The day after Easter turns out to be lucky: I receive a straw hat from Jacqueline

Anticipating how exhausted I would be after the first weekend of Passover I came close to canceling our group for the Monday after Easter.  Luckily, I did not.

Echoing my mood, Jacqueline and Pablo, the first to arrive, complained that the services they attended for Easter were unusually long.  Jacqueline took me aside to give me a fine straw sun hat from her home in Madagascar.

Rather than ascending like a piece of straw, my next gambit fell like a lead blimp: the group was not interested in the Mueller report .  They found however much to ask and say about the upcoming DC International Film Festival.   Once they learned that documentaries used actual people rather than actors they could understand why I recommended “The Eagle Huntress,” a Mongolian documentary about a young girl falconer, as an easier way than traveling to another country to learn about a faraway place.

Asia remained a focus.  The first short article we read from theweek.com  about fortune-telling, took us to China and back again.  Hoon, it turned out, is so expert as a Chinese fortune-teller that her friends in Seoul advised her to quit dentistry in order to make a nice living as a soothsayer.  Hoon  explained that in order to tell a fortune she needs four pillars: hour (within two hours), day, month, and year of birth.  Fortune-telling has become modern: the book that used to be consulted has been replaced by an app.  She had not yet become a proficient prophet  when she met her future husband but still believes that destiny brought them together.  Politicians do not know as much as they think, as was demonstrated when Hoon got no response to the multiple emails she sent to Hillary’s campaign advising them that Hillary would lose the election to Trump.  While Aoi and Hoon regard Asian fortune telling as a science, participants from Latin America respectfully disagreed. Pablo labeled it as pseudo science.  Williams added that shamans in Venezuela are charlatans who take advantage of gullible people.  

Not letting go of the subject, Aoi mentioned that not all that long ago in Japan name analysis was frequently used to give babies lucky first names that also complemented their family names.  There is still some superstition about lucky and unlucky days in Japan.  A rokuyo calendar is followed so that “death” days, inhabited by evil spirits, may be avoided for weddings and funerals, which therefore tend to be less expensive because very few people want to be married or buried those days.   No one in Japan would buy a house whose address had the number 4, just as in the USA, participants were surprised to learn, many buildings do not have a 13th floor, possibly because that was the number of participants at the Last Supper. Amy’s mother went to a fortune teller in China, which provoked problems with her husband who is a non-believer.  We all agreed that fortune-tellers would go out of business if they did not give hope.  

We raced through very short articles from theweek.com about a SWAT team responding to a home-invasion call occasioned by a noisy Roomba imprisoned in a bathroom, dogs sharing expensive meals with their masters in a New York sidewalk cafe, a man’s beard containing more germs than a dog’s fur, a man who sued his parents to the tune of $86,822.16 for destroying his pornography collection, and the campus police chief of Smith and Mt Holyoke colleges being put on administrative leave for having posted positive tweets about Trump; all  these occasioned serious and humorous comments, the last being Pablo's objection that the action against the campus police chief was an infringement of free speech.  Finishing up, our lightly bearded participant Williams revealed how he washed his beard after eating.