Sasha Makedonsky

Mark Liberman has a post at Language Log discussing Alexander the Great, and his relative Greekness, Macedonianess, or Persianess...

I don't have anything to add to that, but it did remind me of one of the many subtitle failings in the otherwise excellent Russian mini-series Brigada (Gang). Our hero is named Aleksandr, which has the nicknames Sanya and Sasha, among others; various people call him those or a different one based on his surname. Who calls him what is a reflection of how they see him, though the subtitles don't always track it well.

But what I was reminded of was the moment when he's first courting his future wife. He tells her that his name is Sasha, and then that Sasha is a lucky name. Throughout history, he says, people with that name have been winners. Think of Sasha Pushkin, he says. When she laughs he reaches further back and turns the prince Alexander Nevsky into "Sasha Nevsky". Her amusement at that leads him to the biggest name of all: Alexander the Great.

Except that Russians call him "Alexander of Macedon", which is "Aleksandr Makedonsky". So what our Sasha actually calls him is "Sasha Makedonsky" - which is exactly what the subtitler put.

Which no (or very few) non-Russian speakers would recognize as Alexander the Great... making the reference both obscure and not funny.

Happy Halloween

Happy Birthday, John

John Keats was born today in 1795, and died 25 years later of tuberculosis.

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water," he asked for his tombstone, but as time passed that became less and less true... Look here for his life and poetry in context of his times.

Cat! who hast pass'd thy grand cliacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy'd? - How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but pr'ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me - and upraise
Thy gentle mew - and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
For all the wheezy asthma, - and for all
Thy tail's tip is nick'd off - and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a mail,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter'dst on glass bottled wall.

more Keats here

Happy Birthday, John

The Atlas of Independence, the Sage of Braintree, John Adams, born this day in 1735 (if you don't count the 11 days 'lost' to the Gregorian calendar in 1752; his birthday was October 19, 1735 by the Old Style, Julian calendar. I don't know what Adams thought of that, but Washington is on record as feeling as though those days had been stolen from him). (On the other hand, these were people who could handle New Year on 25 March.)

Adams defended British troops charged in the Boston Massacre in 1770 (and got most of them off and two convicted of manslaughter only) - an action he later called "one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." Contrary to the 'obnoxious and disliked' image fostered in the play 1776, Adams was one of the most respected advocates for Independence in the colonies; Washington's nomination as general and Jefferson's as writer of the Declaration were both his ideas, and it was Adams who stood up on July 1, 1776 and spoke in favor of independence, extemporaneously, for two hours . Unfortunately, because he spoke without notes and no one took any, we don't have a record of this speech, but Jefferson later said that Adams spoke "with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats."

But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
—'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

(And Writer's Almanac last year featured a pessimistic quote we must prove wrong:) Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

I highly recommend Passionate Sage by John Ellis, and then John Adams by David McCullough, for those who want to know more about this least known of the great Founders - or Ellis's Founding Brothers for an overview of that remarkable group of men.

Sky Watch: Tree at Sunrise

It's not an apple-tree, but there was magic and gold, and the mockingbirds were singing...



And who shall say—
Whatever disenchantment follows—
That we ever forget magic,
Or that we can ever betray,
On this leaden earth,
The apple-tree, the singing,
And the gold?
  --Thomas Wolfe


more Sky Watchers here

That's Capitalism, Baby

Some woman on the news tease was complaining that different pharmacies sell drugs at - gasp! - different prices. "If something is worth one price that ought to be the price everywhere, shouldn't it?" she asked querulously.

Hey. That's the market, baby. You charge what people will pay. Another woman said that "If you only shop at one store you're not going to save any money, 'cause it all averages out, you know."

And that, of course, is the way it works. Loss leaders: charge less for one prescription medicine that lots of people buy, and then ratchet up the rest. Everybody chooses a different med, and they get a whole lot of people in buying everything. ... Of course, you have to factor in gas and time, but with enough meds, you'll almost certainly come out ahead drug-store shopping.

But this naive idea that there should be one price for prescriptions across all the pharmacies? C'mon, are you outraged when your Chex are cheaper at one store, and your oranges at another?

Or do you secretly think that health care is somehow different?

UPS really does not give a damn about the receiver

So I had a delivery attempt today by UPS. Their little note says they'll be back tomorrow between 10:30 and 2:00.

Guess what? I won't be home then, either. I kind of have a job.

My old driver did in fact come around after 5:30, but he's gone. The new one clearly doesn't care if anybody is home to pick things up, or else he'd check the "after 5:00" box on the notice. And of course UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays. Their business model is back in the '50s, when every household had someone who could be at home all day, every day, just to wait on deliveries.

Their website offers me a chance to change the address to my workplace. I normally have things delivered there, anyway, but this is a new phone and they only shipped it to my home... Hmmm. For all I know, that's why the website gave me the result it did. See, first it told me it would cost $4 to make the change. Then it told me that "The Delivery Change Request could not be processed at this time. Please try again later or contact UPS." Grrr.

So I did contact them, by phone, and the cheery robot told me that she could help me for $6. Yes. They're charging me an extra 50% because their website didn't work.

Well, I didn't take her up on it. I put a "will call" notice at the website (which did work), and I'll either beg a ride or take the bus (I hope not the latter, the local bus will take 2 hours to get me to the place).

Clearly, UPS is only concerned with pleasing their customer - who is the person paying them to deliver it. They only make the slightest token effort to accommodate single working people who are the customers of those shippers... Since I can usually choose my shipping address, UPS users isn't on my "won't buy from you because of your shipping policies" list, like FedEx users are.

But still.... Grrrrr.

Happy Birthday, Boswell

Today in Edinburgh was born, in 1740, the man who invented modern biography and became a noun - Boswell, author of "Boswell's Life of Johnson" (The Life of Samuel Johnson). "I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody," wrote Boswell, and made Dr. Johnson better known to us than any man before and most since. It's not the only thing he wrote (his Account of Corsica was deservedly famous), but it's the one he'll be forever remembered for.

Happy Birthday, Valerie

Today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1933, Valerie Worth was born. I love her Small Poems.

