Rowling’s latest Twixter page header is a Blue Oranda Goldfish. Two quick facts and one speculative leap about this beauty:

It grows to eight or nine inches in length, which means you need a big tank if you want it to feel at home. By ‘big,’ I mean at least 20 to 30 gallons up to a 300 gallon ‘bowl’ or a carp pond in the backyard. They can live as long as fifteen years, even twenty, so investing in the right living conditions and care has a pay off in longevity. The chief challenges in that effort are feeding them just the right amount, not too much, not too little, and keeping the tank clean. As big as the fish gets, it produces a lot of waste so the filtration system has to be carefully monitored and the water changed regularly, which, given the size of the tank, is a big deal.

They only exist in captivity and have been a status symbol for the wealthy for centuries:

Orandas, like all fancy varieties of goldfish, are not found in nature. 

According to recent genetic research, it’s thought that all modern goldfish are descended from a species of wild carp, Carassius auratus gibelio. These Prussian or Silver Prussian carp originate from Central Asia, specifically, Siberia, where the fish live in slow-moving or stagnant water bodies, such as ponds, ditches, lakes, and rivers, feeding on algae, plant matter, insect larvae, small crustaceans, and the like.

For hundreds of years, carp were raised as a food source. However, in the 1500s, the first ornamental goldfish were traded to Japan by Chinese breeders, arriving in parts of Europe in the 1600s and the US by the 1800s. 

Large, flat-bodied, brightly colored goldfish were originally kept as ornamental pond fish. However, fancy rounder-bodied varieties were later developed by Asian enthusiasts to be displayed in glass vessels as status symbols in the homes of the wealthy. 

The name ‘Oranda’ is, frankly, fascinating to anyone who took an introductory Latin course in high school. The word also has a meaning in Turkish and Asian languages that may be as relevant, but I’m useless on those scores.

Focusing on the Latin, oranda is a gerundive from oro, orare, the first conjugation Latin verb for ‘to pray, to beg,’ technically the future passive participle, almost certainly here used as a substantive adjective or noun.  Most of us know the ‘-nda’ form from two popular names for women, ‘Amanda’ and ‘Miranda.’ One of the uses or forces of a gerundive is a notion of obligation, hence the names: ‘Amanda’ is ‘a woman who must be or ought to be loved,’ and ‘Miranda’ a ‘woman about whom all must marvel or wonder.’ ‘Oranda,’ on this model, would mean ‘a woman who must be worshipped or begged.’

Oranda, though, is more famous in a slightly different form, as a gerund or verbal noun. The phrase Lex orandi which is so central to Christian teaching, means simply ‘the rule of prayer,’ better ‘the ruling principle of worship.’ [Lex is often translated as ‘law’ which naturally has a sense of force and obligation in it, but here that sense is more of a ‘natural law’ in the sense of the inherent rule or principle at work.] It is almost always used as the first of three gerund phrases, namely, Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi,’ which translates as ‘the ruling principle of worship is the ruling principle of belief which is the ruling principle of life,’ or, using the gerundive force, ‘How one must worship is how one must believe and how one must live.’

The Romans 1:20 principle evident in Orthodox Christian worship — the layout out of the church and principal place of the iconostasis, the chant, the iconography, the chiastic structure of the three primary services, and the choreography of the priest, choir, and deacons — are reflected in the neptic-hesychastic beliefs of Orthodox Christians and way of life practices of the faithful; the absence of this principle in Catholic and Protestant worship, the lex orandi, is the great and substantive divide between the ‘right believers’ or ‘Orthodox’ and the ‘other-believers’ or ‘heterodox’ in creed or thinking and way of life.

Back to the fish!

Oranda, and I’m guessing here, probably comes from the bumps on the head of the fish which resemble a crown. This is a reach, I know, but given the symbolic meaning of fish to Christians, ichthys being an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God’ and the ‘Jesus Fish’ being a cipher for the conjunction of two spheres, the meeting of heaven and earth in the God-man, a fun interpretation of oranda is ‘the fish who must be worshipped.’ See this post for the relevance of this symbol for understanding Rowling’s favorite painting and her own artistry. Given the discipline necessary to keep such a fish in clean water, maybe making those duties part of your prayer rule would be a good idea.

