Today is Easter in the Greek Orthodox Church. Different calendar, you know. Our family, with my mother a member of that church and my father a Methodist, celebrated Easter on the Roman Catholic date (unless the two Easters converged, which sometimes happens), presumably to allow my sister and I to be in sync with the wider culture’s Easter celebrations, and also because dying eggs many colors was a lot more fun than dying them all deep, dark red, which is the Greek custom. The Easter egg is symbolic of the tomb Jesus was in before the Resurrection; dyeing eggs red symbolizes Christ’s blood. Cracking a dyed egg is supposed to symbolize Jesus emerging from the tomb. On Greek Easter, everyone plays tsougrima (“clinking together)”with the red-dyed eggs. One player holds a red egg and taps it against another player’s egg, and the loser is the one whose egg cracks. Then the Easter egg warrior with the unbroken egg uses the same end of his or her egg to try to crack the other end of their opponent’s egg. While the participants do this, one says “Christos Anesti!” (“Christ has risen!”) and the other celebrant responds “Alithos Anesti!” (“Indeed He has risen!”). The Marshalls played the egg game with the regular multi-colored Easter eggs, and on non-Greek Easter. My mother never explained the symbolism of it all to us; she just liked cracking eggs. I assumed everyone did it, Greek or not. As in all competitions, Mom was ruthless at tsougrima.
Incidentally, it was considered unethical to strike an opponent’s egg in the side rather than the end, and doing so meant you forfeited the game.
1. “Go woke, go broke,” or at least become irrelevant. The stock plunges of both Disney and Netflix are at least substantially related to their imposing progressive and partisan propaganda on the substantial percentage of their market that doesn’t want to have such positions rammed down their metaphorical throats. Honors-bestowing organizations like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Nobel Prize have seen the perception of their credibility and integrity fall mightily after attaching political requirements to their awards. Now an open letter signed by dozens of professional journalism organizations, nonprofits, and labor unions asks the Pulitzer Prizes to require newsrooms to participate in the News Leaders Association’s annual diversity survey (or similar) by 2024 in order to be considered for their journalism awards. I have no doubt that the Pulitzers will capitulate to this plan to make only left-driven organizations eligible for honors in journalism, for the prizes are already heavily tilted ideologically: recall that the New York Times and its racist reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones were rewarded for the fake history-spreading “1619” project. On the other hand, because of that and similar fiascos, the Pulitzers have lost much of their sheen already.