Stars

While we
Know they are
Enormous suns,
Gold lashing
Fire-oceans,
Seas of heavy silver flame,

They look as
Though they could
Be swept
Down, and heaped,
Cold crystal
Sparks, in one
Cupped palm.

The first time

From Human Rights Campaign:

Today, something extraordinary happened. Love conquered hate. After more than a decade, the inclusive hate crimes bill we've fought so hard for has been signed by the president and sealed in law.

I cannot overstate the importance of this moment. This is the first time ANY federal equality measure protecting LGBT rights has become law. The very first time. And it is the first federal law to explicitly protect transgender people. It is a touchstone in our movement, a triumph of what is right. And I truly feel things will never be the same.

After a lot of disappointments, something goes right.

Happy Birthday, John

John Hollander was born today in New York City in 1929. He is currently the Sterling Professor emeritus of English at Yale, and still writing (his most recent collection, A Draft of Light, was just publishe).


As the Sparks Fly Upward

As of an ungrounded grief,
Bluish sparks fly upward from
Under the shadow-thickened,
Tree-covered, part of night toward
What can yet be construed as
Dimmed azure, while the summer
Glow of soft streetlamp light hums
Along the wide sidewalk through
Listening leaves: fireflies
Far from the sea rise in an
Untroubled-looking midland,
Soundless, their gaps in the dark
Soundless, and the thunder soon
Coming with a crash across
Glistening eaves will be no
Answer, echo, or noisy
Amplifying of echo.
I will await what the ground,
The great, grass-skinned ground, will say.

Find more here

Donors Choose: Helping Kids Read

This is a genuinely great charity; you give money directly to a teacher who uses it to fund a project - sometimes as basic as buying books.

I've got a Giving Page here. Please consider donating via it, but if you don't like those projects, please look around the site, find a project you do like, and suggest it for my page. Or just give to it. And remember - you don't have to fully fund a project.

Here's something a teacher whose project was funded said today:

The gift of having books where the students can hear different levels of reading is the best gift possible. This has given my students independence in their listening skills.

When we received the boxes, my students acted as if it was Christmas. They were so excited. They chose books and ask daily if they can read books on tape.

One student in particular comes in early, just to listen to books! What a blessing, she is reading below 1st grade level, but she is trying so hard to catch up to everyone else.

These books have made a big difference in my students attitude towards reading.

Thank you so much for helping my students now and students of the future.

quid pro quo

So, someplace where I was reading about Mr Moto they mentioned "the third great Oriental detective" series, Mr. Wong, also with a Caucasian in the title role - this time Boris Karloff. I had not heard of these movies, but got hold of them. They're very adequate B-movies for the time period and Karloff is quite good even though he's less Chinese than Lorre is Japanese!

However, in 1940 they made one last Wong (Karloff did five), and this one starred - hold onto your hats - Keye Luke. Yes. A Chinese guy playing the lead. It's kind of odd, because he's much younger than Karloff and played Wong as much younger, and as meeting the detective for the first time (all the Wongs take place in San Francisco, with a cop and reporter as regular characters), but there was no hint that this movie was supposed to be in the 20s or anything... Anyway, there was one astounding moment (for 1940). Wong has arrived at the house of the murdered archaeologist and there in the hall is a huge box. The dead man's partner informed him that it held "a Ming emperor!"

Wong responded: "Yes, I understand a Chinese delegation will be digging up George Washington in return."

Unstoppable Talking Popups

Ok, I have adblock plus and I'm still getting apparently random popups. Some of them are bogus surveys - occasionally, as now, hours after I've been to site they claim to be about (they're all identical and they all boil down to "would you buy something cheap?"). But the really obnoxious ones come with sound.

I kind of wish I could uninstall Firefox 3.5.3 and go back to the previous version, you know?

But I can tell you this: I am never buying anything from anybody who hijacks my computer's speakers and tries to force me to listen to their ad even after I've closed their popup, even if it'll make me rich!, whether it's that Aussie guy with the investment system or the woman who wants to pay me to put links on Google.

Happy Birthday, Katherine

Today in Birmingham, England, in 1846, Katherine Harris Bradley was born. She wrote, along with her lover, Emma Ward Cooper, under the name of "Michael Field".

Nightfall

She sits beside: through four low panes of glass
The sun, a misty meadow, and the stream;
Falling through rounded elms the last sunbeam
Through night's thick fibre sudden barges pass
With great forelights of gold, with trailing mass
Of timber: rearward of their transient glearn
The shadows settle, and profounder dream
Enters, fulfils the shadows. Vale and grass
Are now no more; a last leaf strays about,
Then every wandering ceases; we remain.
Clear dusk, the face of wind is on the sky:
The eyes I love lift to the upper pane --
Their voice gives note of welcome quietly
'I love the air in which the stars come out.'

Happy Birthday, Dylan

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales today in 1914. Here's his Poem In October photo ©Jeff Towns/DBC

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

States opt out - people opt in?

If your state opts out, can you buy insurance from another state?

Or will you just be able to bitch at your state leg when your out-of-state friends have affordable insurance and you don't?

Non-restrictive relative...

Spotted this in the newspaper-article-intro to the 1940 film Phantom of Chinatown:

The scientific world is anxiously awaiting the report that Dr. John Benton, of Southern University, will make on his recently returned expedition into Mongolia. It is rumored that Dr. Benton discovered the long lost solution to the Temple of Eternal Fire, that has been the goal of Archeologists for centuries. If true it should prove of tremendous financial importance to China. Wow.

A relative non-restrictive that! You don't see that every day...

But it's not about the hate

A lot of people are talking about the Vatican's new strategy to lure welcome married priests and other disaffected Anglicans. The US church has been letting married Episcopal priests convert and stay both married and priests for a while now, so in a sense this is nothing new. But it's breath-taking how many people are buying that it's all about loving those disgruntled refugees from a more liberal church and not about why they're leaving.

A letter in today's WaPo sums it up:

The Catholic Church announces its policy will be to lure priests from among disaffected Anglicans ["Vatican Fishing for Disgruntled Anglicans," front page, Oct. 21], five months after losing a popular Miami priest, Alberto Cutié, to the Episcopalians (members of the Anglican Communion) because he had fallen in love with a woman.

