Grikdog’s Blog... peeled fresh daily! (2003)

Featuring Buddhist chreiai, astringent homiletics, sweet & sour fun, big words, gratuitous sarcasm, Worldwide Spin-The-Moon Day and the unabridged proceedings of the Xochitl Sodality Wonders & Marvels Committee, Cedar Rapids Chapter

 “Shall I mangle this churl’s leg, Hantis?”
             — Pul the Grikdog, in James H. Schmitz’s Witches of Karres

Copyright © 1944-2003 by d.c.oshel, All Rights Reserved

Wednesday, 31st of December, 2003 12:11:03 PM

Who is the snot-for-brains news exec at MSNBC who decided to air an Iraqi snuff film of Pfc. Lori Piestewa’s last few moments on Earth on national television? No wonder we violate the Geneva convention on Saddam Hussein. We can’t even accord our own honored dead the dignity and the privacy their Purple Hearts suggest we owe them.

Tuesday, 30th of December, 2003 12:45:29 PM

North by Northwest If Al Qaeda has a loose nuke in the United States, my guess is we might see a little demonstration of Taliban iconoclasm at Mount Rushmore this New Year’s Eve. Of course, if the dust ever settled on the resulting Nuclear Autumn (not Winter, remember Global Warming?) China would die in famine for a millenium, and the Royal Universities of Hawaii, Iceland and New Zealand would preserve the West on unreadable DVDs long after their respective kings had eaten each other. As for the anechoic remainder... the silence of the Oligocene.

Monday, 29th of December, 2003 04:07:31 PM

Sunday, 28th of December, 2003 12:40:31 PM

Haiku 2003

daze from Christmas to
  New Year’s glitters like melted
    ice cream on my shirt

Saturday, 27th of December, 2003 10:33:07 AM

Over the river and through the woods...

We'll know that rock is dead when you have to get a degree to work in it.
     — Unix fortune cookie

Friday, 26th of December, 2003 08:23:31 AM

Möglich-Wahrscheinlich, mein Schwartz-Hen,
  Legt Ihr Ei ins Relatif-Wenn.
Sie Legt keine Eier in Positiv-Dann
  Weil sie postulieren nun einmal nicht kann.
          — Frederick Winsor, The Space Child’s Mother Goose

Thursday, 25th of December, 2003 11:14:50 PM

Peace On Earth - some assembly required

Wednesday, 24th of December, 2003 03:24:20 PM

twisted

Tuesday, 23rd of December, 2003 02:15:50 PM

Monday, 22nd of December, 2003 08:15:35 AM

I’d be happier with the final credits of LOTR 3 if I hadn’t just spent three hours reviewing LOTR Calendar shots for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 through 2045. My favorites are “Release him, you filth!” (Sam and Shelob), and the Butch & Sundance Reenactment at the Gates of Mordor (Viggo Mortenson, Orlando Bloom, et al.) Oh, yeah! And Legolas surfing down the Oliphaunt’s trunk. And the King of Angmar rampant on the towers of Minas Ithil. The four veteran Hobbits raising a pint at the Green Dragon (you had to be there.) The Bay of Belfalas (out of Naboo by Dinotopia). The scene I missed the most, however, was a quiet moment at the Blue Crane & Porcelain to recycle some used Pepsi.

Sunday, 21st of December, 2003 10:12:16 PM

It’s funny, Laddy, tha’ Gimli spoke like a wee Scot.

Saturday, 20th of December, 2003 09:17:56 AM

Whatever happened to the theory that fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) is the Rig Vedic soma (see Book X, Hymn XXV)? I used to have a copy of R. Gordon Wasson’s book on the subject. Typical. Now it’s out of print and sells for $150 a copy, if you can find one. Wasson has been canonized in the decades since I read the book, but did anyone ever vet his theory? I was swayed by every aspect of his argument, except the obvious one that fly agaric isn’t very hallucinogenic. Has no one proposed an alternative pharmacognosy, at all?

Friday, 19th of December, 2003 02:44:58 PM

M. OrientaleThis unfamiliar corner of the Moon, featuring Mare Orientale, would drive the globe mad — were the Man in the Moon to stumble, and this mad Eye rise above the western limb.

He sees you when you’re sleeping,
  He knows if you’re awake,
He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
  So be good for goodness’ sake!

Thursday, 18th of December, 2003 03:15:09 PM

Apathy, apathy, apathy...
Rot, rot, rot...
Fester, fester, fe... hmmmm.......

Wednesday, 17th of December, 2003 07:51:11 PM

Monstrous RegimentIt almost never happens, but... Homer nods. And Terry Pratchett hits a stunning 40 giga-Z’s on the Rip van Winkle snooze-o-meter in Monstrous Regiment, which is unheard of.

Pratchett’s control over his limited range is so good he’s become one the English language’s most prolific prose practitioners, rivalling Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse for volume, clarity and purity of product. But Monstrous Regiment does suck on several levels, in contrast to the cold and rarefied heights Pratchett achieved in Small Gods.

For one thing, it’s predictable — if you didn’t see Sergeant Jackrum’s fate coming by the last third of the book, your suspension of disbelief is hung like a Humvee. For another, the volume reeks of personal reaction to the Pfc. Jessica Lynch story, with Pratchett’s aesthetic distance demolished in several obvious crumple zones.

The truth is, Pratchett always slips when he skates too closely to his major themes — the horrors that happen when petty tyrannies fester into major tyrannies. It’s an admirable fault, really, which provides hope that Pratchett will someday step out on the high country he discovered in Small Gods and show us big, important things about the human condition.

Which, of course, he always does in small, important ways. It’s too bad Monstrous is such a potboiler, because this book is just as welcome on every fan’s Pratchett bookshelf as the rest of his opus.

Gosh, I don’t know... 4.625 out of five stars?

Tuesday, 16th of December, 2003 01:02:39 AM

I would love to be playing games with Saddam Hussein’s mind right now...Heh heh heh. He’ll talk...

Monday, 15th of December, 2003 01:23:02 PM

More about moon moggies...

Sunday, 14th of December, 2003 11:26:08 PM

Like I said, it doesn’t worry me that the country is in George W. Bush’s hands. But... Remember what happened to Moammar Khaddafi after we bombed his kids in Libya? All focus and no peripheral vision makes a dull bird. Better to be an owl than an eagle.

Say a Dean-Boxer ticket somehow wins the election next November. The everlasting glory of these United States is, George W. Bush would step down on January 20th and let the loons take over, just like the senior Bush. Democracy and the U. S. Constitution are sacred over here. Even John Ashcroft, I think, abides in the living legacy of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and two Roosevelts. The living legacy of Saddam Hussein will be the spit that marks his grave.
Fading away... The Cheshire Cat follows Alice from the Duchess’ kitchen, to the fork in the path leading to the Mad Hatter’s tea party, to the Queen of Hearts’ croquet ground — Tenniel even draws the Cat hovering Moon-like above the argument about how to cut off its head! This is the familiar companion Moon which “goes along” with Alice wherever she goes. Every kid on a long car trip at night has seen it.

And if the Moon is a Cat, then other things follow too! For example, a black cat is ill-omened because it points to the dark of the Moon, to moonless nights when murder and mischief are afoot. The Medieval holocaust of cats may have been a prolonged and bloody campaign against the pagan lunar calendar, against the party of the “Cats” for whom the lunar calendar was an important part of their religious lives — just as it remains to this day in Judaism and Islam, in China and Japan, in Solunar Tables and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. [N.B. Uhhhh... Well, I hate messing up the fun bits with scholarly apparatus, so make up your own mind on this one.]

