First of three, beautiful Irises from a recent trip to a grower who specializes in them.
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Lucky Penny →
What defines you →
Bruce, deep down you may still be that same great kid you used to be. But it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.
~ Rachel Dawes, Batman Begins (2005)
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Temenos? What’s that? →
Me, the other day after hearing a brief mention of a new-to-me-word on a podcast: “Is there a Greek work, something like (sounds like) tem-in-oss, that has to do with a special protected place of healing, particularly out in nature?”
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You’re likely thinking of temenos (τέμενος), pronounced roughly “TEM-eh-nos.”
In ancient Greek, a temenos was a sacred precinct or sanctuary—a piece of land marked off and dedicated to a god or gods. These were often places of worship and healing, particularly sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius (the god of medicine), where people would go for ritual healing practices.
The term literally means “a piece of land cut off” (from the verb τέμνω, “to cut”). These sacred spaces were set apart from ordinary use, often located in natural settings like groves or near springs, and served as protected places for religious activities, healing rituals, and refuge.
In Jungian psychology, Carl Jung later adopted “temenos” to describe a protected psychological space for inner work and transformation—which connects nicely to the original sense of a sacred, healing precinct.
The best camera →
They say the best camera is the one you have with you.
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Worth a listen →
Tune in to this Bullseye episode…
Live every day →
Live every day as if it were your last, for one day you’re sure to be right.
~ Breaker’ Morant, in 1980 film
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Magic of life →
In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
~ D.H. Lawrence
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So much yak shaving even this post →
So I was off talking about something, which was in fact a classic example of yak shaving. The person I was talking with is intimately familiar with the term. But in case you are not…
me: There was an old—sesame street maybe?—tv episode from the 70s or early 80s with a song, “There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza…” that describes that sort of recursion. Decades earlier than yak shaving.
You’re absolutely right! “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” is actually much older than that—it’s a traditional folk song that dates back to at least the 1700s in Germany (as “Lieder von der Zithermädchen”). The English version became popular in the 1800s.
The song became widely known in America in 1961 when Harry Belafonte and Odessa Turner recorded it, and yes, it was performed on various children’s shows including Sesame Street in later years.
The song is the perfect example of circular dependency/yak shaving! The structure is that Henry needs to fix the bucket, but to do that he needs to sharpen the axe, but to sharpen the axe he needs to wet the stone, but to wet the stone he needs water, but to get water he needs… the bucket. It’s an endless loop of prerequisites that circles back to the original problem.
So you’re totally right—this concept of getting stuck in recursive task dependencies has been around in folk culture for centuries! The MIT folks just gave it a modern, absurdist name with “yak shaving.” The bucket song might be one of the earliest comedic explorations of dependency hell.
It’s funny how the same human experience—whether it’s 18th century peasants or 21st century sysadmins—keeps rediscovering this frustrating pattern and finding ways to laugh about it.
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Worth a listen: An episode on Studs Terkel →
If you’re a podcaster—or even just a fan of aural history—you’ll enjoy this, from PRX.
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Two-fer from an introduction →
I’m currently in the Introduction from Will Stone’s translation of, Montaigne by Stefan Zweig. Two things:
First, a nit about getting the right ideas into our minds when we read. Not a criticism of authors’ (such as Stone) word choices, but rather of our thinking correctly as readers.
Stone quotes Zweig as, “How to keep humanity intact in the throes of bestiality?” Stone’s translation is from 2015, and our current English usage carries sexual connotations. But I had a hunch that Zweig had something like “in the way of beasts” in mind since he was writing in German, in Brazil, in 1941, amidst the global throes of WWII.
It took me just a few moments to get an LLM to show me that Zweig almost certainly wrote «Bestialität»—which in Zweig’s German would have meant brute savagery or barbaric cruelty with no modern (circa 2025) sexual connotation. And in the larger context of the brutality of the war, that connotation makes perfect sense.
Second, further along Stone quotes a vivid metaphor from Zweig relating to suicidal ideation:
[…] always in moments of impotence it emerged, surging powerfully upwards like a dark rock whenever the tide of passions and hopes in his soul ebbed.
Relax; I’m not suicidal. I’m only remarking on the sublime perfection of that metaphor.
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