The hypocrisy of this latest decision is breathtaking.

No kidding.

Nook: with ADS!! ... no thanks

I bought the Kindle and I like it a lot. Now B&N has a reader, the nook, and over at TPM, Josh loves the color:

Just on a very casual glance some features that make Nook sound much better than Kindle are 1) color, speaks for itself

(he also loves the touch-screen, which I on principle DO NOT WANT on something I am trying to read, but ymmv).

However, look at this (click image to enlarge):



Now, I could be mistaking an advertising mockup for the real thing, but ... I don't want ads on the bottom of the page I'm reading in a book. Color or not.

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• David Morgan-Mar at Irregular Webcomic has a post about Newton's third law: think about what your feet are actually doing to the ground. You plant your foot, and then your foot tries to push the ground backwards. This is easy to see if you imagine walking and accidentally stepping on a skateboard. Which way does your foot propel the skateboard? Backwards, not forwards. So your feet are definitely pushing backwards. Newton to the rescue! Your feet provide a force to the Earth, which means the Earth provides an equal force to your body, in the opposite direction. The entire Earth being pretty difficult to move, the result is that its reaction force pushes you forwards, rather than you pushing the Earth backwards*. When you walk, your feet are pushing backwards, and it's only through the magic of Newton's Third Law that you get where you want to go.


• Sean at Cosmic Variance looks at an essay predicting the end of the world because of the LHC: A recent essay in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye has managed to attract quite a bit of attention around the internets — most of it not very positive. It concerns a recent paper by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya (and some earlier work) discussing a seemingly crazy-sounding proposal — that we should randomly choose a card from a million-card deck and, on the basis of which card we get, decide whether to go forward with the Large Hadron Collider. Responses have ranged from eye-rolling and heavy sighs to cries of outrage, clutching at pearls, and grim warnings that the postmodernists have finally infiltrated the scientific/journalistic establishment, this could be the straw that breaks the back of the Enlightenment camel, and worse. Since I am quoted (in a rather non-committal way) in the essay, it’s my responsibility to dig into the papers and report back. And my message is: relax! Western civilization will survive. The theory is undeniably crazy — but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing. And an occasional fun essay about speculative science in the Times is not going to send us back to the Dark Ages, or even rank among the top ten thousand dangers along those lines.


• Calla at Cocktail Party Physics has a different take: Nielsen and Ninomiya start to make some bold statements including but not limited to the idea that it is God who hates the Higgs (Even though he created it? Make up your mind, God.). He hates it so much that he "avoids" it (maybe they dated and it ended badly?), and to do this he must stop the LHC from starting up. It's like your friend who doesn't want his ex-girlfriend to show up at your party so he just starts telling people to say that it's cancelled so she won't come but won't feel uninvited and then he goes back in time and causes a wiring problem at your party. God is that guy, I guess. I'm not joking when I say that Nielsen and Ninomiya then go really far off the deep end and suggest that the wiring malfunction and resulting explosion at the LHC in 2008, which delayed particle collisions for over a year, were a result of this jinx. Following that up, they suggest that if their theory is correct, another accident will occur and people could get hurt or even die. To even make this suggestion is irresponsible unless you really believe that your theory is correct. Are we supposed to take this as a warning? If you are willing to suggest that this could happen, even under your extreme circumstances, then aren't we forced to take it seriously to prevent injuries and deaths? These are real people you're talking about. It's really tasteless.


• Jonah at The Frontal Cortex blogs on research showing making mistakes helps learning: In the latest Mind Matters, the psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn review some interesting new work by Nate Kornell and colleagues, which looked at the advantages of learning through error. Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to teach children is to have them repeatedly practice once they know the right answer, so that the correct response gets embedded into the brain. (According to this approach, it's important to avoid mistakes while learning so that our mistakes don't get accidentally reinforced.) But this error-free process turns out to be inefficient: Kids learn material much faster when they screw-up first. In other words, getting the wrong answer helps us remember the right one.


• And going mainstream, here's an article by Amy Wallace from Wired on the anti-vaccination movement: Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative. Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why?

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: The rest of Mr Moto. For what they were they were very enjoyable. Gotta say Lorre did a fine job. Out of curiosity I picked up the Mr Wong movies, which I had never even heard of: Boris Karloff in the title role... They're pretty good mystery movies, but Karloff was a bizarre choice. He's fine (of course) but still. How odd, and sad, that the prevailing time wouldn't let a fine actor like, say, Philip Ahn have a role like this. Reminds me of the decision not to cast Bruce Lee in Kung Fu...

TV: House... maybe he's not quite totally stable? And neither is anybody else on this show! Whee! FlashForward - not an interesting episode - and considering that it ended with everybody under attack, exploding cars, and such, that's not a good sign. I'll give it one more. Modern Family - I love the dialog. Phil is forcing Gloria and Claire to talk about their relationship. Gloria says she feels like Claire doesn't like her. "Wow," says Phil, "powerful, powerful stuff. Claire, tell us how that makes you feel." Claire glares at him and begins, "Right now I'm feeling a lot of anger-" "Don't tell me, tell her," says Phil. "OK. Gloria, right now I'm really angry at Phil." Numb3rs - This director is annoying. I posted on it, so here I'll just say, he's really annoying. Otherwise, the story was good and the ending very effective, though if I'm going to praise the writing I do have to ask: why couldn't one of the guys be the one who lost a baby, just for a change? CFL Football!!! Yes, I discovered that CSN/TCN shows them, and so I got to watch the Ti-Cats save their playoff hopes, and my Als get their butts kicked by Winnipeg 41-24, their first East loss this year, so a mixed-emotion discovery.

Read: Finished Don Quixote, excellent (of course). Skullduggery by Aaron Elkins - once again I figured out much but not all of the mystery. Even Money by Dick & Felix Francis, not bad. Evidence by Jonathan Kellerman, which was a good entry in the series, better than the last couple in fact. A Face in the Window by Sarah Graves, a pretty good entry - better than some of the recent ones, if a bit forced. Bringing Jake's father back wasn't necessarily the best idea Graves ever had...

Instead of watching and dying...

