interweaving, about her. A ruddy, fair-faced countenance she had, narrow below and broad above. She had a blue-grey and laughing eye; each eye had three pupils. Dark and black were her eyebrows; the soft, black lashes threw a shadow to the middle of her cheeks. Red and thin were her lips. Shiny and pearly were her teeth; thou wouldst believe they were showers of white pearls that had rained into her head. Like to fresh Parthian crimson were her lips. As sweet as the strings of lutes when long sustained they are played by master players' hands was the melodious sound of her voice and her fair speech. As white as snow in one night fallen was the sheen of her skin and her body that shone outside of her dress. Slender and very white were her feet; rosy, even, sharp-round nails she had; two sandals with golden buckles about them. Fair-yellow, long, golden hair she wore; three braids of hair she wore; two tresses were wound around her head; the other tress from behind threw a shadow down on her calves.

Medb gazed at her. "And what doest thou here now, O maiden?"

The Foretelling
The Cattle-Raid of Cooley

Celtic Folklore

Legends and Sagas
at Sacred Texts

chansons de geste
from a search for
Holger The Dane

Cheer’s original, 13th-century meaning could equally suggest gloom, for it was the face itself. Via Old French chiere, it is from late Latin cara, face, itself most likely from the Greek for head. It soon had the sense of expression, and one could change cheer (surviving in “be of good cheer”, which was not, then, a tautology).

The Times has a feature called A Quick Word, from which this excerpt has been plucked.

"It's not what we thought we were gonna be doing, a lot of the people's civil rights have been compromised, and we don't know what's going on. If I keep speaking my mind, will I be deported? I'm not very happy with the state of things. Music is being banned, and we have people in control of the radio stations who are the same people in control of the concert halls. They're also tied into the [US] administration and are sponsoring pro-war rallies. It's not good. It's interesting ."

Neil Young interview, Guardian UK May 22

Guardian UK review of Shakey, biography of Neil Young by Jimmy McDonough

* * *

review in pitchfork

* * *
as David Bowie says at one point: "There's youthful redemption in everything he does, a joyfulness about being an independent thinker in America." While no less a misanthrope than Randy Newman adds, "Most people did their best work when they were younger. Neil Young is as good as he ever was, which is quite an accomplishment ... It seems like there's no tricks to him. I don't know if you could name anybody better who came out of rock and roll."

review in Salon

{the Loner, Four Dead in Ohio,the FBI must have seethed, at least the lower echelons, I always figured it was him that put that Cordwainer Smith link on the Buffalo Springfield liner notes. and then when Cinnamon Girl and Down By The River came along, that was also my first headphone trip, you could see it all laid out ahead, that part of it, the valid darkness of real night, with its stars and its sleeping children and its dreams and its lovers and its moonlight and its way late crazy shit on toward dawn. so much gets lost on the way to the auditorium, someone standing in the wings says something then the lights go down, it's hard to remember later, and for me, things got extra confused. but that's ok, I've remembered enough to know all I need to now. it's nobody's business, it's everybody's story, he looks like Kate Jackson early on, like Alfalpha, and sounds like my great-grandmother. sometimes it feels like any true thing I ever did got done because I had the room to do it, because he was over there doing what he did.}

The Runaway Pancake
at D.L. Ashliman's thorough and scholarly
Folklore and Mythology
Electronic Texts

The Goodman of Wastness
a selkie tale,
at Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World, a wonderful gathering of traditional stories.

Selkies
at Romantic Scotland

The Silky Wife
nested in Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts
in turn nested in Celtic Folklore
whose volumes are themselves a bit of the world of Legends and Sagas
(Arabian Nights, Edda, Kalevala, Cid, Roland, Ring of The Niblung, Grimm's, Shah Namah, more...)
which is itself, like a galaxy within a still greater wheel, part of The Internet Sacred Text Archive
"This is a quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship"

{still meditating on Elaine Morgan's hypothesis, the unfortunately titled Aquatic Ape Theory, which makes it sound like our ancestors might have been ducks.
whether it's true or not, in the context of her work, or true in a larger more atavistic sense, the way dragons map onto dinosaurs, or just another human dream, I don't care. I had a vision one time of fresh water seas, lakes as wide as the great oceans, and people living in and on them. it doesn't matter to me about the validity, the viability. this world, as it is, now, is the result of an absence of dreams, and dreamers.}

{the above research expedited by Mozilla 1.4 Beta}

VOCATUS ATQUE
NON VOCATUS
DEUS ADERIT

(Invoked or not invoked, the god is present.)

epitaph of Carl Jung
from the scholarly and inspiring Last Words: "A collection of famous last words, epitaphs, obituaries, farewells, and last stands"

this guy is armed
parent directory/images at russianphoto.com

Johnson estimated in 1992 that he had built 60 violins, in the process working with such distinguished players as Jack Glatzner and Leonie Darby (one of Johnson's closest friends). He gave her a violin in 1985 after her own one was smashed by burglars. She later wrote that it was "the most magnificent violin I have ever played or seen", and played it with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Salzburg Festival of Music and the Leningrad and Finnish State orchestras.

John Godschall Johnson, Violin maker, 1912-2003
obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald

"I saw on the ubiquitous CNN, a piece on a visit to Nepal by HRH The Prince of Wales a couple of years ago. He was touched and appalled by the plight of returning child prostitutes from the streets of Bombay. I had visited a wild cat sanctuary at about the same time and decided to combine both sentiments in the song Sanctuary for the Secret Language Of Birds album. The first part of the song is on the subject of the little girls (and boys): the second on the plight of the small wild cats of the world, often rejected by private and zoological keepers. Well, aren't I a big softie, then?"

the dithyrambic hirsute flautist himself, Ian Anderson, at Folking.com, wherein you may find a downloadable rendition of the tune "Sanctuary"