Illustrating the awesome predictive power of any sensible theory, why do we say “Shoo!” to cats? Are you ready for this? It’s terribly easy. “Shoo” is shoe, quite literally. [N.B. The linguistic evidence for this is sort of intriguing. “Shoe” (P.Gmc. *skokhaz) is one of those old Germanic nominals like “bird” and “bear” which have no cognates in non-Germanic IE languages. So why "shoe" and not "skoo"? Did Vikings say "skooh, kette"?] The cat is Odin, Odin is Father Christmas, and Father Christmas fills our shoes with P for Presents, C for Coal, got it? So we throw shoes at cats yowling at the Moon in hopes that Odin will fill our shoes with gold and throw them back at us! All of this stuff lives in our souls at some deep subliminal level, we know it like it’s second nature.

So for a deep exercise in lunar felicity, consider the well-turned-out Puss in Boots, who reminds us of weavers and cobblers, and yet he’s also a lunar reminder, because those Seven League Boots of his carry him from horizon to horizon in a single night. So a “cat’s paw” is associated with shoes, we throw a shoe at yowling cats (if only in cartoons), yowl and Yule are cognates, and the Man in the Moon is our old friend, the shapeshifting, skyriding Odin. Odin, whose spinster crones keep cats, is Jul is a Cat is the Moon.

(Incidentally, do you see an arched Halloween cat’s back in these ancient lunar maps from Knowth? Probably not, but then I don’t actually see a Moon in those scratches either! The pertinent question is not what I see, or you see, but what the builders of Knowth saw — conclusions about culture drawn from physical evidence alone can only be inconclusive without essaying a few suggestive ethnographic parallels. A few runes at Knowth would certainly help... ;-)

Not that it matters.

Saturday, 13th of December, 2003 11:09:56 AM

So, Iceland’s Yule Cat and Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat probably derive from some prototeutonic Ur-cat bound up in solstitial Norse and Germanic myths of winter and the moon, and are themselves probably cognate with Old Man Winter, Father Christmas, Odin Shapeshifter himself. Both cats are at least pretty old, i.e., older than Charles Dodgson, and older than Jóhannes úr Kötlum’s relatively modern poem. I wonder why nobody’s noticed the connection before? Seems more than obvious to me. Both cats simply are... The Moon. (If I were to guess, the Yule Cat is the New Moon closest to Christmas.)

Which brings me to my daughter’s rainbow kitties. When she was about four, this child of mine used to hold doors open for a troop of colorful imaginary kittens which followed her around the house. I don’t know where they came from. Suddenly the house was full of rainbow kittens. I think they fell asleep in various nooks and corners of her room. We haven’t seen them since.

One of my own personal leg-pulls with this family is, however, “the ghost kitties.” I forgive throwing food away by dedicating the secret inner essence of all discarded foodstuffs to the ghost kitties, which astute students of Mahayana Buddhism will recognize as The Hungry Ghosts. I tell my daughter that ghost kitties are always hungry, and always grateful for anything you throw away; but they will never touch any food that is not specifically dedicated to them. The ghost kitties, I say, are grateful, and can live for weeks on the spirit odor of food you might think could not feed a fruit fly. But since there are so many, many ghost kitties all tumbling around in space and time, nothing is ever wasted.

This brings the subject of wastefulness to mind, of course, so it’s really a bit of jujitsu about not discarding what you don’t eat, or “Waste not, want not.” The other evening at dinner, the subject of ghost kitties came up in the context of a few discarded milliliters of tabasco sauce in the bottom of an otherwise empty bottle.

The ghost kitties can live on that much tabasco sauce, I said, for 200 years. Which is odd, I mused, because real cats hate tabasco sauce. My daughter pounced! Aha, quoth she, so ghost kitties aren’t real???

“They’re just like rainbow kitties,” I pronounced solemnly, without a trace of humor. “They’re real, and they’re imaginary.”

I meant to add, that ghost kitties are a beautiful story with a larger meaning, just like.... But by then, Tara had left the room shaking her young head sadly, and Cheryl was figuratively snorting milk through her nose, so I gave up.

Friday, 12th of December, 2003 06:58:41 PM

The cat is starving, so it wastes away to nothing. And the cat is lunar, therefore a lunatic. The image of a starving lunatic cat’s grin hanging in the lower branches of trees only occurs in December, when the lunar crescent tips horizontally at sunrise and sunset. Aha! Presumably, there is some deeply disturbing ancient ritual associated with the winter solstice (such as “gifts to Odin” hung in gallows trees near Yuletide)C.C.on the plains of Cheshire, England.
The Full Moon’s fat as a Cheshire Cat,
   The New Moon’s thin as a grin!
The Yule Moon hangs in the limbs of an oak
   And wawls the New Year in!

Thursday, 11th of December, 2003 09:39:03 PM

gooseberries
Almost all of what you find on the Internet can be disconcertingly false. For example, these tiny gooseberry goblins are actually the size of bowling balls!
Gooseberries and eggnog make my Christmas season. The usual reaction to that reminds me of an IOWA, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT! tee I once saw in California.

Orange marmalade, too... That’s Yule! (See also boars, green men, Mors Iabrochii, the Thirteen Icelandic Santas, etc.)

Odin’s cat, Starving, is lean and mean in December, when the Old Man rides his goatcart across the freezing sky. But don’t be afraid — the cat’s grin hanging in the lower branches of the oaks this time of year is just the Moon.

(But why is this lunatic bit of folklore associated with Cheshire?)

Wednesday, 10th of December, 2003 10:23:24 AM

Nominations for Dean’s running mate? How about Olympia Snowe? That would drive everybody nuts.

She has a pretty classy website, too. But... Tch! Clark is personally blogging now? Who has time for that? I guess Blackberry poking beats squeezing off a few extra clicks on the doorknocking counter during those long dull rides from Hayseed to Hooterville.

Tuesday, 9th of December, 2003 11:50:31 PM

To do:
  1. Admire Isadora Duncan’s taste in flowing iridescent scarves, Bugattis, last words...
  2. Turn off outside faucets
  3. Quash rumors that Harkin will endorse Dean anytime “soon”
Harkin will endorse Dean when Kerry and Gephardt decide to drop out. It’s fun to call Tom a weathervane, but the truth is, he got religion his first year in Washington (1975) and he works hard to elect Democrats. It’s not an act. Dean is a maverick and stands a bit to the right of Harkin’s soft spot. But Harkin will come around.

It’s Al Gore’s Dean endorsement that surprises me. That’s an astonishing bit of news. Great things happen around great men, and Howard Dean begins to qualify. (And of course, Lieberman is the jolly feng shui gnome who anchored Gore’s little zeppelin in Tennesee, Florida, West Virginia and various other directions west of Trenton, back in 2000, so... Need it be said? When it comes to running, Joe Lieberman is not exactly Montezuma’s Revenge.)