Is it wrong that I, when watching the opening scenes of Jackie Chan's The Myth, I kept hoping that Princess Ok Soo would just take off that long robe, climb out of the burning wagon on the edge of the cliff, unhitch the horses, and gallop away?

How much is being alleged?

In the Letters to the Public Editor in today's NYT, a reader makes this point:

Even in simple matters like the order of words, an assumption of guilt is frequently conveyed. Any reporter or editor should know that there is a great difference between "Prosecutors allege that Jones shot Smith because of a dispute over money," and "Jones shot Smith over a dispute about money, prosecutors charge." Nonetheless, the fact that this is only an allegation is routinely buried at the end of a sentence describing charges.

The editor responds:

I am leery of claims that The Times “routinely” does this or that, but Mr. Margolis has a point in this case. In fact, headlines, which carry an especially large punch, are often structured the way he describes. Journalistic convention says to give readers the information first, followed by the attribution. But I think Mr. Margolis makes a good case for reversing that when it comes to unproven accusations of criminal conduct.

Both of them are concerned with the placement of the attribution. In that concern, they miss another point about the sort of sentence they're discussing. These aren't simple sentences; they contain several assertions, and the problem is how the verb "alleged" is applied - all of them, or only to one.

"Prosecutors allege that Jones shot Smith because of a dispute over money" contains a premise which is accepted by the reader as he moves on. You can rewrite this as "Prosecutors allege that the reason Jones shot Smith was a dispute over money", and this more obviously brands only the reason as the allegation. That Jones did indeed shoot Smith is assumed - only the reason is open to doubt. It's a more subtle version of the old "when did Jones stop beating his wife" ploy.

There's a material (or informal) fallacy called "begging the question" or circular reasoning, or in Latin petitio principi. The Latin means "assuming the initial point" (and "begging the question" isn't a good translation, as it leads people to think it means "leading to another question") and it involves an argument in which the conclusion is actually part of its own support. An example would be a lawyer arguing that since the defendants show no remorse, they should be punished: Claiming that they should show remorse assumes their guilt; if they are innocent, why should they be remorseful?

But petitio principi can be found in many other guises. One that is extremely common is hiding a premise in one clause of a complex sentence. Clauses create separate assertions in a sentence which can be true or false independent of each other. For instance, it may be true that Jones and Smith had a dispute over money with it being true that Jones shot Smith for that - or any - reason.

This statement is composed of not one, but two clauses: Jones shot Smith - the reason was money. Thus there is a matrix of four ways to break it down by truth and falsity:

a - Jones shot Smith / Jones' reason for shooting him was money
b - Jones shot Smith / Jones' reason for shooting him was not money
c - Jones did not shoot Smith / Jones' reason for shooting him was money
d - Jones did not shoot Smith / Jones' reason for shooting him was not money

As you can see, statements c and d are actually meaningless. They aren't right or wrong, true or false: they have no meaning. There can be no reason (or motive) for a shooting if the shooting never occurred. The statements are nonsense.

The real problem with "Jones shot Smith over a dispute about money, prosecutors charge" is not the placement of the attributive clause. It's that hidden presumption: that of guilt.

Happy Birthday, Anne

Born today in 1941, Anne Tyler - Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who celebrates the minutae of ordinary lives lived by ordinary people who are splendidly not ordinary in the narrow sense. I love her books - she's one of the few authors whose new novel I pre-order, in hardback, and who never disappoints. A private person, she makes no tours or public appearances, and I honor that here by not showing her face - only her latest three novels. May she write many more.

Leaking tension

Mr Wong, the famous detective, and his professorial friend are investigating a murder in a rich man's San Francisco mansion. A ladder to a french door on the second floor has been found. Leaning over the balcony to look at it, Mr Wong says, " I don't understand that at all."

"What? That our Mr X should have to force an entrance into the house?" asks the professor.

"Or Mrs X," Wong replies with significant emphasis on the Mrs. "Or Miss X."

It plays out funnily. All the tension dissolves with that "(pause) or Miss". Even Karloff can't keep it dramatic.

Open Letter to Ralph Hemecker

I just watched the Numb3rs episode "Hydra", and I have to say this: Your work is annoying.

It's obtrusive. It distracts from the story. It forces itself on the viewer, makes us consciously aware of how arty it is. I hate it.

I could really do without all your extreme closeups of not even as much as a half face, arty angles (like through the ceiling fan), people on the edge of the frame (or just off it), and especially without the over-the-gunsight shots, like some video game POV.

Please. Trust your story - which was really good - and your actors - who are also. Lines like "Is this [book] about the 'cake problem'? What's the matter with you mathematicians? Cake is never a problem." do more for the viewer than all that obtrusive camera work.

Happy Birthday, Antonie

Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek was born today in Delft, the Netherlands. Now known as the Father of Microbiology, he was a master of the microscope - which he perfected - and the first to observe and describe single celled organisms, which he referred to as animalcules. He was also the first to record microscopic observations of muscle fibers, bacteria, spermatozoa and blood flow in capillaries.

Hey! CFL on TV

I've just discovered the CFL playoffs are on TV here - not just "listen online"! Hamilton vs Toronto right now on Comcast Sportsnet, and tomorrow my Alouettes at Winnipeg on TCN!

Hot dog! Maybe the Grey Cup will be on, too.

Butterfly nom

I believe this to be a Southern Cloudywing. I'm not positive, because it was feeding on these little white flowers last week, and that seems late according to Kaufman...

Happy Birthday, John

Today in 1805, John Russell Bartlett was born. He was a co-founder of the American Ethnological Society and author of that invaluable book, A Dictionary of American Regionalisms (on line here). Some entries:

GO AHEAD. To proceed; to go forward. A seaman's phrase which has got (into common use)

TO GO BY. To call; to stop at. Used in the Southern States.--Sherwood's Georgia. Mr. Pickering says this singular expression is often used at the South. "Will you go by and dine with me?" i. e. in passing my house will you stop and dine?.

TO GO FOR. To be in favor of. Thus, 'I go for peace with Mexico,' means I am in favor of peace with Mexico, or, as an Englishman would say, I am for peace with Mexico. This vulgar idiom is a recent one, and is greatly affected by political and other public speakers, who ought to be the guardians of the purity of the language instead of its most indefatigable corruptors.