I have no idea, of course, if this has any correlation with why Rowling chose to include this Blue Oranda Goldfish in her twixter homepage header.

Beneath that header, Mrs Murray let her readers know that Hallmarked Man is still very much a work in progress. Even with the tease that Strike 8 will include the Strike fandom’s longed-for moment when “Strike and Robin finally fall into each other’s arms,” it looks like we won’t see the next installment in the series until well into 2025.

This time last year, we were just beginning to explore the depths (and the structure!) of Running Grave. It’s a bit unreasonable for readers to expect books of this length and quality to be produced on an annual basis. I’m going to assume, consequently, for my own mental health and in respect to the creative energy involved in writing these novels, that we will not have Hallmarked Man until next summer or even this time next year. An earlier publication date, holding to my new expectation, will only be a wonderful surprise.

Back to searching online for a 300 gallon Blue Oranda goldfish tank…

J. K. Rowling put out two tweets yesterday that seemed to channel her inner Ron Weasley. She’s not transphobic, Islamophobic, or homophobic but it seems she has a healthy fear of a flood of spiders:

Watching that video, I confess to be a member of Team Jo if the entrance exam is alarm even while knowing it is just a film of large spiders on the wall.

Some of Rowling’s 14 million + followers on Twixter shared their stories of life with insects, especially a surprise flood of spiders:

The threads beneath these tweets are worth reading — lots of Great Australian memes and Rowling jokes.

Which is, I think, to say “Mission Accomplished.” Rowling went on offense in the transgender conflict earlier in the week and it seems probable that her PR team told her to lighten it up a bit, “You’ve got a book coming out soon, right, Jo, and a Bronte Studios adaptation? How about a silly tweet for a change-up, something with creepy crawly animals for a laugh?”

More on that switching of gears in the Gender-Sex is Real War in coming days and on Rowling’s very idiosyncratic feminism. Cheers!

Rowling tweeted this in response to a fan who joked about her supposedly heading to Greenland to escape criticism of her stand against the gold medal winning boxers in this summer’s Paris Olympic Games.

To no one’s surprise, she seems to be doing her best to sail again to the far north for her birthday next year. Yesterday she tweeted about Fabrizio ‘Valentina’ Petrillo, a 47 year old Italian “transgender woman” who satisfied the Paralympic guidelines for men-competing-as-women with respect to current testosterone levels. These guidelines are ridiculous because, once having passed through puberty, the male human body is significantly stronger and faster than the average female body, an advantage that is not off-set by lowering testosterone and elevating estrogen. Rowling sarcastically called Petrillo “inspirational” and a “role model,” if only to “the cheat community” of men-competing-as-women.

The first comments to this thread were behind Rowling and against Petrillo, not an unheard of thing now that Rowling’s 14 million twitter followers include significant numbers of Gender Critical feminists, two of whom noted that “transgender” Petrillo’s specific practices from youth forward with respect to his mother’s and wife’s clothing was understood by psychologists as “transvestic fetishism.” Read More “Rowling Heads to the Paris Paralympics”

Rowling confirmed for her more than fourteen million Twixter followers what we have been reporting here for several weeks, namely, that her annual ‘Birthday Party’ cruise this year took the Murray clan to Greenland. In a four part thread, she thanked the people whom she had met, shared pictures of the natural beauty there (to include feminists near the Artic Circle), endorsed a guide to the folklore of Greenland, and assured her readers that it was a working vacation, i.e., she had not been “idle” in finishing The Hallmarked Man.

One by one, then:

The Rowling Library helped those of us who have neglected to keep up with our Danish (Greenland dialect) by providing this helpful translation:

The natural beauty!

It looks like Rowling &Company had a costume ball for her birthday revel and that she dressed up as ‘The Mother of the Sea.’ Forgive me for wondering if she traveled with the necessary dress, tiara, cosmetics, and hair dyes to pull this off or they sell these things at most shops in Greenland’s port cities. 