Monday, 8th of December, 2003 02:46:12 PM

bloggerMy blogging system is slowly evolving. Here’s the latest addition. (Requires Ruby, Mac OS X, Apache, PHP, my file structure and templates, a strong stomach for quick & dirty code with no error checking, etc. etc.) I was using a similarly grotesque PHP hack for this, but there are fewer file permissions hassles (because Apache runs with restricted permissions as www) with User’s Own Ruby Scripts. Besides, that way Platypus can automate clickability.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby# d.c.oshel, 8 december 2003, GNU Artistic License# create a new blog item, launch Safari to view the new entry,# and launch BBEdit to make changes in the new entry# get a file name for the new blog entry, e.g., 031208-071709.blognewblogitem = Time.now.strftime("%y%m%d%-%H%M%S.blog") path = "/Users/dave/Sites/bloggers"# prepend the new file name to the blog items listf = File.open("#{path}/blog_items.list", "r+")	buf = f.readlines	buf = [newblogitem+"\n"] + buf	f.rewind	buf.each do |line|		f.write line	endf.close# create the new blog item filesystem( "cp #{path}/\"new blog entry.php\" #{path}/#{newblogitem}" )# open the local home page, and open the new blog item for editingsystem( "open http://yggdrasil.local/~dave/" )system( "open #{path}/#{newblogitem}" )

Sunday, 7th of December, 2003 11:29:35 AM

GeorgeThe President’s Christmas card seems tacky this year. Yellow and blue instead of green and red? With Niagara Falls? Maybe he feels like he’s gone over ’em in a barrel. At least it’s a print of a watercolor of a diptych surrounding a... uhhh... picture of George. Recursion hath charms, but... allegory? Bush league is more medieval than I thought.

[Jeez, Dave — most people would say “sweetly unsophisticated” and let it go at that.]

Saturday, 6th of December, 2003 03:48:27 PM

Autodidacts pay dues to destiny and collect odd little gems from the unswept corners of their indiscipline.

E.g., nobody tells you that PHP scripts need to contain Unix line endings or they won’t run on Mac OS X 10.2 Apache servers. You have to figure those details out for yourself. Sometimes I envy those happy group photos of “our team” of programmers, big unisex gangs of boys and girls in jeans and sassy tees who throw latenight pizza parties and share deep secrets with each other — but (sour grapes here) programmers are so damn competitive I don’t really believe my own Elysian idylls.

After reading all the poop about how Sun designed Java from a bear pit of raging egos (the way Microsoft goons tell the story anyway), I’m at least resigned to lonely idiosyncrasy. I’ve worked in three of these blistering Asura shops, and believe me, sooner or later everyone becomes self taught, just to stay alive. The woods are full of dinosaur bones.

Gems? Well, once I spent all morning reading Microsoft’s specs on interprocess communications for Windows NT — then chucked it and wrote a two line version of the same thing using Visual C's standard ANSI legacy from Unix, vspawn. You’d have thought I’d invented the Moon and stars. A senior programmer accused me of using intuition, and “That’s crazy!” No, I just remembered how we did it using cl.exe in DOS in 1986 — something they don’t teach in your average MFC bootcamp.

The truth is, management is ALWAYS, ALWAYS obscenely ignorant about This Craft We Honor, which is why you can’t trust Human Resources to understand the job they’re trying to fill. Hence, it’s all about that B.S. — and mine is in English & Speech (Iowa State University, 1969).

Life since then’s been one long, occasionally ecplectic, non sequitur.

Friday, 5th of December, 2003 08:50:37 AM

Snow!

Thursday, 4th of December, 2003 11:55:01 PM

Wednesday, 3rd of December, 2003 02:16:27 PM

Tuesday, 2nd of December, 2003 04:25:59 PM

I don’t know what I am anymore, politically speaking. I think I’m a “strict construction socialist” — at least, I believe the Founding Fathers established the commerce clause (Article I, Section 8) of the U.S. Consitution for good reason, probably some sort of inkling that Capitalism is Rapine, Plunder and Piracy by other means. Normally, that would put me in bed with the Ralph Nader soviet of the Green Party or with Maoists or something, but frankly I find doctrinaire ideologues, including Wellstone Democrats and Adam Smith Republicans, extremely tedious.

So it’s with some personal surprise that I’ve come to notice that Howard Dean has a brain. This is interesting. Also, and I’ll grant you I haven’t been giving this a lot of attention since I thought I was a George W. Bush Republican, Dean seems to be avoiding the Carville-Begala line of canned union demspeak. That’s astute. Democrats don’t command much over 45% of likely votes by anybody’s count. Swing, swing, swing...

The one thing Bush has done lately that I really approve of is his insistence that the U.S. is not waging a Christian Right holy war against Islam. That’s not only smart, but he says it with conviction. It doesn’t worry me that the country is in Bush’s hands — not to include Rove, Rice or Rumsfeld without a few footnotes.

Monday, 1st of December, 2003 06:50:21 PM

Deconstruction puzzles me. Of course, many things do, but still it’s difficult to imagine what relevance “deconstruction” might have, say, to string theory or the decline of the nuclear family, et cetera. Aside from bothering a few people who’ve heard of it, what good is it? If it truly is little more than a credentialing buzzword separating ins from outs, the next great flu pandemic should edit the thing out of the Einfachheit, along with McJobs and any superfluous middling classes. It’s amazing how resilient the great heresies are, by contrast, such as Entropy, Communism, Albigensianism and the Transmigration of Souls; nothing fazes those!

Whatever. I guess I’ll have to construct a point of view on deconstruction; tear away the veils, burn off the mists, sweep away the cobwebs, cleanse the doors of perception, etc.... Thinking back to English Lit (circa 1963!), there’s an outside chance I do this stuff automatically, so I suppose I oughta know what it is. There was a time I thought top-down programming was rubbish. Hmmmm...

Sunday, 30th of November, 2003 12:33:31 PM

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man,
they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.
                — Tao Te Ching, 80, Jane English and Gia-fu Feng
Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching used to really bug me. Of late, though, I’ve begun to appreciatethe graces and nuances of its seeming apathy. The way I read it these days, the Old Man wasn’t referring toisolationist ideology or “live and let live,” but to the realization that pacific, isolated communitiesproduce their own kinds of unique, isolated Style. Every neighborhood has its colors, its wise womenand witch doctors, its quilting bees and koffeeklatches; every hollow echoes to a different yodel, everyCaribbean island has its own unique breed of six-toed cats. Like biodiversity, like politics, GENIUS IS LOCAL — little Dutch girls inwimples and clogs, Scandanavian cabinets with rosemaling, Hawaiian luaus, Tahitian hulas, Japanese anime and electronics, Hindu-Pakistani nuclear frontier stylized disdain, Ravi Shankar, rock and rugby. All of that gets homogenized, stereotyped and boiled down as gray as day-old instant oatmeal by our suburban mindscape dumbed down television monoculture, without the depths and distances of time and silence to grow it in. Real cultures grow small and lonely, like Muhammad Ali guerilla rhetoric or pot gardens hidden in the woods.

Saturday, 29th of November, 2003 11:42:15 AM

Expecting a visit from Parker-Bowles, maybe? Apparently, Aussie taxes fund a government service called The National Continence Management Strategy. Smallest continence in the southern hemisphere, not counting Antarctica.

Friday, 28th of November, 2003 02:03:25 PM

The President went to Baghdad the same way William Beebe plumbed the abyssal depths off Bermuda — in a steel bubble.

Blub...

Blub...

Blub...

Blub...

Thursday, 27th of November, 2003 05:59:30 PM

Fourth swan?! Never! Fortunately, Anastasia Volochkova, the “grotesquesly overweight” petite former doll of the Bolshoi, has won again! Brava! This kind of humiliation for a world-class prima ballerina woulda never happened in Kruschev’s day. You have to wonder if those Bolshoi hernia twinge artistes who can’t bench press 109 pounds are really worth their $50 a month. Ballet dancers are nuts. Brilliant, hopelessly beautiful... and nuts.

Wednesday, 26th of November, 2003 09:06:43 PM

Do Israeli Palestinians get to vote? If not, why not? As the majority party, they could simply pass a law to rename the real estate and everyone would be happy, right? Something tells me common sense is not welcome in a dispute so rabid it makes the U.S. civil rights marches of the Sixties look like ... uhh ... civil rights marches.

