Turns out it existed, once, but I still made it up today.
toyful, archaic: full of trifling play: sportive
Q: How ya feeling?
A: Toyful!
(Actually I feel crummy from a head cold, but still...
Sounds like I got a frog in my throat!)
bink saved this ^ off FB for me--unknown source--there are many versions. Like most of them, it is likely AI "slop" (the actual term!--I learned it in the Economist), but there are photos of real people wearing inflatable costumes acting this scene out.
I wondered if the original Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima had been staged.
... Apparently not. Photographer Joe Rosenthal of the AP said:
"Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene. That is how the picture was taken, and when you take a picture like that, you don't come away saying you got a great shot.
You don't know."
Yeah, in 1945 you didn't know...
Another famous WWII photo, Soviet soldiers "Raising a Flag over the Reichstag" in Berlin was a photo shoot
. . . but it was still REAL:
"On 2 May 1945, Khaldei scaled the now pacified Reichstag to take his picture. He was carrying with him a large flag, sewn from three tablecloths for this very purpose by his uncle.[8]-- Hm... that would be a good one for MAGA to AI reproduce:
[Khaldie himself said] he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photo shoot."
An inflatable Frog raising a Communist flag on the White House!
*googles*
It doesn't exist. Yet?
(Maybe they don't know that photo...)
________________
II. Girlettes: History Is a Costume Parade
I woke up excited to get back to the 16-hour audio book I started yesterday (free on the library app Libby)--listening as I made God's eyes:
Roger Williams and the Making of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, 2012, by John M. Barry.
Williams is the Separation of Church & State–guy, ya know, founder of Rhode Island.
What a cast of characters!
Their portraits are rich with ideas for Girlette Halloween costumes. (How do you make a ruff?)
L: Williams's mentor, English jurist Edward Coke; the "a man's home is his castle"–guy
R: John Winthrop--Williams's friend and exiler; the"City on a Hill"–guy
Also, weirdly topical today, "the monarch is the law"–guy, King James I--(cousin, once removed, of Queen Elizabeth I, who had executed his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots).
James established the Divine Right of Kings.
A perennially popular idea ^ among tyrants!
"Let's do his costume!" the girlettes say. "He was fine when he was our age."
He is their exact age (8) here, below:
It's a tangled web, and the book goes into detail about English legal and theological wrangles that led to Williams (and other Puritans) emigrating, which I appreciate--it forms the backdrop of much US history and culture.
(We haven't gotten to Anne Hutchinson yet--she was also banished by Winthrop & Co. and went first to Roger Williams in R.I.)
III. And why do I even care, besides random interest?
Random interest would be good enough, but I went looking for Roger Williams because he founded the religion of the nearby church I am liking (fingers crossed):
American Baptist.
Not Southern Baptists--they split when the northern Baptists refused to ordain slave-holders.
Today Southern Baptists number about 14 million, while the American Baptist Church (ABC--how cute is that?) is tiny, with 1 million followers.
I doubt many people who go to my nearby church consider themselves to be actual Baptists.
It is Christian, feels akin to Unitarianism, but most of all seems to be a round-up of liberal people who live nearby and probably don't feel passionately about predestination and other obscurities of religious history.
Sadly, it is NOT a toyous church, physically. Thought it's a classic stone church built in 1908, aside from stained glass and some carved ornaments on the choir loft, there are no fripperies, trinkets, or statues.
There are four woven (paper? felt?) hangings that look--really and truly--like summer camp crafts. Penny Cooper has even written them down in her little book for next summer's Doll Camp: "weave things to hang up".
I think they are embarrassing— if you are going to strip away icons, you should have nothing but the beauty of emptiness, not crafts glued together in the church basement.
Williams was not a halfway guy: eventually he left all denominations, calling himself a Seeker, and a champion of Soul Freedom.
And now I am going to go weave some more God's eyes and listen to a few more hours.
If you're interested, Barry wrote a Smithsonian overview of the whole thing:
"God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea"
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