Idle Echidne Musings

These are my payment for blogging, the time at a cocktail party when I grab your shoulder and will not let you go while I tell you all about my sore tooth or what the bartender told me the other night or about how clever it was to put thumb tacks on the boss's chair while her back was turned.

So I was musing over the concept of "opinions" the other night. Opinions (in this post) are those spicy things one finds quite obviously true, whatever the facts might tell. They are a little bit like your beloved children who can do no wrong, while other people's opinions are the neighbor's spoiled brats. It's very odd that anybody would be interested in other people's opinions, actually. Much better to just read here and get only mine.

But more seriously, opinions are something that comes out when you mix half a pound of evidence, add some quasi-evidence and whip it all up with enormous amounts of childhood memories. Then you bake it and if you're brave enough you will serve it to a large party, asking for comments on how well the cake turned out.

And this is where things may turn out nasty, because loads of people will not like your opinions at all and will tell you so in no uncertain terms. Depending on what those childhood memories might be you might then fall apart and crawl back home crying or you might take out those fancy sharp kitchen knives and do a little dance around the room. Or you might just yell back, with your eyes bulging out and your veins popping.

I don't seem to be able to stick to seriousness in this post. What I really wanted to say that having opinions and expressing them publicly can be quite frightening, especially if you belong to one of the groups who are not supposed to have opinions but to mainly listen to other people's opinions while holding that adoring glazed look. That would be lots of women. Thus, for me to have Public Opinions required the disguise of a goddess. Goddesses can have opinions, even bad ones.

Hence the birth of Echidne.