Tuesday, 25th of November, 2003 08:21:49 PM

Shades of Washington Irving! Have you seen Headless Dakini...?! Something to do with egolessness, I think. This is either desperately smoky suppressed rage, or my kind of humor, or maybe a bit of both...

Sunday, 23rd of November, 2003 10:08:03 AM

Entreprenuer, n.:A high-rolling risk taker who would rather be a spectacular failure than a dismal success.
        — Juan Unfoco

Thursday, 20th of November, 2003 07:19:56 PM

My sixtieth winter has begun!

Tuesday, 18th of November, 2003 11:57:15 PM

True Story This is one of those cool things you don’t understand until 30 years later. Let’s go back, back to a night in November of 1974, the night of The Election.

Harkin headquarters was in an old J. C. Penney’s basement on Main Street in Ames, as I recall. It might have been a Younkers, who knows? We were all amateurs, the polls had closed after 9 P.M. and the early results all showed Bill Scherle winning. So far, Harkin was just another young lawyer trying to find a niche. He was surrounded by a few bright characters, among them John Fitzpatrick and Clyde Brown — you can find my Harkinistas link here. The point is Harkin expected to lose this election, and the mood at HQ was tight and laconic. There was a lot of through the looking glass practice for the inevitable concession speech going on, a lot of preparation for the letdown sure to come later. Harkin looked like a man writing his resume.

One of Senator Dick Clark’s guys, Rich Bender, was closeted with Clyde and J.F. working phones, getting a feel for the precincts Clyde and John had targeted months previous. Bender knew everyone, knew who to call, knew all the courthouse numbers. The numbers were unlike anything on the news. There was a chance — a disconcerting, strange chance — that Harkin might not actually lose the election. J.F. was incredulous. Clyde was sober, stable, unexcited, unexcitable — our rock. Nobody knew, of course, none of the hundred or so people crowded into the old headquarters, normally so quiet, so full of silently turning mental wheels, and mice. The room was warm and smoke-filled. I was still chain smoking.

Here’s the part that gets me. Eventually, one of the wire services called the race for Harkin. Just imagine the shouting and pandemonium, it’s not important. Dismiss that and look at Tom Harkin. Harkin’s jaw is slack. The man is in shock. Amazed and astonished, and John Liepa has grabbed his hand and is pumping it up and down and booming “Congratulations!” There may have been a bit of backpounding, I don’t know. What I do know is, the moment for anyone else to occupy center stage in Tom Harkin’s tunnel vision at the precise moment of the peak experience of his political life, the moment when every last shred of cynicism and disbelief in Tom Harkin’s soul was banished to the backside of the Moon, the moment Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were real again, the moment wishes came true, that soaring shining moment of victory, was gone forever. The blaze of Harkin’s transcendent experience was forever imprinted with John Liepa’s beaming, approving, shining face on it.

The rest of us lined up to cheer, but hell, most of us were congratulating ourselves. We did it. Everyone in that room did it! Victory was ours. Harkin was passing between stages in his life, in a chrysalis of joy and disbelief, from lowly Democratic candidate to actual imago United States Representative, 5th District, Iowa. I think he noticed that. It became a kind of theme in the way he handled staff, over the years. Everyone who thought of Tom Harkin as “our” candidate gradually fell away, or was frankly shed. The only ones who stayed on his staff with any sort of tenure were John’s wife, Diane, and Rich Bender, who “we” picked up after his stint with Senator Culver.

John’s wife, Diane, one of J.F.’s grad students, used to have a sign on her wall in the days when she worked in a cubicle in the Harkin District Office in Ames. It read, “To be successful, a woman must work ten times harder than a man. Fortunately, this is not difficult.”

I think a great many people have underestimated Diane Liepa over the years, to their everlasting chagrin.

Monday, 17th of November, 2003 11:44:26 PM

Sunday, 16th of November, 2003 12:19:04 PM

From One-stanza Odysseys...
The Penelope’s afloat again,
  Her Sails are full of wind!
And after coursing Here and There
  Her Captain sets his chin,
And points Her at the Pleiades
  And thinks of Home, and gin.
So the weblog is reprieved, evidently.

In other news...

Ms. Clinton rambled on at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines last night. That was the most ruckus I’ve ever seen out of Iowa Democrats, and I’ve seen my share of J-J’s since 1972. The mood was just this side of riot, in fact. A fun note: The Dixie Chicks’ “Ready to Run” on the CD player in the background.

So, Hillary says she’s not running for President in 2004. My guess is, she’d be humble but happy to accept a draft for Vice President. Only “Kerry-Clinton” has a ring to it, though.

As a former Democrat whose Clinton nausea reaches Republican proportions, I’d have to boldly predict that Hillary on top of the ticket would carry fewer states than George McGovern. In the missionary position, as Veep, she’d be largely irrelevant — Bush is likely to sweep the South, the West, the Midwest and maybe half the Northeast. Biggest winner since the Lyndon Landslide.

Followed by pandemonium in the streets, as the beaten rump of the Democratic party begins a protest against the war in Iraq that will make Kent State look like Sunday school.

Interesting times we live in.

Saturday, 15th of November, 2003 10:23:59 AM

Speak softly and carry a vorpal sword. (Speak hardly and carry a banana daquiri?)

Ugh. Jughead vs. Doodledorf is not my idea of a fun time. Hopefully, the prompt will change soon.

Monday, 10th of November, 2003 08:20:20 PM

I wasn’t gonna do it, but here you go...

Just another Unix fortune cookie, by Juan Unfoco
I ask only one thing. I'm understanding. I'm mature. And it isn't much toask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with mySelina -- or not even alone, damn it, merely close to her, close enough tosmell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the mouldingof her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough toput in one good, clean punch. That's all I ask.
      — Martin Amis, Money

Saturday, 8th of November, 2003 11:11:47 PM

defunct

Pffft!


Nuts. Patrons send spare change to:

grikdog

In other news, finished my first week scoring the CUNY Proficiency Exam for ACT. Not harder than MCAT, just slower — scoring into a hypercube instead of on a six-note scale takes a few additional minutes per diem. Lots of average kids in New York City, plus a few high-soaring hang gliders, a lot of break-your-heart ESLs, and one or two underachieving local geniuses who couldn’t score all sixes on a sunny day. I don’t understand bad karma excellence. On the other end of a colorful spectrum anchored by one of these infradig trolls was a 70 year old Daedelus armored in stellar humility. Who teaches the egoless? Some of these sixes are their own rule. Even the worst are fascinating, in a morbid sort of way.

<doodling>6 * 6 * 6 * 6 =36 * 36 =(30 + 6) * (30 + 6) =(30 * 30) + (2 * 30 * 6) + (6 * 6) =900 + 360 + 36 =1296.</doodling>

Thursday, 6th of November, 2003 07:55:45 AM

She Who Must Be Obeyed has decreed that my Mac.Com account shall expire on November 20th (my birthday) because these are Hard Times. Hmmm... I’ll have to find a cheaper home for Ye Olde Blogge, I guess.

Considering how much of the old Macintosh Legacy Preservation mindset has eroded under the current regime, maybe the old Mac cachet exhibits more slobby than sabi these days, anyway...

But that’s just sour grapes. [heave a... sigh]

Wednesday, 5th of November, 2003 06:43:40 PM

In the immortal words of Pete the Puma.... (We won.)

Tuesday, 4th of November, 2003 07:00:24 AM

Vote Today No on Linn County gambling. Yes on library levy.