TO GO IT BLIND. To accede to any object with out due consideration.

TO GO IT STRONG. To perform an act with vigor or without scruple.

TO GO THE WHOLE FIGURE. To go to the fullest extent in the attainment of any object.

TO GO THE BIG FIGURE. To do things on a large scale.

TO GO THE WHOLE HOG. A Western vulgarism, meaning to be out and out in favor of anything. A softened form of the phrase is to go the entire animal.

TO GO THROUGH THE MILL. A metaphor alluding to grain which has been through the mill. A Western editor observed that the mail papers looked as if they had been through the mill, so much worn were they by being shaken over the rough roads. It is often said of a person who has experienced anything, and especially difficulties, losses, &c.

Shadow of Starling

I was just snapping a shot of a bunch of starlings in a tree...

Sky Watch: Scudded Skies

I wasn't sure which of these views of this afternoon's clouding sky - the first looking east, the second west - to put up, so here are both of them.







more Sky Watchers here - and believe me: you really want to see this week's cover shot: an autumn sunset in Kolkata.

Blur

I heard him before I spotted him Tuesday afternoon. But then he changed trees and I found him. Most of my pictures of him look like this, or worse, as he hits the tree fast and hard.



But then there's this one: Downy Woodpecker holding still!

Happy Birthday, Ivan Alekseyevich

Иван Алексеевич Бунин (Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin) was born to a once-wealthy but impoverished land-owning family in Voronezh, Russia, on this day in 1870 (it was Oct 10, Old Style).

He was a poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote poetry first, including the collections "Под открытым небом" (1898 Pod otkrytym nebom, Under Open Skies) and "Листопад" (1901 Listopad, November (Leaf-fall)), and then short stories, the most famous of which include Господин из Сан-Франциско, Gospodin iz San-Frantsisko, The Gentleman from San Francisco), Антоновские яблоки (Antonovskiye yabloki, Antonov's Apples), Сосны (Sosni, Pines), Новая дорога (Novaya doroga, A New Road), and Чернозем (Chernozem, Black Earth), won him great acclaim.

But after 1905, things became darker in Russia and in Bunin's work. His first novels, Деревня (1910, Derevnia, The Village), and Сухдол (1912, Sukhdol, Dry Valley), written before he left Russia after the Revolution, portrayed a decaying countryside which destroyed the image of idealized peasants and garnered more criticism in his native country than praise.

Works written in exile in France include his diary, in which he attacked the Bolsheviks, Окаянные дни (published in 1920, Okayannye Dni, Cursed Days); Жизнь Арсеньева (1933, Zhizn Areseneva, The Life of Arsenev) - first in a projected but unfinished trilogy, Митина любовь (1925, Mitina Lubov, Mitya's Love), Тёмные Аллеи (1946, Tyomnyye Allei, Shadowed Paths) written during the Nazi occupation, and Воспоминания (1950, Vospominaniya, Memories and Portraits). As a translator Bunin was highly regarded. He published in 1898 a translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1903 by the Russian Academy of Science, to which he was elected in 1909. Among Bunin's other translations were Lord Byron's Manfred and Cain, Tennyson's Lady Godiva, and works from Alfred de Musset, and François Coppée.

Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933, but he had become an unperson in the Soviet Union: not only were his books not to be found, his name was unspoken and certainly unwritten.

Over at Language Hat, Hat has a translation of Book (Книга) which is quite good.

Here are a few of his poems with my translations:


Неуловимый свет разлился над землею,
Над кровлями безмолвного села.
Отчетливей кричат перед зарею
Далеко на степи перепела.

Нет ни души кругом - ни звука, ни тревоги...
Спят безмятежным сном зеленые овсы...
Нахохлясь, кобчик спит на кочке у дороги,
Покрытый пылью матовой росы...

Но уж светлеет даль... Зелено-серебристый,
Неуловимый свет восходит над землей,
И белый пар лугов, холодный и душистый,
Как фимиам, плывет перед зарей.

1894

The elusive light spills over the earth,
Over the roofs of the silent town.
And before the dawn the quails' clear cries
Can be heard from across the steppe.

Not one soul is about - not a sound, not an alarm...
Untroubled dreams keep the sleeping oats...
Head tucked, the falcon sleeps on the hillock,
His tousled feathers covered in dull, dusty dew...

But light is in the distance now... Silvery green,
The elusive light covers the earth,
And white steam off the meadows, cold and sweet
Like incense, wafts before the dawn.

* * *

РОДИНА

Под небом мертвенно-свинцовым
Угрюмо меркнет зимний день,
И нет конца лесам сосновым,
И далеко до деревень.

Один туман молочно-синий,
Как чья-то кроткая печаль,
Над этой снежною пустыней
Смягчает сумрачную даль.

1896

HOMELAND

Under a sky leaden like death
The wintry day fades into murk;
There is no end to the piney woods
And any villages are far away..

Only fog, milky blue,
Like someone's gentle grief
Thrown over this snowy emptiness,
Softens the twilit distance.

* * *

Все лес и лес. А день темнеет;
Низы синеют, и трава
Седой росой в лугах белеет...
Проснулась серая сова.

На запад сосны вереницей
Идут, как рать сторожевых,
И солнце мутное Жар-Птицей
Горит в их дебрях вековых.

1899

More forest, and more. The day darkens,
Blue grows beneath, and in the meadows grass
With frosty dew grows pale...
The gray owl awakens.

To the west the line of pines
Stretches like an army of guards,
And the sun, smoldering like the Firebird,
Burns their ancient wilderness.

* * *
Не видно птиц. Покорно чахнет
Лес, опустевший и больной,
Грибы сошли, но крепко пахнет
В оврагах сыростью грибной.

Глушь стала тише и светлее,
В кустах свалялася трава,
И, под дождем осенним тлея,
Чернеет темная листва.

А в поле ветер. День холодный
Угрюм и свеж - и целый день
Скитаюсь я в степи свободной,
Вдали от сел и деревень.

И, убаюкан шагом конным,
С отрадной грустью внемлю я,
Как ветер звоном однотонным
Гудит-поет в стволы ружья.

