farranger

Rebekah took this picture of me today on the C&O Canal Trail. She said it looks "sad." Melanie said, "You look like have have a broken heart." My friend Renate said it makes me look "forlorn."

Jeez.

When my daughter was seven I read her a passage from Huckleberry Finn, not noticing before I had started that it included the offending "N" word. Rather than elide over it, or substitute it with "slave," I just said it. When I finished I explained how that word, although very offensive nowadays, was necessary to fully understanding the story's message.

The next day, my daughter told her teacher about the book, and self-importantly said, "And the word n****r is in there, but it's OK because it's important for the story."

I bring this up because as a parent, I could not disavow responsibility for her...gaffe.

Ergo, Ron Paul cannot disavow responsibility for the crap that appeared in newsletters under his name in the 1990s.

A vivid description of a person's life and interests can be found in a simple list of books.

"...and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis." (My rereading of "The Name of the Rose" appears near the end of 2011.)

Another year, another mere 60 or so books read. Rather meager, but then I'm a notoriously slow reader.

Any of my LJ friends living in DC and looking for work? We have an opening for an administrative person. Pay is $42,000/year with good benefits (a real pension, and a 401(k), medical, dental, etc.) Here are the requirements:

Bachelors degree OR a minimum of 5 years of administrative/secretarial experience; intermediate Word and basic Excel; excellent oral/written, telephone and filing skills; detail oriented; possess a high degree of flexibility; must be hard working, dependable, have the ability to take the initiative and work well with others in stressful situations, to think and act quickly and responsibly, possess a positive, team oriented attitude. Highly Desirable Skills Include: basic accounting experience, i.e., bank deposits; previous association experience; experience with pacs, legislative and government affairs matters; knowledge of Vocus, PeopleSoft/Tripartite Systems.

"We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda." --Mikhail Bakunin, 1814-1876.

Bless the OWS protesters who are able (or "have the luxury" as some of my more piqued friends say) to participate in the ongoing demonstrations. Not as final or as violent as an "attentat" assassination attempt, these demonstrations do, however, rise to the level of what the French anarchists called "the propaganda of action." The idea then, as now, is that deeds do not always arise from ideas; sometimes it's the other way around. The idea that is gaining strength now is that there is something profoundly unfair in America's widening wealth gap.

So good for the protesters and their forebears from the Sons of Liberty to the Freedom Riders. Without people like them--throughout history--we'd all be up the creek.

Rebekah got her license today. The observer asked me to wait by the testing lot, on a bench. After the parallel parking demonstration, Rebekah and the observer went onto the road. I thought to myself: "Hey, I don't know this guy! A stranger just took off with my most precious object--my car." But they came back after only 10 minutes.

Of course, after getting her license, Rebekah wanted to drive home. The first thing she did after she got behind the wheel was drive out of the MVA parking lot by way of the "enter only" lane. She makes me so proud.

I normally don't pay attention to book reviews by regular readers, but this fervid piece over at Barnes & Noble's web site has me really wanting to buy Umberto Eco's new novel, Prague Cemetery.  I'm relieved to know that it's "grammatically, fairly well written."

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Eco pens filth

I do not write many negative reviews, i can't remember the last time I did. However, I must mention the following based on the 30-some page sample i received of this on my Nook. In just 30 short pages the author did the following:

- glorified Satanism

- described (although fictitious) a black Mass- a satanist ritual. If you are looking to undertake some dangerous (from a disease standpoint) practices, this romanticized account of a ritual to lucifer is a great way to start.

- homosexuality

- Sex

- Manipulation of individuals' minds

- Pedophilia - an older man who claims he can't overcome the "seduction of pre pubescent boys and girls"

- the description of Pedophiliac sex acts

- church corruption of the renaissance - roman catholic priests who were secretly Satanists - may or maynot be true, this is fiction after all.

- Homocide [The killing of a gay person? --RR]

And that's just a start! That 's not even ALL the demented stuff in just a 30 page sample!

Grammatically, fairly well written, however, it appears the whole book is a remembrance of sorts - you are reading someone's journal entries, and the writing style made it hard to connect the dots at points.