Monday, 3rd of November, 2003 08:17:25 PM

Ah. The DaVinci Code is a novel. I thought it was nonfiction.

Sunday, 2nd of November, 2003 03:35:45 PM

A Well-ordered Universe After she kills Bill, mightn’t the Black Mamba be persuaded to terminate Neo?

Meanwhile, back at Reality... I’ve been reading Diana Preston’s The Boxer Rebellion, always hazardous for me — I tend to get sucked into these things and lose my bearings. It’s amazing, though, how often we seem to blunder into the great chapters of history (Vietnam, Iraq...) as though all our roadmaps were drawn a century ago in China. Now I’ll have to brush up on my Joseph Needham and Arthur Waley...

Saturday, 1st of November, 2003 02:59:32 PM

Aozora BunkoAll Saints Day One of my favorite Pure Land Buddhism stories goes like this: Everyone who says namu amida butsu (yes, this is Japanese, and daily Japan is not notably Buddhist except for funerals — the formula just means “I take refuge in the Buddha”) gets born into the Pure Land, no matter what their spiritual (or intellectual) condition.

Very democratic. Dullards, wizards, clods, clowns and mandarins, little flower girls and ancient Empresses Dowager, all alike get in, just by saying “I take refuge in the Buddha.” All alike will enter the Pure Land in a lotus bud, stepping forth from the opening flower into the proverbial Better Place — where all alike eventually learn the truth about their own Buddha natures and enter Nirvana after spending millenia in the common Heavens, the Pure Land, as freely open as a public golf course. Even to murderers.

Sadly, Buddhism reveals a mean streak of sly humor at this point. True, murderers are born into the Pure Land like everyone else — but their lotus buds do not open! I was disappointed when I heard this. It means somebody’s ego has not transcended after all! (And which of your God’s gifts would you deny?)

Answer to the Riddle Lotus bud caesarian sections. Everybuddy needs somebuddy sometime.

Friday, 31st of October, 2003 03:15:58 PM

Jack Plus the Toff’s take on pumpkinology.

My kid’s going as Kim this year. She’s never kippled, though.

Thursday, 30th of October, 2003 12:45:39 PM

It seems peanuts came from Brazil’s eastern Andean slopes, originally, and now infest every interesting cuisine in the world, including Mexican, Thai and Szechuan. Talk about your pandemic!

Imagining whirled peas? Try the IHIQS. Mentioned in the Observer. (138)

Wednesday, 29th of October, 2003 01:02:49 PM

English literature's performing flea.†
                — Sean O'Casey on P.G. Wodehouse
Oh, now. We can’t all be Oscar Wilde in chains!
†Just another Unix fortune cookie...

Tuesday, 28th of October, 2003 02:47:08 PM

And the Top Ten Reasons Rift Valley Fever (RVF) is spreading to Iowa [“Deadly Virus On Horizon,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, October 28, 2003, page 1]...

10. It’s just our bad luck
 9. It somehow got to Florida and it’s only a matter of time
 8. Cuban boat people brought an infected goat to Miami
 7. Hominid bones received by the Smithsonian packed in infected goat straw
 6. Illegal oriental rugs woven by slave Afghani children with RVF
 5. Osama bin Laden’s goat got loose
 4. Infected Al Qaeda goat entered the Governor’s race in California
 3. African pandemics got legs
 2. Johnny Rift Valley Fever Seed
 1. It just makes perfect sense

Conventional Wisdom: Presumably, RVF will show up the same (unpredictable) way as West Nile — e.g., riding in a boatload of old, wet, mosquito larvae infested tires from Israel. The timetable for this tub’s unwelcome arrival on our shores has not yet been published. In any case, my money is on Russian tuberculosis, Son of SARS or dengue fever when it comes to placing bets on what pale horse Plague comes trotting in on.

Monday, 27th of October, 2003 11:34:09 PM

Apparently, “gargoyle” is cognate with “gargle.” I should have known.
Yes, I did say “sky blue pink” several hours before the cabbie said it on PBS’s Hound of the Baskervilles last night. But I edited the entry, so I can’t prove it! Heh heh heh... (Happens all the time.)

Sunday, 26th of October, 2003 10:55:27 AM

Small Victories Turns out “sky blue pink” is a Sky Blue Pink; i.e., a variety of Symphytum grandiflorum, not a color riddle after all. And, I finally tracked down my flickering mnemonic grip on Cherry 2000! What else happened in 1988? Oh, yeah. Perfect Blue won the World Series. By the way... [NRRK! sarcasm alert!] God still loves the Yankees (even when they lose). Heh.

Saturday, 25th of October, 2003 04:31:05 PM

“One loved money, one loved power, and one loved China.” Of the three Soong sisters, the one wholoved power died last Thursday. She was 106. The Committee of One Million (less a few) will crack the Dragon Lady’s mahjong tile in remembrance, no doubt.

Monday, 27th of October, 2003 11:55:44 PM

Almost every dream... There’s still a few old ones, and these days, a few new ones. I’d like to see my grandkids on the barricades at Alpha Centauri Station, for example.
I’m against the new Greater Potterville casino. Vote No! on November 4th. Keep life in Bedford Falls ... uhh ... Cedar Rapids ... wonderful!
Gundam appliance girl (Sofi Fatale, the quadraplegic secretary with the obnoxious cell phone, remember?) could be a running gag. Like, she keeps coming back in ever more high-tech assassination suits, and the Bride keeps offhandedly ducking out of the way and hoisting her by her own incidental petards, like Road Runner vs. Coyote. Or Bond vs. Jaws. Or Jake Blues vs. Camille Ztdetelik.

These are predictions! Keep score!

Thursday, 23rd of October, 2003 05:09:35 PM

Whenever I contemplate the modern masters, like Neil Gaiman or Hayao Miyazaki or Linus Torvalds or Monty Widenius, contrasting my own past aspirations and well-deserved oblivion against their effulgence, I realize how maudlin sobbing grateful I am that I have seen, with my own eyes, the fruition of almost every dream I ever had, executed brilliantly by other hands and greater minds than mine. I was born into in a cynical anti-heroic age (even the Beat Generation produced only zombies, not heroes) — who knew that after all, this kid would have heroes?

There’s something sad about being ahead of your time — then living so @#$% long you catch up to it!

Wednesday, 22nd of October, 2003 12:48:53 PM

nee noo nee noo nee noo

Unspeakable pursuits, contd.

Autumn in full glow. The Di character assassination squad a-drip in full innuendo. Must be silly season in Britain! Personally, I side with the mob who think something still stinks under that Paris bridge. But if “they” did do her in, what a gloriously foul venue for a full-gore, double-barrelled haunting — the London Daily Mirror!

“I’ll admit it’s hard to crank up much sympathy for either side in a feud among feudalists.”

Tuesday, 21st of October, 2003 04:02:40 PM

Great maple. Ok, maybe polyurethane is progress!

Monday, 20th of October, 2003 01:59:28 PM

Q: What's the difference between a duck and an elephant?
A: You can't get down off an elephant.
                             — Yet another Unix fortune cookie

I had a T.I.A. on Saturday, just as the Marlins scored 3 runs. Off to E.R. for a cat scan. Nada. Then a carotid infrasound this morning. Also nada. Who knows? Too much excitement. We slept in on Sunday. Yankees back in form. Quiet today. Indian summer today. Cheryl is polyurethaning the maple in the entryway. I was using a spinning rod to snag the door we opened for ventilation, in order to close it, and snagged her tee instead. Oops.