1889

No birds can be seen. Subjected,
The forest withers, emptied and ailing;
Mushrooms are gone, yet in the copses
Lingers still their strong damp scent.

The thickets grow more still and bright,
Grasses tangle in the bushes,
And, moldering under autumn rains
Dark leaves turn ever darker.

But a wind is on the field. A cold day
Both gloomy and fresh - the whole day
I range across the open steppe
Far from village and town.

My horse's steps are a lullaby,
And in a pleasant melancholy
I hear the wind's single unchanging note,
Singing and piping into the barrels of the gun.

Was it just a nightmare after all?

Once again, the Justice Department uses everything at their disposal to arrest a terrorist.

Wannabe.

Detailing the charge against Mr Mehanna, US prosecutors accused him and his alleged co-conspirators of discussing how to obtain automatic weapons before "randomly shooting people in a shopping mall".

They allegedly discussed "the logistics of a mall attack, including co-ordination, weapons needed and the possibility of attacking emergency responders", acting US Attorney Michael Loucks said.

However, the plan was eventually abandoned, prosecutors said, because the conspirators could not get hold of the necessary weapons. ...

A justice department document said that while "some of these plans involved no more than one or two conversations, at least one involved multiple conversations, discussions and preparations".

This is the kind of arrest that used to be all over the media, as proof that we needed the Patriot Act and even MORE, because scary people are out there and they want to hurt us. Actually, whatever Mehanna wanted to do - and I'll stipulate that he wanted to blow people up - he didn't actually do anything, couldn't manage to do anything, and is portrayed as "hapless" and "inept" by the FBI. Another report has this quote:

"It's very aspirational -- hopes and dreams," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because both investigations are classified and ongoing.

In other words, he's another malcontent, and his arrest hasn't really made us safer. Which is par for the course. Remember the Florida boys who had pipe dreams about blowing up the Sears Tower?

But there are some differences. One is that the FBI has learned to bide its time and do actual police work before rushing to arrest. Another is that most newspapers aren't covering it, and those that are aren't doing so with that breathless OMG coverage designed to keep people as scared as possible as much of the time as possible.

In other words, this is an arrest that might stand up in court, and which is being given the coverage it deserves. Maybe the media is finally waking up, too.

"doing business another way"

So, I got an email from "Levana - Health Care for America Now". It had this in it:

These companies - Cigna, WellPoint and UnitedHealth - insure millions of people, but they make their money by denying us care when we need it. Next week, all three companies' CEOs will be in D.C. to congratulate themselves on making record-breaking salaries and tell our Members of Congress to oppose health care reform. We can't let their visit go unchallenged, and you can help us send a message.

Our signatures make a simple demand: that the CEOs who make billions of dollars and deny us care meet the people they've hurt and consider doing business another way.

I don't think that's going to happen. Insurance companies are doing business the 'right' way - they're for-profit, publicly-owned and -traded companies, after all. Making the most money they can is what they're supposed to do, under the free-market, capitalist way of operating.

They won't change. And a CEO who tried to change might well find their shareholders rising up against them.

Which is why we need a public option.

Because when you don't have to, then leaving your health care decisions in the hands of people whose salaries and bonuses depend on giving you as little money as possible is not only way scarier than leaving it to government bureaucrats whose salaries only depend on how efficiently they move money from one account to another, it's just dumb.

Happy Birthday, Ursula

Today in 1929, Ursula K. LeGuin was born. I've read much of her work, but until last year I didn't know that the K was for Kroeber, or that her father was Alfred Kroeber, the "dean of American anthropology" and the man who studied Ishi, the last Yahi.

Long-term political trend and forecast

A friend of mine sent me this...



лысый = bald
волосатый = hairy

For one meaning of "for"

Prepositions are funny things.

I'm catching up on the Left-Handed Toons archive, and this one made me laugh out loud.





Left-Handed Toons

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• At The Rennaissance Mathematicus is a nice post on Newton, alchemist: Newton’s biographers in the 18^th and 19^th centuries had presented him as the brilliant, rational, mathematical father of modern science a man who had guided the world into a modern age freed of superstition and wizardry. The man whom Keynes discovered in his unpublished manuscripts was a very different animal indeed, a man of very strange beliefs and practices who appeared more at home amongst the necromancers of the Renaissance than the mathematical physicists of the twentieth century. Newton was an alchemist!


• At Bad Astronomy Phil shows us two planets from a third: The picture was taken in May 2003, but its impact has not lessened with time. It shows Earth and Jupiter in one shot as seen from Mars!


• At Bioephemera Jessica is angry: This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't that surprising: hunters have already killed nine wolves in the wilderness area near Yellowstone's northern border - including both the radio-collared alpha and beta females of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood wolf pack. Uh. . . oops.


• At Cocktail Party Physics Jennifer talks about lies and lie detectors: So it's not surprising, then, that lie detection has a long and colorful history. It has its roots in instruments of torture, most notably during the European Middle Ages, when it was believed that subjecting the body to extreme physical agony would force the victim to blurt out the truth. (We now know that this is far from the case. An Italian Enlightenment thinker, Cesare Beccaria, wrote in 1764, “By this method, the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. These are the inconveniences of this pretended test of truth.”) In 1730, Daniel DeFoe suggested it might be possible to measure someone's heart rate to detect deception.


• At the Sandwalk Larry Moran talks about aspects of Jerry Coyne's book: Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne is one of the best popular books on evolution. If you can only buy one book this year then this is the one to buy. It contains an excellent explanation of all the basic facts about evolution. I'm not going to review this book, instead, I'm going to comment on just two things that interest me: how Jerry Coyne treats the mechanisms of evolution (natural selection and random genetic drift); and how he treats speciation—his area of expertise. I'll also discuss Richard Dawkins' treatment of these two topic in his book. (That's four separate postings.)

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Cheryl Wheeler, at the Ram's Head in Annapolis. Not only does she write wonderful songs and sing them in a gorgeous voice, but she's funny. I loved the counter-"Gandhi Buddha" (And when the winter morning dawns all white and blue I'll tell you how it was when you get up at two. I must have have been Hitler or Satan or someone like that, I must have brought death and destruction everywhere I went...). The stories were great, the songs better. Some of my favorites and some I hadn't heard. She does a great concert.

