A couple more thoughts on the quilts:

Kucki, I wonder if MOST quilters have a Grandmother's Flower Garden UFO. I know several personally who do. I think it's just kind of a project that everyone loves but maybe underestimates how long it will take.

And blow-in cards are those little heavy paper cards (usually promoting subscriptions) that come in magazines. They're the ones that, when you get a new magazine in the mail, if you hold it upside down by the spine and shake it, they fall out on the floor. They're called "blow in" cards because they're placed in the magazine that way - the bound printed magazines are run in front of a blower that blows the cards in between the pages.

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I finished another book last night. This one is called "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter." It's one of Thomas Cahill's "Hinges of History" books (I think it's the fourth - his first was "How the Irish Saved Civilization," the second was about the early Jews, the third was about the life and times of Jesus, and this one is about the Greeks. I believe there are seven books planned in this "series," and he's written five so far.)

Cahill has an interesting view of history and I always learn things from his books. In this book, he titles the chapters "How to..." and takes on different aspects of Greek culture in each chapter (Fight, Feel, Party, Rule, Think, and See). I find ancient cultures interesting because they are so different from ours. Especially the Greeks; their worldview is very different from the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped western Culture (and even if you do not ascribe to either of those faiths, if you grew up in a western culture, I do think your philosophy and way of looking at the world will have been shaped by those Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the culture).

A big difference is how the Greeks viewed the individual. In Judeo-Christian cultures, the individual is important..."So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." In ancient Greek culture, it seems that the individual was less important, more a part of a unit. This was true of the fighting forces and I think (and those of you who are classicists feel free to correct me if I'm misinterpreting) that the idealized Forms of Plato also limited the concept of individuality and individual's worth - in the sense that we are all reflections of some ideal form of "human" (or in Greek culture, "Man." Women didn't seem to make the scene much except as wives and mothers or as courtesans.)

Also, fate played a large role in Greek culture; there seems to have been a believe that the dies were cast when you were born and, rather like a character in a play that had already been written, you moved through the necessary plotline. (Hence "Oedipus Rex" - he was condemned to kill his father and sleep with his mother, and even though his family went so far as to attempt infanticide to prevent that prophecy from coming true, Fate still willed it). While in Judeo-Christian (and I suppose, for this concept, primarily Christian) culture there is some belief in predestination (at least in some Protestant denominations), free will plays a much bigger role.

(And interestingly - thinking about the book on Finding Darwin's God - the author's argument there was that there is something fundamentally unknowable and unpredictable to us about the universe - that what the Greeks would have called Fate doesn't exist - but that that fundamental unknowableness is the signature of God, so to speak, the idea of "you humans think you may control everything but you can't." And the idea that things may be able to change on a dime - related to some of the odder findings from quantum mechanics - the idea that there may be no "Fate" in the Greek sense.

Arrah. I'm not saying this very well. I can't quite get the concept I'm thinking of our of my head and into words on the computer right.)

Anyway. Lots of differences between the Greeks and us and that's one of the things that makes them interesting to me.

Cahill's last chapter is kind of a "Well, what became of them?" summing-up - showing how the Greek world evolved and changed as people decided that the old gods really weren't possible, and as they began to learn of this new concept of God from a people called the Jews. And one of the really interesting things that Cahill talks about are how the fundamental differences in Greek and Jewish-Christian* philosophy (for example, ideas about matter, ideas about whether resurrection of just the soul or of the body as well was more desirable) were some of the "stumbling blocks" that they faced in the two groups forging a new identity as Christians.

(*not the same as Judeo-Christian; here I mean the Jews who were followers of and believers in Christ. They wouldn't technically have been called Christians yet, not until Paul)

And that struck me as interesting. Having grown up learning Paul's letters in Sunday School, hearing about the "Judaizers" and the difficulties with the Greeks, you sometimes come to assume that it was more a fault of "those people, they're not like us" in terms of the Jewish Christians accepting the "Gentiles." But it may actually have been a two-way problem, where people had such different mind-sets and worldviews, that trying to understand what the Man from Galilee was telling them would wind up kind of a "blind men and the elephant" type situation - where each group grabbed hardest on to the things that appealed to them, and tried to disregard the things they were uncomfortable with. (And I think people still do that, today.)

Cahill also talks a little bit - but I'd have like to have seen more - on how Greek philosophy seeped into some of the teachings of Christianity (one of them being the idea of "world without end" - that's more of a Greek concept, according to Cahill).

There's a tremendous amount of information in this book, a lot to think about. I've only scratched the surface.

My only complaint with Cahill is that sometimes he tends to pander a bit- to describe the shocking or the titillating to excess a bit. And he does use four-letter words here and there, which is (to me at least) a bit surprising in what I'd consider to be basically a scholarly book.

But I did enjoy this book - I think of the four of his I've read, this is my second-favorite, after "How the Irish Saved Civilization." The one on the Jews, I almost felt like he didn't understand the topics as deeply (or maybe care about them as deeply); in his book on Jesus at times he felt insufferably flip to me (He actually referred to Nazareth as...well, I won't write it out, but it's the same general terminology that sometimes the acronym B.F.E. is used for. I get his point, but he could have as easily said that Nazareth was "the boonies" or "where the hillbillies came from" and that would make as much sense. But I'm a prude in some ways and I'm not ashamed to say it.)