Sunday, 19th of October, 2003 11:29:33 PM

What to say about Kill Bill ... hmmm ... O-Ren Ishii’s snow-filled Japanese garden probably reminds everyone whose brains are no longer virgins of cocaine. The recent chorus of shocked reductionists suggests something epochal, too. Personally, I enjoyed the anime sequence, and the byplay between master and disciple which becomes hilarious only in very formal retrospect.

If you say K.B. has “no plot,” you simply do not realize how Tarantino folds and refolds your stream of consciousness like origami. One of the cleverest things he does is present you, at the beginning, four adobe walls (get it?) decorated at eye level by a broad, aesthetic band of bullet holes — but the rest of the movie is a protracted sword fight (what’s wrong with AK-47s for getting even, may I ask?) stiff with Aristotelian structure. Beginning. Middle. End. Followed by two violently understated statements in His & Hers sadomasochism that set up the sequel and leave the audience hanging, violated and distant.

Like a $50 line of cocaine, the chill is definitely worth its costliness. But... Can you afford the habit? Can America afford the habit? And who takes care of the kids? Silly rhetoricals. Can’t you just hear the PSA at 2 in the morning? Lucy Liu’s delightful little girl singsong, saying, “Oopsie, touch-e-é! This is your br-a-ain on coc-a-aine.”

If Tarantino is smart, he’ll leave the sequel in the can, and never finish it. This was the past, pure allusive reference and retrospective. The sequel will have to refer to a real future — Now, extrapolated. Tall order. Except... by George! Tarantino does make one ironic topical reference: The Bride carries her sword in plain view, in de rigeur Musashi style, on the plane from Okinawa to Tokyo! We’re meant to laugh! (And where does Black Mamba get her money?)

Coming up... High plains sister. Followed by... Blade runner meets Gundam appliance girl. Is Tarantino really painting himself into obvious conceptual corners? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

Saturday, 18th of October, 2003 11:42:32 AM

Ceilings are cool, especially flat on your back looking up with curtains on the windows and light leaking onto the blank spaces and geometric corners on a lazy Saturday morning. Mondrian for the masses. Whatever. Why don’t Americans decorate their ceilings? Nature does it all with shadows. Nobody notices. We live in tents made out of wood and plaster. Upscale, America.

Friday, 17th of October, 2003 04:26:37 PM

Thursday, 16th of October, 2003 11:13:45 AM

God doesn’t love the Cubs. God loves the Yankees. You can’t convince me the Bambino would curse the Sox, though. Babe’s a nice guy.

Wednesday, 15th of October, 2003 11:16:41 PM

M.A.D., M.A.D., M.A.D., M.A.D. World
14 Oct 2003 Oliphant FAIR USEI have to admit, on one level Oliphant’s vizzual komment yestiddy about the yellow peril kind of ticks me off. It’s just part of a pattern that implies Chinese are too dumb, backward and ... well ... yellow to understand rocket science without buying the answers from Asian-American citizens who happen to have security clearances. On the other hand, it’s true that China just delivered a ’stremely understated message to the U.S., always presuming Condoleeza Rice & Ilk are bright enough to notice it, namely, Intercontinental Delivery Platform. Yowza, Uncle Joe. On the other other hand, maybe China was just slapping up a PostIt note for Taiwan, India and Pakistan.

Also...

Tuesday, 14th of October, 2003 05:24:20 PM

My kingdom for a shrubbery Warn’t Boudica a hoot the other night? O, please tell me that this great charismatic Celtic warrior queen, she haling from a thousand year tradition of Bardic lilt and lyoness, mistress of a thousand generations of Celtic feminine torque and banter, inflames her wee band o’ Iceni anarcho-syndicalists on the eve o’ ghastly battle with the legendary legions o’ Rome with less gift o’ the immortal gab‡ than the Aflac Duck! The gang who scribbled this epiclichkeit for PBS have obviously never heard of incendiary speech, let alone heard from (e.g.) Bernadette Devlin, who, before she was gunned down in her own home, slung the slang with the best of them. Nobody who writes “warlike Celt” in English prose should get away with it, ’lessen they be also capable of quoting favorite passages from Ulysses in Nighttown!
‡ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theater lifts Boudicca’s chariot speech before the battle with Suetonius nearly verbatim from the Penguin Classics edition of Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, p. 330, leaving it pristine and unsullied by the least trace of artistic license. My point is, Tacitus, famously taciturn, is impressed enough to quote at length, but very likely gives only the gist, as anyone who enjoys William Butler Yeats or Oscar Wilde or James Joyce (or Bernadette Devlin!) may feel especially invited to presume.

Monday, 13th of October, 2003 09:23:21 PM

Shhhh... Quite.

Sunday, 12th of October, 2003 03:36:34 PM

Remember loaves and fishes? That can be done if you divide by a number small enough (limit zero). I also like the analogies of dividing a loaf with a knife (into 2 pieces) or a mirror (into two loaves). This sort of heretical humor drives rationalists and religionists nuts, because it somehow suggests that truth is provisional, or nature is unnatural, or present company is too close for comfort.

Wow, a golden goal! What a great game!

Whyizzit, btw, that a “dog bites man” story like ISU Loses Again! is BIG SNOOSE, but the FIFA consolation round with Mia Hamm’s valedictory appearance in a 3-1 win over the second-best Canadian women’s team in history (counting the future) gets buried below Jan Stephenson’s racial slurs about Asian pros on the LPGA tour below the fold on page 8...??! Got our priorities straight in Iowa, yup yup you betchum Red Ryder. In my next life, I want to join the Yellow Peril and be a soccer-playing mathematician-slash-golf pro.

Saturday, 11th of October, 2003 07:07:34 PM

Unix fortune cookie of the day:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi hasshortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the OldSilurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundredthousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now theMississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There issomething fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns ofconjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
                -- Mark Twain

Friday, 10th of October, 2003 03:41:08 PM

      Odds and ends...
  • Did you know that sunflowers are known as the Kobe earthquake flower?

  • And here’s a cool link about quipu. Apparently the Incas weren’t just totting up, their knots told tales.

  • Sunday’s FIFA final, Germany ups Sweden, 2-1. USA over Canada, 1-0 on pk’s in the consolation round tomorrow. The whole thing should be run like the World Series, best of 5 at least. Yankees vs. Marlins.

Thursday, 9th of October, 2003 08:31:13 PM

I was showing my daughter how the times table is really about shapes this morning. She’d seen the table before, but not the shapes; e.g., 8 x 8 is 64, a square. I showed her that 2 x 7 is 14, the same as 7 x 2 is 14, when she added the two areas together, “And 14 and 14 is 28!” Smart kid, except that Dad complicated things by noticing the two rectangles were overlapping in the top left corner, so the sum was actually 24!

That got me thinking about the old geometric proof for (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2, so for example 14 squared is 196 because 10 squared is 100, 4 squared is 16, with two 4 x 10 rectangles on the sides, and so on. But then I noticed that the sum of two overlapping rectangular areas is actually a set of results: 28, 26, ..., 14, plus 27! (That’s when the rectangles overlap on one unit square in their respective intersecting corners.) What kind of operator describes addition as a range of specific allowable values? Not addition, evidently. How large is the result set? Is there any way to predict how many elements it contains, if the total area is less than (or equal to) 28, and the shapes need not be squares or rectangles? What (if anything) does a result set with two elements, one composed of one unit square, and the other composed of 27 unit squares stacked on each other, describe? Can you add two result sets with different properties? Is this another way of saying something we already know about? A puzzling way to spend a morning walk.