DVD: Think Fast, Mr Moto; I'd never seen any of these, and this one wasn't a bad little mystery flick. I watched three more - Thank You, Mr Moto; Mr Moto Takes a Chance, and Mr. Moto's Gamble, which is the one that started out as a Chan and doesn't really match the others, with their espionage and foreign locations.

TV: House - Hadley's going to Thailand? (Or someplace, anyway.) God, I hope so. And this is probably the quintessential House quote: "Better a murder than a misdiagnosis." Nova's look at the latest Hubble repair mission - very good. Flash Forward - I can forgive a show one music-video montage, but two? On the other hand, it's interesting how we're starting to see that some of them might not be going to come true... Modern Family - still good. Not hilarious, but quite enjoyable. The Mentalist - an improvement over last week. I have to admit I loved seeing Cho with that shotgun. Numb3rs - Larry is taking longer to leave than Hadley, but that's okay because I like Larry. And I don't mind that he's not going very far away. Nice murder problem this time, too. Psych - what a great mid-season finale. I loved so much about it, and most of all that we saw how Henry's slightly psychotic child-raising techniques actually came in handy.

Read:

Imagine that

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting look at what motivates the Taliban, looking at the story by David Rohde. He finishes with an update that looks at a Boston Globe article that says, among other things,

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’

and he concludes

One of the most astounding feats in propaganda is how we've managed to take people who live in a country which we invade, bomb and occupy -- and who fight against us because we're doing that -- and call them "Terrorists," thereby "justifying" continuing to bomb and occupy their country further ("We have to stay in order to fight the Terrorists: meaning the people who are fighting us because we stay").

Happy Birthday, Victor

Sen Yung, who later went by Victor Sen Yung, was born today in 1915 in San Francisco. He began by playing Number Two Son - Jimmy - with Sidney Toler Warner Oland in the Charlie Chan movies. After a break to serve in the USAF in WWII, he returned to Hollywood and Chan, playing Jimmy in the last Sidney Toler movies and then moving to the Roland Winters ones, where (confusingly) he played Tommy (who'd been played by Benson Fong in the Tolers...). After Chan, he continued to work in Hollywood and television, where he's probably best known as Hop Sing on Bonanza.

Happy Birthday, Lotte

Today in 1898 Lotte Lenya was born in Vienna. Best known for singing the songs of Kurt Weill, her husband, including Tony-award-winning performance as Jenny in the off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (the only off-Broadway winner ever, by the way), she also earned an Oscar nomination for playing Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and she's also well known for From Russia With Love, in which she played the switchblade-shoe-wearing Rosa Klebb.



ps - this post originally had a picture of Blossome Dearie on it!

Just one

Nineteen more here.

What might have been - or be

"The human fascination with what might have been is tiresome, Doctor." General Martok said that to Dr Bashir in the Deep Space Nine episode "Soldiers of the Empire". Earl in Pickles has been expressing the same sentiment, differently phrased, in Pickles all this week, ending with today's strip:



Earl and Opal have crossed from wondering "what might have been" to "what might be".

Interestingly, in English, they both are expressed with "if + past" (a trait English shares with Russian, by the way), but usually the aspect is different: "what if I had decided" is counter-factual, but "what if I decided" is merely a question about the future.

That's YA, Alex!

The category is "I've got a 4-letter word for ya, pal!"

Alex pronounced it "for YOU".

That reduced "ya" is a clear signal that the stress is on "for" - and that there is no "U" to be heard. What's the point of spelling, if Alex is just going to ignore it?

Sky Watch: Tapestry of Cloud

Dawn comes to a complexly clouded sky...







more Sky Watchers here

Happy BIrthday, Noah

Today, 250 years ago, Noah Webster was born.

He had a profound influence on our spelling, but not nearly as profound as he would have liked:

1. The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. On the other hand, it would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and while it would assist foreigners and our own children in acquiring the language, it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.

2. A substitution of a character that has a certain definite sound, for one that is more vague and indeterminate. Thus by putting ee instead of ea or ie, the words mean, near, speak grieve, zeal, would become meen, neer, speek, greev, zeel. This alteration could not occasion a moments trouble; at the same time it would prevent a doubt respecting the pronunciation; whereas the ea and ie having different sounds, may give a learner much difficulty. Thus greef should be substituted for grief; kee for key; beleev for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught. In this manner ch in Greek derivatives, should be changed into k; for the English ch has a soft sound, as in cherish; but k always a hard sound. Therefore character, chorus, cholic, architecture, should be written karacter, korus, kolic, arkitecture; and were they thus written, no person could mistake their true pronunciation.

3. Thus ch in French derivatives should be changed into sh; machine, chaise, chevalier, should be written masheen, shaze, shevaleer; and pique, tour, oblique, should be written peek, toor, obleek.

He won with draft and plow, but not with much he wanted. And here's his motivation:

1. The simplicity of the orthography would facilitate the learning of the language. It is now the work of years for children to learn to spell; and after all, the business is rarely accomplished. A few men, who are bred to some business that requires constant exercise in writing, finally learn to spell most words without hesitation; but most people remain, all their lives, imperfect masters of spelling, and liable to make mistakes, whenever they take up a pen to write a short note. Nay, many people, even of education and fashion, never attempt to write a letter, without frequently consulting a dictionary.

But with the proposed orthography, a child would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time, and the orthography being very regular, he would ever afterwards find it difficult to make a mistake. It would, in that case, be as difficult to spell wrong as it is now to spell right.

Besides this advantage, foreigners would be able to acquire the pronunciation of English, which is now so difficult and embarrassing, that they are either wholly discouraged on the first attempt, or obliged, after many years labor, to rest contented with an imperfect knowledge of the subject.

2. A correct orthography would render the pronunciation of the language, as uniform as the spelling in books. A general uniformity thro the United States, would be the event of such a reformation as I am here recommending. All persons, of every rank, would speak with some degree of precision and uniformity. Such a uniformity in these states is very desireable; it would remove prejudice, and conciliate mutual affection and respect.