Disgusted after just 30 pages.

Lutheranism was born on this day in 1517.

I'm putting together an issue on happiness and started looking around for quotations. I found these two beauties. I think I'll use them together.

"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."
--Aristotle

"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."
--George Orwell

One of my prized possessions is my grandfather's first edition of The Grapes of Wrath. Will my future grandson or granddaughter wipe away a tear while reading one of my e-books on a 10th generation Kindle?

I found a lighter. It had a zodiac sign on it, Scorpio. I'm a Scorpio. That's minor win for me.

Jesus Christ, another one? Watching this slate of Republicans debate is like watching the poker scene in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

One of the preferred cliches around here is "splitting the baby," a metaphor that has always presented problems for me. Does this Solomonic solution suggest bifurcating the child…in other words splitting it from crown to groin? Any other way would seem patently unfair—who would want the bottom half of a baby, for instance?

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you...
You have been connected to _Paul M.

Robert R: Why can't I reach anyone at 611?

_Paul M: Hi Robert , welcome to T-Mobile live Chat. I’m _Paul and I will be happy to assist you. Please give me a moment to review your question.

_Paul M: I see that you can not call 611, correct?

Robert R: I've tried for days and days and can't reach anyone.

_Paul M: Can you call it?

Robert R: I don't want to call it again. I've tried a dozen times over the past week and I'm always put on interminable hold. Can you call me? I have a question about my plan. I've been a T-Mobile customer for 15 years and I'm seriously on the verge of going somewhere else.

_Paul M: What is going on with the plan?

Robert R: I have a question about my data plan.

_Paul M: What is going on with the plan?

Robert R: Paul, you're not real, are you?

_Paul M: I understand that you have questions about your plan, what can I help you with on that?

Robert R: Paul the computer, tell someone real that they're about to lose a 15-year customer.

_Paul M: I am I real agant. [This spelling error led me to believe Paul M. was indeed real, if not overly conversant in English.]

Robert R: I want someone at T-Mobile to call me in the next five minutes. My number is 240-478-****.

_Paul M: Unfortunately, we can not set up call backs in chat, I can help you with the account though.

Robert R: Paul? Do me a favor and stick your keyboard into your anus. It will seem very difficult at first, and not a little painful, but it'll be much less painful than dealing with customer service reps at T-Mobile.

I always thought Segways were the dickiest looking things on the road...until I saw a guy today going down the sidewalk on roller skis. These are cross-country skis with wheels at each end.

I'm tellin' ya...

This:



Makes this:



Look like this:

Went to the National Aquarium with Melanie last weekend. Ain't he gorgeous?

Very cool.


http://inspirationgreen.com/natural-pools-swimming-ponds.html

From the KJV, Second Kings 2:23-24:

"And he [Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up that way, there came forth little children of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; Go up, thou bald head.


"And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them."

Wow, I wish I could do that.

What's this I read about Obama sending 100 armed advisors to central Africa to hunt down some rebel group? Isn't that how the Vietnam War started?

Washington is an insane asylum and the inmates are in charge.

Humor can be dangerous.

I was in the kitchen this morning when Richard walked in. He had a brown spot under his nose, which I assumed was a big piece of muffin or something, so I mentioned it and joked that he looked like Hitler. Ha ha, he said. Then I realized it was a scab from a medical procedure (melanoma removal?) he underwent earlier.

I'm reading the letters of Thomas Merton. Lots of pearls in the book, of course, including this one, on the benefits of simple living, without undue distraction: "There has to be clean water in the mind for the spirit to drink."

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Richard continues to tell me that, having been born a Catholic, I cannot claim to be "unreligious" or "lapsed." 

"If you were baptised, baby, you're always going to be a mackeral snapper!"

I told him that by that logic, he must stop rooting for the Yankees because, though he lived in Manhattan for years, he was born on Long Island and, by the unwritten rules of baseball allegiance, he's got to root for the Mets. This displeased him.

Dad is great!
He gives us chocolate cake!

