I Return From Isolation, In Time for Social Media Anniversaries

I've been procrastinating editing a lot lately, which kept me offline for about a week or two. Finally I said, "Aw, screw it," and got back on Google+ and Twitter just in time to find out that G+ is two years old today and in two days I'll have been on it for two years, and that I've been on Twitter four years as of yesterday. Significantly, G+ no longer slows down my computer to a crawl and TweetDeck's working for the first time in a month. Synchronicity or just serendipity?

Meanwhile Twitter recently killed off Posterous, exactly as I feared (and cynically predicted) when Posterous sold out, so over the coming month I'll be reposting entries from my now dead Posterous blog here and on the project blog. And I'll start blogging about books and music again, and I'll post photographs and drawings.

The important thing is, I'm back. And I'm relieved.

Relevant Random Facts: The Goddess of Easter Isn't the One You Think

It was a close call. Too bad it didn't fall on April Fool's Day, or I'd have much more fun with it. One of these days I'll get my wish. But first, the relevant random trivia.

I've been hearing that "Easter" is supposed to be a variant of "Ishtar" (the goddess), whose holy day is the spring equinox. But then other facts intrude from the depths of my brain, and I realize I can't agree. For one thing, the holiday's name in German is "Oster", related to the word for east. But there's another goddess, an ancient Indo-European one, whose day also falls on the spring equinox, namely the dawn goddess: Aurora in Latin, Eos in Greek — and Easter in English (Ostara in medieval German).

Argue my point all you want, this is what I learned.