Jackie
Peace?
1. The Jeep Cherokee is the favoured drive of the Surrey stockbroking classes. The word, therefore, is familiar. Besides, what with the ubiquity of the 'Western', I simply assumed that most English speaking people would be able to tell that Cherokee, Apache, Commanche, Arapaho, Navajo et al were tribes of Native Americans. Your approach, however, was more cautious, and is to be lauded.
2. I posted about my forebears perhaps swinging the 'other' way (knowing full well that that is not-too-subtle code for homosexuality), but using it, in this case, to refer to the possible penchant some of my foremothers may have had for a 'bit of white on the side' (if you'll pardon the crude phraseology). Followed a sweet post explaining to me the code for gay which I thought, therefore, had missed out on the 'subtlety' of my post. (Irony, if explained, loses all its humour - I'm not going any further with this one...)
3. Magister Ludi, also called The Glass Bead Game is a book by Herman Hesse (perhaps more famously the author of Siddhartha, a university favourite in the '60s and '70s), considered by some of his fans to be his best. Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature early in the 20th Century, and is a relatively well-regarded German, mildly mystical, author. (Or was he Swiss? Damn these dying neurons...) The other names etc refer purely to the invention that Shona and I were swapping regarding possible 'just so stories' as to the origins of games (and the common origin theory, that Shona expounded). For the full flavour of meaning that 'just so stories' now has, you have to be familiar not just with Kipling's originals ("How the camel got his hump", "How the elephant got his trunk" etc) but with Stephen Jay Gould's castigation of the 'adaptationist programme' in evolutionary biology as just so many 'just so stories': Gould, SJ & Lewontin RC, 1979. 'The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian program: A critique of the adaptationist programme.' Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205, 281-288, and various Gould books thereafter.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
