In mythology, Theseus built the labyrinth to trap the Minotaur. He built it so cleverly that he was afraid he would be lost in the maze. But Ariadne, a princess who had fallen in love with him, gave him a ball of string and told him to unwind it as he walked into the labyrinth and then follow it back out.
That simple gift allowed Theseus to enter, slay the Minotaur, and find his way out.
This hero myth became so well known that Ariadne's ball of yarn—called a "clew" in Old English—became synonymous with anything that helped to solve a problem. Over time, the spelling of the word changed to "clue."
The convent labyrinth is covered with snow, but some person and two small deer have been walking Daedalus' circle without walls. I follow the unseen path and pray for a clue to lead me out.
As the Summer Solstice approaches this week, you may hear the name Litha mentioned.
Litha, also known as Midsummer, is a festival celebrating the Summer Solstice. It is one of the eight "Sabbats" in the Wheel of the Year, observed by Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, and various European folk traditions.
The name Litha is derived from the Old English word for June and June/July, specifically appearing in the writings of the 8th-century monk Bede in his work De Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time). According to Bede, the Anglo-Saxons referred to this time of year as Līða, which essentially translates to "gentle" or "navigable." This name reflected the calm summer weather that made it safe and easy to travel by sea.
In the 20th century, the name was popularized as a designation for the Summer Solstice by Aidan Kelly, an influential figure in modern Paganism. He sought historical-sounding names for the "Lesser Sabbats" on the Wheel of the Year, and Litha was chosen to represent the solstice, distinguishing it from the Christianized "Midsummer" or "St. John's Eve."
Today, it serves as a bridge to ancestral traditions, honoring the time when the sun is at its most potent and the earth is in full bloom.
Utopia, 1977 L–R: Roger Powell, Willie Wilcox, Todd Rundgren, Kasim Sulton
Todd Rundgren's solo work (1972 onward) is a study in genre‑hopping with songs that feel like soul, pop, psychedelia, electronica, and even a cappella.
With the pseudo-band Runt, he made two albums of experimentation, transitioning away from the style of his first band, Nazz.
He was writing more deeply personal lyrics. He was doing a lot of studio experimentation. He was playing nearly all the instruments and doing the vocals himself. The signature albums of that early solo period include Something/Anything?, A Wizard/A True Star, Hermit of Mink Hollow, and Healing.
On his 1973 album A Wizard, a True Star, Rundgren had sung the line "Wait another year, Utopia is here." That lyric predates the band’s formation and suggests Rundgren already envisioned “Utopia” as a concept — a kind of musical ideal or creative destination he wanted to reach. In other words, Utopia wasn’t just a band name, but a kind of mission statement for that time.
One of those genre-hops came with forming the band Utopia. That was 1973, and they performed and recorded through 1986 with occasional reunions since.
During its first three years, the group was a progressive rock band with a somewhat fluid membership known as Todd Rundgren's Utopia. Most of the members in this early incarnation also played on Rundgren's solo albums of the period up to 1975. For a short period of time (1973–74), Todd Rundgren's Utopia consisted of Rundgren and included Hunt Sales and Tony Fox Sales who had been in his former band, Runt.
By 1976, the group was known simply as Utopia and featured a stable quartet of Rundgren, Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell, and John "Willie" Wilcox. This version of the group gradually abandoned progressive rock for more straightforward synth‑pop and a touch of new wave.
This is the one band where it seems that Todd is a bandleader, not just a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist.
The band played long, complex compositions early on with long instrumental passages. The band evolved later into doing tight, hooky, electronic pop closer to Todd's solo work.
In 1980, they had a top 40 hit with "Set Me Free". Though often thought of as a Rundgren solo project, all four members of Utopia wrote, sang, produced, and performed on their albums; "Set Me Free", for example, was sung by Sulton.
The word utopia was invented in 1516 by Sir Thomas More. Thomas More was a 16th‑century English humanist, lawyer, statesman, and author best known for Utopia (1516). He served as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII but refused to accept the king as head of the Church of England. More’s steadfast commitment to conscience and Catholic doctrine led to his execution in 1535. He was later canonized as a martyr.
The word's etymology is a deliberate linguistic pun built from Greek roots. It literally means “no place,” but it also sounds like it could mean “good place.” Built from ou-topos (no place), More coined the term for the title of his 1516 book describing a fictional island society. The "noplace" was More's way of indicating that such a perfect society does not exist.
16th-century readers noticed that utopia sounds almost identical to eutopia - a good place. The sense was reinforced when the contrasting term dystopia (“bad place”) was coined in the 19th century.
More's Utopia is presented as a traveler’s account of a perfect island society in the New World.
But the book is satire, not travel, and a critique of European politics, religion, and inequality. The book’s narrator, Raphael Hythloday, has a name meaning “speaker of nonsense,” reinforcing the satire.
The island’s map and alphabet were also fabricated to deepen the illusion. The word utopia quickly entered English (by 1551) to mean any imagined perfect society, and by the 1610s it was used metaphorically for unrealistic idealism.
Phillumeny is the hobby of collecting items related to matches—most notably matchbox labels, but also matchbooks, matchboxes, and even the tiny printed wrappers from safety matches. Collecting matchbox labels gives us examples of mid-century commercial graphic design.
People who collected matchboxes were once simply called "matchbox collectors." That changed in 1943 thanks to a British collector named Marjorie S. Evans. She wanted a more distinct, sophisticated name for the hobby, similar to philately (stamp collecting) or numismatics (coin collecting). She combined two linguistic roots: phil- (from the Greek philos, meaning "loving" or "fond of") and lumen (from the Latin lumen, meaning "light"). Purists occasionally point out that combining Greek and Latin roots into a single word is a bit of a linguistic "hybrid" faux pas, but the name stuck beautifully.
