First, I apparently lowballed my estimate of the crowd at yesterdays moronathon in D.C. Huffpo is saying tens of thousands, CNN put it at 80,000. These are pretty frightening numbers. Whatever. I’m still going to refer to it as the million pound march, and there’s no doubt they were well over that.
Anyway, today we picked up Sam from football camp and while we were in the neighborhood decided to see řip hill (I know that should be capitalized and I know there should be a way to do that, but i don’t feel like asking and you can just visualize it as capitalized,also I just hate using the Czech keyboard because it fucks up all sorts of unnecessary things, turns parentheses backwards, inverts the z and the y for no good reason whatsoever and a bunch of other little shit like that so from here on out I’m just spelling it Rip and you can visualize the hacek, how’s that?) Anyway, I felt that I should see it as I’ve been living here 12 years and it is, after all, the legendary founding point of the nation, there’s a sign on the restaurant at the top saying “What Mecca is to Muslims, so Rip is to Czechs” but really, I don’t think the Czechs take it all that seriously, it was my wife’s first time there as well.
Anyway, I was curious as to the etymology of the name, so I google it and found a lovely little book all printed out right there on the internet, the way books should be, by a man named B. Granville Baker, called “From a Terrace in Prague”, nicely written by someone with an obvious affection for the country, and full of bullshit. Basically, nothing is known about Praotec Czech and Rip Hill, including whether he even existed or not. According to the book, he and his tribe ascended the hill sometime in the 6th century A.D., and Rip means toadstool. Bollocks, my wife said. (and we couldn’t find that definition in any dictionary) There is a rather tasty mushroom with a similar name, though. Also, Mr. Baker attributes the name to the toadstool like shape of the hill, but our walk up and down it provided another explanation. There were mushrooms all over the place.
I can well imagine some ancient skin wearing iron age barbarians hanging out there and living on mushrooms, nuts, berries and the occasional squirrel or rabbit they were lucky enough to trap or club to death, for many generations. I’ll bet the village medicine man (looking a lot like the old guy in the Asterix movies) also experimented with the hallucinogenic varieties. Thus are legends born.
www.gurukalehuru.com 