Star lichen

What a week! Between work and packing I’ve barely been able to post, and even when I get to the computer I never have time to put on my special Ignoramus mask and cape.

And the figure I was stuck with is as boring as they come: asterismos, adding an unnecessary word to emphasize or draw attention to what follows:

…and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists".

So unobtrusive is this figure—and I begin to wonder whether it is a figure at all—that I simply couldn’t make it the most striking sentence in a long post. The only way to catch it would have been to focus on the short post with just a few lines.

Boring or not, useful or not, I must memorize the figure, so: Picture a gentle hill on which has been placed a completely unnecessary stone staircase; in fact, it was only put there to emphasize the fact that there is a hill. So unnecessary is this staircase on such a gentle hill that no one ever uses it, so it is so covered with moss that you can’t see the stone at all. In fact, on closer examination, it turns out that “a stair IS moss.”