Before going to the Capitals/Lightning game with Marina last night, I killed an hour walking around the National Portrait Gallery, one of my favorite museums in the city. The girl in this painting ("Angel" by Abbot Handerson Thayer) reminds me of Melanie.

Maurice Sendak, in a recent interview, said of electronic books:

Melanie the 12-year-old philosopher: "Dad, just remember, when things seem really bleak...they usually are bleak."

Here's a bleak existentialist story for you.

A man was lost in the jungle, starving, when he found a coconut by the path he was traveling. He rejoiced at his good fortune, but soon discovered that he had no way to open it the coconut. He noticed a monkey sitting by a tree, so he asked, "Monkey, can you open this coconut?" The monkey took the coconut and banged it on a rock, but couldn't open it.

Then the man took the coconut and walked on until he saw a toucan. "Toucan," he said, "can you open this coconut?" The toucan tried to open the coconut with its large beak, but couldn't even crack it.

The man, feeling very low, took his coconut and walked on. After a little while he saw a tiger. "Tiger," he asked, "can you open this coconut?" The tiger ate the man and said, "Coconut, schmoconut."

The end.

"A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life."

--Henry Ward Beecher

André Malraux said that "all forms of action are Manichean" and that "revolutionaries are born Manicheans."

A revolutionary MUST see the world in black and white. Without appreciating stark contrasts, the revolutionary will become mired in doubt and nuance, and will cease to be effective. Revolutionaries are not intellectuals.

I'm not sure if Malraux (perhaps it was Koestler) said this, but I believe that a tendency to see the world in Manichean terms is an attribute of all politics, not just revolutionary politics. Look what has happened to Barack Obama: his public persona went from intellectual (by definition, a man of subtleties, interested in the absolute truth and complexity of things, an anti-Manichean) to politician par excellence.

Four of our lobbyists this week are working on a letter to the House and Senate, asking lawmakers not to cut our programs. (Fat chance.) The government affairs vice president sent it to me for "syntax, grammatical guidance."  Let me just say that the King James Bible retains its title as the only good work produced by committee.

This letter has dependent clauses that have nothing at all to do with the rest of the sentence they appear in. It has mixed tenses. It has run-on sentences. It has phrases--like "we recognize the importance of"--that appear at least three times. We're talking monumentally bad, here.

Can't anyone in this town write anymore?

Going to fire up the old Zenith Philco tonight and listen to the Tigers beat the Yankees!

Nobody tells me what not to touch!

What a nightmare I had last night. I dreamed that no matter how long I ground my coffee, every time I opened up the grinder the beans were still there.

I can't find my paper journals Nos. 19 and 20. Very strange. I tossed them onto a pile of Latin American literature a few months ago and now I can't find them anywhere among the Marquezes, Cruzes and Allendes. Have they been sucked into another plane, into a fictional world?

Meanwhile, I just read Franz Kafka's "Message from the Emperor." 

These two events--my reading Kafka and the disappearance of my journals--are not connected in any way that I can see, but you never know. Maybe my two journals have sprouted legs and are eternally running across some surrealistic landscape, chased by Paleolithic hunters with No. 2 pencils.

Speaking of Franz, I wish I had seen this photograph 20 years ago, before I turned mostly bald. I would have loved to have said to a barber, "Make my hair Kafkaesque!"

Rebekah reports something weird with the online application for one of the universities she's applying to. Below the field for an emergency contact's name there's a yes/no question: "Is this person deceased?"

This is the WTF of the month...unless, of course, she's applying to the Madam Blavatsky School of Necromancy.

On the one hand, I'm wasteful in that I toss pencils when they still have a couple of inches of useful life left. On the other hand, I don't toss them in the trash but into a desk drawer, for what purpose I don't quite know.

Coworker 1, furrowing her brow over the Wednesday NY Times crossword puzzle: "Seven letters, last two letters 'RD'. 'Dim bulb so to speak.' What could that be?"

Coworker 2: "Dullard."

Coworker 1: "How do you spell that?"

Baseball is my only real petit-bourgeois indulgence.


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"Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of Dionysianism."

