June 9, 2008
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Writers Choice Featured Questions Week 8
five questions for this week +1
(unfeatured questions stolen from the featured question chatboard, dated from September of 2007)
Can someone be truly happy without a purpose?
twilightbearer
Do you think that teenagers are now falling under peer pressure much easier than before?
azn_chewynezzz
Have you ever let fear stop you from doing something in life?
lustres_des_emotions
If you could bring ONE person back from the dead, who would it be and why?
RunningWithThePack
If you could just leave right now and go anywhere you want in the world where would you go?
LeleColon+1 What song would you like played at your funeral?
I just had to add this one question extra because I could have So Much Fun with it. I mean, picture me dead and everyone’s come to the funeral. Suddenly you hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller playing over the speakers. AWESOME! lol So I’m dead. I can’t still have a little fun with the living?? lol I’m going to put it in my will!Answer any one or all of these questions in the coming
week. I try to mix the whimsical with the serious here, so hopefully
there is at least one question here for everyone.
June 9th
In a ceremony called the Famadihana, “turning over the dead,” the Malagasy highlanders of Madagascar visit the tombs of their dead to exhume the bodies of those who have been buried three to five years. The dead are reverently wrapped in silk shrouds and paraded through the streets before being returned to their resting places. After this first visit, their dead with be visited at five, seven, or ten year intervals. Because they feel the dead continue to live, the Malagasy will call on them for help in times of need.
This was a feast day of Vesta, goddess of hearth and fire. Banquets were prepared before the houses, and meat was sent to the Vestals to be offered to the gods. Matrons of the town walked barefooted in procession to Vesta’s temple to implore the blessing of the goddess for their households and to make food offerings in remembrance of the time when the hearth served generally for the baking of bread. The millers and bakers also kept holiday. Millstones were decked with garlands, and the beasts that turned them were led round the city covered with garlands and loaves suspended from their necks.
In 1892, Grace Cook (a popular spiritualist medium and founder of the White Eagle Lodge) was born in London, England. Her first psychic vision of Indian Chief White Eagle and other Native American spirits occurred early in her childhood. With the aid of her spirit guide, she authored many books on healing and spiritual growth. She believed that after her death (which occurred on September 3, 1979), her spirit would be reincarnated in Egypt.
Comments (10)
Interesting questions. I like the first one.
Gaud! I need a breather. I am being flamed on my own site. Don’t go there. It aint pretty. Lordy! Ok, catches breath. 1: No. Drugged out of one’s mind does not count. 2: Not just teenagers. Visit my site and you can witness rabid clique mentality raging out of control. Don’t go look without protective gear. 3: Not sense pubescence. 4: Only one? Gosh…I am not solid on this because there are so many…I suppose DiVinci. Got some questions to ask that sucker; like, did you really know or was it revealed in the creative process. 5: Caught you on this one…it isn’t narrowed down to just one…every exceptional extreme mentioned in the BBC series, Planet Earth. If you haven’t seen that thing in HiDef, make every effort to do so. Amazing!
I guess I’ll answer them all at my site, as soon as the window loads.
Very thought-provoking q’s. I like the one about who you would bring back from the dead.
PS–I like your profile pic. Squids are my favorite animals (strange, I know).
Dear Candace,
I have been intending to come by and let you know how neat I think it is that you are researching and finding the questions that Featured Question doesn’t use. I did that a few months back with a spritual question which tied in nicely with a Universal Blog entry I was writing.
I rarely “recommend” posts to my subscribers/friends, so that when they see that I have done so, hopefully they will know it’s a great post. I recommended this one. I might even try to answer one of these in an entry on my site sometime this week.
Are you a member of my Internet Island blogring? It’s been a bit quiet for the last few topics. I’ve been contemplating what I can do to get it “swinging” again. Maybe I could post some of your entries like this on the Island site? You’ve already done the research, and there are over 150 Islanders. They don’t come out for the regular topics, but maybe I’m just not giving them enough.
Anyway, I appreciate what you’re doing. Are you getting feedback at all from the writers of the questions. I see you are including their links! Fantastic networking on Xanga.
Michael F. Nyiri, poet philosopher, fool
I’m here on the recommendation mentioned above = )
Hmmm…I’d bring Jinnah back to life. He was the man who worked to bring Pakistan (where I’m from) into existence. I want to know what he was thinking, did he see the problems, and what he’d think of the country as it is today.
Thriller playing at a funeral – = D That’d be cool! If I were to try and choose a song, it’d change every week or so = /
hi Candace….these are all great questions, but i like your question best… here’s my answers….sorry for being wordy, in advance…1) yes, but it shouldn’t be allowed…2) i doubt that the numbers of kids falling prey to peer pressure varies much, from generation to generation…i do, however, believe that the kinds of bad behaviors and the consequences have gone to a dangerous extreme…3) i was pretty daring and fearless, as a kid…but if something tugged at me, and said get out of here, i would, usually to get validation, of the danger, later…so my answer is, on occasion, yes…it’s important to listen to the “fight or flight” reflex…it’s your own personal “Spidey sense”…i have also beaten some unnecessary fears, by thinking through them, after the feeling of dread…4) my dad…i only knew of him, till i was 25….then, after only 10 years of meeting him, and developing a relationship with him, he died…i have so many more questions i would like to ask him….also, i would have loved for him to meet my daughter, Diana…5) that’s easy…Captiva Island, Florida, where we vacation…this island is off the beaten path, on a sparsely inhabited part of the gulf coast…the best time is after labor day (off season)…6) just cause i’m a goof, i’ll say, “Pop Goes the Weasel”…maybe do up my coffin to look like a jack-in-the-box …he he …peace…animal
@heidenkind - Nah, not that strange. Squid and octopuses are some of the smartest creatures in the sea next to mammals.
@baldmike2004 - Yes I am a member of the Internet Island blogring. So far, only one blogger has contacted me after I used their question, and he is now one of my friends. Featured Questions hasn’t contacted me at all, which is a little disappointing. I had hope to goad them into either selecting better questions, selecting questions more often, or assigning someone else to select them… since they don’t really do a very good job at all. I mean, some of their questions are good, but most of them are just not worth answering. I don’t mind if you use the questions I selected, but you should probably go back to my first five and start from there, just so we’re not doubling up on them.
@jaded_maudlin - I could probably think of a dozen or more songs to be played at my funeral that are just as funny as Thriller, but that’s the one that leaped to mind first. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited Kween_of_the_Queens , but the challenge for this month is to write from someone else’s perspective. Perhaps you could explore what you think Jinnah’s perspective would be on modern Pakistan. That’d probably be a really interesting post!
@MManhoff1 - Awesome song selection! lol Like you, I’d choose a relative to be revived over someone famous. My grandfather died when I was only 2, but by all accounts he was someone worth knowing and I often feel gypped that I didn’t get to “meet” him at an age I can remember him.
oh that’s my question! i really love the idea of playing thriller, that’s really funny
at my funeral i would probably have jesus of suburbia by green day, as it’s my favourite song .. but because it’s 9 minutes long everyone would probably be really bored by the end. thriller is certainly a way to liven things up! xx
@gemmagemmahey - The only thing I could think of that might be funnier than Thriller would be the Ghostbusters song. I’ve told lots of people that I might haunt them when I die. heh