The Maria Kreutzmann book she recommended, Bestiarium Greenlandica, can be purchased at Amazon. What’s it about?

Meet the motley crew of dangerous, cheeky, and fantastical beings of Greenland! 

The world of Greenlandic mythology is inhabited by creatures that have played a vital role in Inuit beliefs and stories throughout the ages. The Bestiarium is a collection of what is generally known about these diverse beings, spirits, and animals. Their stories are gritty, cruel, and reflect from the harsh landscape and lifestyle of ancient Greenland. Descriptions are paired with illustrations by contemporary Greenlandic illustrators that transport these mythological beings into the 21st Century. A brief history of Greenland and the shaman tradition launches the reader into the ancient world of Greenland and how myth and legend told generation after generation can mould and depict a place that was dark and grim as mischievous and lively and full of natural wonders. 

If the Fantastic Beasts franchise is ever revived (ho!), perhaps this bestiary from the great north will be part of Newt’s kit.

And then there was this bit of news, perhaps as much for Rowling’s editors as for her readers:

Taking a closer look at the written page, we find a quotation from Oxenham’s A Maid of the Silver Sea as the epigraph for Hallmarked Man’s Part Nine:

That passage has a note of finality to it and Running Grave only had nine chapter sets, Rowling’s ‘Parts,’ so we can hope that she is nearing the finish line. I have to doubt very much, though, that it will be available for your Serious Striker’s stocking stuffer this December. Alas!

For a in depth conversation about the Maid of the Silver Sea and Oxenham, Nick Jeffery tells all in ‘Sark, Snark and Censorship.’

One jokester on the thread noted the hysteria that had been going on in her absence about her Olympic boxing “cyber-bullying” and how her silence for several weeks had meant to her critics that she was retreating from her war against gender theory extremists (discussed here). Her response was characteristically buoyant, appropriate for a woman sailing back across the North Atlantic in her yacht.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on the influence of P. D. James on Robert Galbraith. Stay tuned!

 

Last week I posted ‘Rowling Rages Against Olympic Women’s Boxing Debacle,‘ in which piece I reported on the author’s sixteen tweets between 30 July and 3 August on the subject of men being permitted to compete against women in the 2024 Olympic Games. See that article for the facts about these karyotype XY boxers, the pushback against Rowling’s  assertion that this is being allowed by a “misogynistic sporting establishment” rather than by an IOC cowed by feminists and their genderist offspring, and my thoughts about the relative importance of this story compared to the UK riots and incipient war between Iran and Israel.

Since I wrote that post, the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers won all their matches against biological women and were awarded gold medals. Rowling has tweeted and retweeted fifteen more times on this subject since 7 August; her only other three tweets in that time frame were one to condemn the UK riots targeting Muslim groups (nothing about those targeting “non Asian” populations or the causes of anti-Labour riots as well as the attacks on immigrants in the UK), one about the Islamist state’s abuse of women in Iraq, and another about those in Iran.

[Aside: again, nothing about the history of Islamist crimes against women in the United Kingdom or the context of the UK riots contra open immigration, making the irony and hypocrisy of her rioting post’s exclusivity that much more obvious. See ‘England Burning’ for the necessary historical perspective and typology of current populist protests in the US and UK that you won’t find in Rowling’s tweets.]

Regardless, Rowling has tweeted on the subject of men being able to beat up women in the 2024 Olympics more than thirty times since the end of July; thirty one out of thirty seven tweets and retweets have been on the Olympic boxing scandal or 84%. She hasn’t tweeted on the subject or any topic since 7 August.

Today this story took a predictable turn. One of the XY boxers, Imane Khelif, the Algerian who won a gold medal against XX competition, has initiated a law suit in France claiming that he has been the subject of “cyber bullying.” Rowling is said to be named among those accused of causing Khelif this harm. From the BBC report: Read More “Rowling to be Sued for Cyberbullying?”