3. Such a reform would diminish the number of letters about one sixteenth or eighteenth. This would save a page in eighteen; and a saving of an eighteenth in the expense of books, is an advantage that should not be overlooked.

4. But a capital advantage of this reform in these states would be, that it would make a difference between the English orthography and the American. This will startle those who have not attended to the subject; but I am confident that such an event is an object of vast political consequence. For,

The alteration, however small, would encourage the publication of books in our own country. It would render it, in some measure, necessary that all books should be printed in America. The English would never copy our orthography for their own use; and consequently the same impressions of books would not answer for both countries. The inhabitants of the present generation would read the English impressions; but posterity, being taught a different spelling, would prefer the American orthography.

Think about the publishing business. Think about the Internet!

Happy Birthday, Oscar

Today in 1854, in Dublin, one of the world's most quotable men - Oscar Wilde - was born.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

And, of course,

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Barten Dress?

So, Ryan at Dinosaur Comics recommended something called left-handed toons (by right-handed people) and I've been working my way through their archives. I got to one (linked above) called "Smooth Move" which has in its first panel a guy clutching his lapels, eyes bugging out and a goofy grin on his face, thinking, "Oh man. That bartendress is so hot! Okay... play it cool."

I said to myself "Barten dress? What the heck is a barten dress?"

And of course it's a woman tending bar. Which I truly didn't figure out till I read the next panel.

Weird.

Me, that is.

Just a thought

What is the point of requiring everybody to buy something unless you also require somebody to sell it to them - at a price they can afford?

Happy Birthday, Plum

Today in Guildford, England, in 1881, P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse was born. He moved to the United States in 1909 and began to write for the Saturday Evening Post. His most famous creations are, of course, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, but Psmith, Blandings Castle, and the Oldest Member are justifiably well-known and loved, too. Wodehouse also wrote a huge number of song lyrics for musical comedies, and worked with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, among others. Although his books are light comedies, they are extraordinarily tightly plotted - and he achieves heights of genius with Wooster: it's not easy to write from the point of view of someone so dim while keeping the character and the book amusing and coherent.

"...Have you ever had a what-do-you-call-it? What's the word I want? One of those things fellows get sometimes."
"Headaches?" hazarded George.
"No, no. I don't mean anything you get -- I mean something you get if you know what I mean."
"Measles?"
"Anonymous letter. That's what I was trying to say."

Happy Birthday, Virgil

Today in 70 BC, Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born. Author of The Georgics (written to recruit Romans back to the rural life), Virgil won a lifetime stipend from Augustus and settled down to write the Aeniad. However, he contracted a fever and died before his masterpiece was finished. He asked for it to be burned, since it wasn't completed, but his heirs (fortunately) ignored that instruction and listened to the emperor, instead.

arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram,
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
inferretque deos Latio; genus unde
Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso
quidve dolens regina deum tot volvere
insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores
impulerit. tantaene animis caelestibus irae?

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town;
His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav'n began
To persecute so brave, so just a man;
Involv'd his anxious life in endless cares,
Expos'd to wants, and hurried into wars!
Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show,
Or exercise their spite in human woe?
-- John Dryden

My epic theme is war, and a man who, through fate, came as a refugee from Troy's coasts to Italy, and the shores of Lavinium. This man was battered helplessly both on land and at sea by the viciousness of the higher powers, thanks to the obdurate wrath of Juno the savage. Much, too, did he suffer through war, until he could establish a city, and bring his gods home to Latium. This is how the Latin peoples came to be, whence the forefathers in Alba, and the walls of mighty Rome.

Muse, remind me of the reasons: through what damage to her power, what wound, did the queen of the gods drive a man famous for his respect to live through so many agonies? Can so potent a fury blaze in a god's heart?
-- Andrew Wilson

"close to the finish line"

Paul Krugman says:

Health care reform is getting close to the finish line. The key thing was always to get a bill to the Senate floor, so that reform no longer requires overcoming political inertia; instead, it’s killing reform that would now require drastic action, action that probably won’t happen.

Also, the preferred narrative on cable news and suchlike — that it was 1993 all over again — has been shattered. The momentum is now all with reform.

Something could still go wrong; clearly, Joe Lieberman is itching to find a way to oppose this. And the bill will, of course, leave much to be desired. Still, at this point it looks as if history is in the making.

I hope he's right. I know he is about the bill falling short of hopes, but I hope it's good enough bill to go on with once all the hammering out is done. (Go Howard Dean!)

On the ragged edge

If I have to walk in the dark and the cold to the Metro stop, I might as well do it in time to catch the right bus and not be 30 minutes late, yes?

Yes, that's right. The Connect-a-Ride B bus was late. Again.

In fact they didn't even run a 6:00 bus. Had I waited for the bus to show up, it would have been the 6:30 bus, which would have meant that would have been 50 minutes - possibly, depending on traffic - an hour late.

They are so damned cavalier about that bus.

Mali! w00t!

Whew! The Final Jeopardy answer was "It's a landlocked country in West Africa, and its name is "locked" within the name of a country on Africa's east coast." None of them got it (Guinea, Gambia, and Lesotho were their guesses - only one is landlocked, and it's not in the west), but I did. Not because I have the West African countries memorized - in fact, I had to look at a map to verify that Gambia isn't landlocked - but because the East African coast is much easier to remember.

I just started at the bottom and said "South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia - Mali! It has to be!"

It's all in the strategizing!

Something over

In that post yesterday, I was saying that for the writer (and others who use it) "skip over" functions like "look over (meaning appraise", "knock over (meaning rob), "push over", or "turn over". While for me, it's like "walk over".

Thinking about it today, I realized that there are many "verb over" constructions that are phrasal for me and hardly any that aren't. There are also some that can go either way, depending on what you mean. "Walk it over" means to bring something over by walking, "walk over it" means to walk on top of something. "Look it over" means to peruse it, "look over it" means to peer over the top. And so on.

So it might be considered somewhat odd that I have a problem with "skip it over" - but I think that the real problem is that this use of "skip him over" is not the one that I think it should be. I can understand the examples I cited (The Yanks skipped him over the Dominican Summer League and had him in Low-A Charleston as a teenager) , but not the ones like "the grouchy gene skipped him over".

But I'm not really sure I know any more!