In my next life, I’d like to catch on a lot sooner that math might be fun. Especially proofs, for which you don’t need nobody’s permission...!

Wednesday, 8th of October, 2003 11:41:09 PM

I’ve given up on Wesley Clark. Shelton’s opinion matters. And if Democrats need Carville & Begala to tell them what to think, then Carville & Begala should be running for office. I give Schwarzenegger credit for not boring California voters. Hell, who needs specifics? California’s problems are complex. Take an idea here, steal an idea there. Maybe Arnold ok for dat job, huh?
Call me an incurable cynic, but the new Lion King Special Edition plays like a VHS dub on my clunky old 26" Sony. Sleeping Beauty didn’t do that. Sleeping Beauty was gorgeous, better than the original. As for the “new song” ... can you say D-O-R-K? And frankly, Lion King is awfully old hat. My guess is, this won’t be the money maker stockholders expect. Which begs the question, can Eisner be trusted to do right by Cinderella?

Tuesday, 7th of October, 2003 11:35:54 PM

Days like this should be poured into bottles and corked for a full rack of weary Februarys. Remember the old paperback cover on Ray Bradbury’s October Country? Cold, gray, windy, slanted rain, dismal, dreck. Today was nothing like that. The air is full of little orange Halloween beetles bizzling and foozling in the sunlight.
On this day 29 years ago (October 7, 1974), DeeCee cops stopped Wilbur Mills for speeding, and Fanne Fox jumped out of his car and popped into the Tidal Basin. That was a highlight of a fun political year. Brings it all flooding back, somehow. My favorite scandal from that era, however, was Wayne Hays’ secretary, Elizabeth Ray (May 23, 1976), who famously said, “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone.” Hays was no loss. His patronage kept a few elevator boys on the payroll who made weekend book and peddled lids from the fancy scrollwork and rackety sanctorum of Mr. Otis’ wrought-iron cages. Funny thing is, in “Mainland China” that same year (September, 1976), they shot the Gang of Four for painting the town Red, but Hays got got for a little thing like gargling his secretary’s Chloraseptic. History records a bit of irony here.
Nuclear treadmill tests again, yesterday. Wonder how they came out? According to my paperwork, I am a CAD (coronary artery disease) and an SOB (shortness of breath). How ominous! Even the word “cardiopulmonary” sounds like a veiled threat to me...!

Monday, 6th of October, 2003 10:06:29 AM

Night of the living goalkeeps. I still give the edge to USA-China in 1999. That was a great game. Unfortunately, I fell asleep during Sweden-Canada last night, so I don’t know how Sweden pulled it out. Should be a good game next Sunday, with Germany ahead at the end.

Sunday, 5th of October, 2003 10:16:59 AM

White Tiger It turns out the greatest sustained winds on Earth (90 MPH and up for days on end) are the katabatic winds off the coast of Antarctica. I thought they were Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh, Dum Dee Dum and Dum Dee Dee on the petty theme of Needle Tweedle. Slash and Slander, the white tigers of the goddess Satire, are the easiest offensive weapons of war to pick up, and the hardest to put down.

On a high note, we watched Bend it like Beckham last night. A sweet film, full of hope. Nobody told me it was comedy. Liked it a lot. Bring back WUSA.

Saturday, 4th of October, 2003 10:02:16 AM

It was only a dream ... worthy of Magritte! Why do I have such dreams? I dreamt I saw the Moon and Six Pence. Moondogs, more or less. The Arctic apparition that surrounds the Moon with a circle (except there was no circle) and two flanking disks (except there were six arranged hexagonally). But then I noticed the whole thing was a reflection, as though drawn on ice crystals in the night sky. I turned, and on my left, there in all its glory, hung six full moons surrounding the Moon herself, so weird it begs interpretation. There was a photographer, Magritte’s eternal watcher, part of the scene photographing part of the scene. There was another silhouette or shadow of a man gazing silently at the dimmer reflection. I was reminded of the Lights and the Lesser Lights in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So who’s dying? The Pope? Me? Who’s got six or seven months to live? There was more... Two people I used to know well, a man and a woman, stepped through a door onto a platform with a low rail, near the top of a sheer precipice. The man said, “Wow,” and he and the woman stepped onto the rail. I turned away as they stepped off. I suspect they must have felt as though they were flying toward a far horizon with a Moon and Six Pence reflecting in the sea.

Friday, 3rd of October, 2003 11:02:54 AM

China played classy, classy football last night, but lost the battle in the trenches — an outcome Sun Tzu would understand. Four times out of seven, China woulda won that game easy. A million times out of a million, in China, without SARS. The Chinese women had depth, skill, talent, spirit, speed, fire and character. Everything, maybe, but a coach who’s read Sun Tzu.

Thursday night’s meteoric moment was the goal by Danilova. Sunday? Germany cracks the U.S. women’s team over its knee, 5-2. Canada stuns Sweden, 1-0 in overtime.

Thursday, 2nd of October, 2003 04:44:14 PM

A beautiful day, cold blue skies following our first hard freeze. Nice October so far. Good day to mow the last green lawn of the season. Great football weather. (Heh heh.)

I mentioned the cloud of unknowing. Fortunately, mere names do not break when dropped.

Wednesday, 1st of October, 2003 11:24:49 PM

Hmmm... U.S. beats Norway one to zip. I can see why. The Americans field a taller, proportionately larger team — more bulk, more domination in the zones. China will need to be fast, assuming we can outlast Germany.
*It should be obvious why an exception is made for political speech in the Do Not Call law, but we’ll assume everyone but you, gentle reader, is as bright as the center wad in a jarful of used bubblegum. “Political speech” includes speech in opposition to established order, which allows incumbents to be thrown out of office. There. Got it? Regulating that is unconstitutional. “Commercial speech” is purely putative, as commerce is and always will be regulated by the U.S. Congress according to the commerce clause (Article I, Section 8) of the U.S. Consitution.

**Ok, ok, the vote on the FTC explicit authorization for Do Not Call was U.S. House 412-8, U.S. Senate 95-0. Almost unanimous. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, it was almost acclamation.

***You gotta love the truly weird, at least before they’re committed.

Tuesday, 30th of September, 2003 09:52:36 AM

You cannot trust the media (even, or perhaps especially, Fox News) to construe strict construction the right way. I’ve learned to appreciate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for his gifts in this regard — slicker than a greased weasel, for the most part, he does prefer the spirit of the Founders when their experience of the 21st century may be insufficient. The media in general grind only one axe, the First Amendment, since that is where their bread is buttered. Scalia can be trusted with the fasces as well as the fascicle [sic].

As I understand the current telemarketer debate in the context of the U.S. Constitution, freedom of speech refers primarily to freedom to criticize the government and government’s favorites, in the overriding interest of a free and informed electorate. This is the gist of Sullivan vs. New York Times (1964), for example. But there is no “commercial” freedom of speech. Absolutely none. There can’t be, since snake oil and rat droppings can not, do not, should not, and must not vote. Commerce and commercial speech in particular must be forever regulated.

Furthermore, the sanctity of the home, enshrined in English common law as “A man’s home is his castle,” is specifically enshrined as well in the Bill of Rights, where, in the Third Amendment, it even takes precedence over national security:Clearly also, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments specifically allow the sovereign people of this nation to kick telemarketers out of their homes: Bleeeaah!

Monday, 29th of September, 2003 12:17:03 PM

My 2003 FIFA Women’s Soccer World Cup Championship prediction is ... Ta Da! ... China.

Brandi Chastain and Mia Hamm still zap my Valkyrie meter, of course. But the Chinese women are just as scary on the field as they are in the Adidas fantasy commercial. China plays kick ’n click, too. Just like a soccer team.