--J.M. Coetzee, "Summertime"


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The memories of the land are in the trees, deep-rooted in the dark places of the earth. The wind whispers through their branches, taking stories and promises across the meadows and over the mountains, down the streams and rivers to the ocean. Man will pass through this world and be forgotten, but the trees will live and live.

Here's a good word, which I found recently while reading a biography of St. Nicholas: myroblyte.

Myroblyte--a dead saint whose corpse emits a pleasant, balsamic odor, and whose nearness heals the sick.

My literary obsession of the month is George Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. I picked up the first novel, "A Game of Thrones" during all the hype over the release of the fifth volume, "A Dance with Dragons," and I'm hooked. Let me tell you something: these are epical masterworks. Sure, they're technically fantasy, a genre I would normally eschew, but they're so damn well-written and evocative that, like many critics have already done, I compare them to the "Lord of the Rings." In a way, they're more satisfying than LOTR because Martin doesn't overdo the songs and poetry, which Tolkien, bless his medievalist heart, had no ear for.

So, I recommend. Yes, I recommend.

Cute kids, but somebody shoot that escaped gorilla with a tranquilizer gun and get him back to the ape house!

There was a sailor walking down a street in New York and he met a lady wearing bright red lipstick. She looked at him and whispered, "Do you know what the Height of Purple Passion is?" He said, no he didn't. She asked, "Would you like to know what the Height of Purple Passion is?" He said he would like to know so she told him to follow her. She led him up the street about six blocks and then turned the corner. When he stopped next to her she pointed to a dark townhouse and said, "Wait on the front stoop of that house for an hour. After an hour ring the doorbell. That is, if you still want to know what the Height of Purple Passion is." He assured her that yes, more than ever he wanted to know what the Height of Purple Passion was. So she turned away and walked down the street, leaving him there. He went to the steps in front of the townhouse sat down and waited. An hour later he stood up and rang the doorbell. A flock of pigeons fluttered out of the upper windows and flew up and down the block. The sailor watched them in amazement. When the birds returned the door opened and there was the lady wearing bright red lipstick. "You're still here, I see," she said. "Do you still want to know what the Height of Purple Passion is?" Yes, yes, yes, the sailor said, twisting his hat in his hands. "Follow me," she said. So he followed her into the townhouse. It was dark inside. The lady led him up a staircase and to a bedroom. When she turned on the light in the bedroom she turned around and opened up her robe, letting it fall to the floor. "Are you sure you want to know what the Height of Purple Passion is?" By this time the sailor was more than sure.

"Yes! Yes, for the love of god," the sailor said. "I want to know what the Height of Purple Passion is!"

"Good," said the lady wearing bright red lipstick (and nothing else). "Then go into the bathroom and take a bath. Make yourself very clean and then come to me and I will show you what the Height of Purple Passion is."

So the sailor went into the bathroom and scrubbed himself clean. As he was getting out of the tub he stepped on a bar of soap and fell and broke his neck. He died. The sailor never found out what the Height of Purple Passion was and neither will you.

The end.

I left my little Moleskine at home today and, truth be told, I feel rather naked without it. I use it not only for notes, but for all my important information, like bank account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, etc. (Everything important is written in a code I've developed for myself.) Most people nowadays probably keep all this on their smart phones, but I'm so hopelessly analog...

I was just told that an article I wrote on the debt ceiling negotiations was profligate. To be precise, it suffered from "word profligacy."

At least he didn't excise my John Wayne quotation.

It's so hot out there the Payday bar I bought from Sayeed was droopy. I asked him how he could suffer such heat cooped up in his little sidewalk cart and he smiled, inclined his head slightly, and undoubtedly thought, "It is like a cool oasis breeze compared to the fires of hell you infidel Americans will suffer for all eternity," but said, "I am OK."

Great, I said, catch ya later.

An NPR commentator said that he thinks it's time for Christopher Robin to grow up. I think all the children of literature should grow up! I am getting damn sick and tired of opening "Tom Sawyer" and finding him still a smug little bastard. I mean, enough's enough.

Know who I'd like to see in a pornographic spanking video? Michele Bachmann.