Sunday, 28th of September, 2003 12:04:08 AM

Slugbug Update My daughter has changed the rules. Now, even if Dad sees the beetle first and yells "Slugbug!" she gets to hit me. Ow. Ow. Ow. The score is now 1004 her, 17 me. I have to spot vintage beetles, evidently, so my previous score had to be adjusted downward.

Saturday, 27th of September, 2003 12:53:47 PM

Ekpyrotic universe, anyone? Or, say... What would a 31th Century Flying Fortress look like, analogous to the WWII jobbie? My guess would be a Paris-sized Tardis pretending to be an ekpyrotic paintball BB. High velocity. Its location would lie somewhere in a cloud of probability, which, if intersecting you, would be represented in Goth Tollsdottir’s Video Games Of The Future as a prominent red haze.

My thoughts on meditation, the serious wall-gazing kind, takes color from these ruminations on bleeding-edge astrophysics. Can you do this zazen stuff by yourself? Well, sure! You can also take a quiet evening stroll through Ernest Hemingway’s Kilimanjaro basin — who knows what interesting experiences you’ll discover?

You don’t know what you don’t know, as somebody once said. Humans probably should travel in packs. So I’m in no hurry to find out why clocks (alarm, wrist, electric, spring-wound) stop when I meditate too much.

There is a school of thought which says the entire universe is virtual, and far weirder than anyone imagines. For example, what if the Last Day is not an atomic holocaust, or a shower of deadly cosmic rays from a Rigellian supernova, or collision with an asteroid the size of Texas? What if, that day, the sky just crumples like aluminum foil, and the folds and ripples turn bright orange and green and purple, then slowly writhe across human perspective from Left to Empathy leaving behind purvots and skombol?

Who says the prevailing myth has anything to do with science fiction? What if the Earth is a fortress, and we’ve forgotten why?

Patanjali’sYoga Sutras mentions a supernatural ability to make oneself tiny, but Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency actually enlists that surreal theme — he has a demon hiding behind a molecule. Lewis Carroll’s telescoping Alice has a separate, unrelated, slightly comic provenance, of course, but Patanjali may share somewhat with Thumbelina, Tom Thumb and Smurfette, images in fantasy and folklore which obviously refer to conception and growth in the womb. It doesn’t pay to project our own fascinations onto the cloud of unknowing, but when they turn up in String Theory... Hmmm...

Friday, 26th of September, 2003 08:59:25 AM

Hey, what do I know about nuthin? Nada, that’s what! It may take a Constitutional Amendment to do it, but telemarketers are going to learn they are persona non grata in America. What astounds me is these guys think they’re a “legitimate business!” Has somebody checked with the Adam Smith seance on that one?

Thursday, 25th of September, 2003 05:02:22 PM

This afternoon on Fox News, I saw a telemarketer call a sitting Member of the United States House of Representatives a “hypocrite” to her face. She smiled, and four hours later the unanimous membership of the U. S. House and U. S. Senate handed that man and his entire industry their walking papers. Wow.

Wednesday, 24th of September, 2003 06:41:13 PM

Another Unix fortune cookie:

... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When aprogrammer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sittingdown, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. Thatbehavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting andnever when standing.

Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminalknow whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though,know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest tohypothesize: was there a loose wire under the carpet, or problems with staticelectricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible.An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard:the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was atouch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was ledastray by hunting and pecking.
        -- "Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985

Tuesday, 23rd of September, 2003 10:27:26 PM

Autumn’s here. And how do you save three lives a day?

Tuesday’s Saturday Matinee Why, it’s... >Gasp!< Yes, GWB is that cowboy, the one whose “gut instincts” tell him the world is a small place, about the size of the U. N. Corral...!

Ah, Clio, muse of backward glances...! We went from Reagan, a president who used to be an actor, to Bush, a president who used to be a Texas National Guard bush pilot. Wouldn’t you think Condoleezza Rice would have been a quicker study than that? Maybe she's not much better than Margaret Truman on the pie-anna neither...

Ok, Bill Clinton (and Al Gore, James Carville and Paul Begala, not to put too fine a point on it) cured me of calling myself a yellow dog Democrat. On the other distal extremity, though, whenever three Republicans get together you get an Adam Smith seance — slimed again! And now Bush has cured me of voting for former Texas Rangers managers. I guess I’m a Republicrat. Or a Demoblican. Or...heck...an Independent.

Raise the Bar! Either way, Clark has raised the bar already. That’s good news. Let’s see his team.

Monday, 22nd of September, 2003 03:24:16 PM

Monday AM QB Dept Ok, for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m listening. GWB has done one thing brilliantly, namely destroying the ghastly blight of Taliban jinnocracy in Afghanistan, but three things wrong, in my estimation: 1) “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” 2) enforcing nuclear non-proliferation while snubbing members of the nuclear club, especially France, Russia and China, and 3) attacking Iraq both “preemptively” and baselessly. At best, the operant words are half-baked, half-cocked and BANG!

Clark '04 Wesley K. Clark’s opinions on these issues are just carping unless he also addresses future policy, but I’m listening. I’ll probably still vote for Bush, but I welcome Clark’s critique in the national debate. We Americans have some soul-searching to do.

Sunday, 21st of September, 2003 03:10:14 AM

I must be hypersensitive to tarragon, which to my taste is an almost obnoxiously over-flavored spice. My family doesn’t seem to notice. I started putting it in my pizza sauce, but it overpowers everything else, no matter how much I cut back the amount added. A common name for the herb is “dragon,” so maybe others have felt the same as I do. It’s not a bad spice — although it is nothing like anise, despite claims to the contrary — but a very little goes a long way.

Wikipedia strikes again: Chopsticks!

Friday, 19th of September, 2003 04:49:14 PM


Shiver me timbers, ye scurvy dogs! JPOP at four points o’ the larboard beam!
Hmmm, speaking of longjohns...

Thursday, 18th of September, 2003 02:30:53 PM

Wouldn’t you love to see the “grotesquely overweight” (5'6", 106 pounds!) prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova wearing a black eyepatch and saying “Arrr!” on Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Tuesday, 16th of September, 2003 08:38:28 PM

Scoring the MCAT essay questions ended today. We ran out of ungraded essays. Tomorrow, training for the Blackout Prompt. Thursday, maybe one extra day of extra specials. Then that’s all.

Monday, 15th of September, 2003 06:14:27 PM

There were turkeys outside our window this morning on the ACT campus on the northeast edge of Iowa City. Two toms, three hens.

Sunday, 14th of September, 2003 11:49:54 PM

A Zen Tea Party “Alice is no Alice.” What is that? The formula charges the Diamond Sutra with an atmosphere of near-meaning. Also the Lankavatara Sutra, and others. Enough! I take it to mean what it might say, i.e., the identity of field & ground, a==^a, meaning all something inextricably involved in everything not it.

In one of the old-fashioned university museums of my past, there's a stuffed cat on a board, behind glass. Just a little tabby cat labelled: “Felis domesticus.” How felicitous! Is that a cat? No. Mothballed hide of a dead cat, maybe, stretched over armature. A cat includes more than itself. A cat is also the spaces a cat can lie in: A hat, a sauce pan, a box on a shelf. A cat is also the places a cat can go: A windowsill, a window open 2 inches wide, a fencetop, a yard, a path behind yew bushes. A cat is all its kittens, all its fights, all its songs, all its friendly bats and yowls, all its disturbances. A cat is purring, moonlight, daylight. A cat is the chuckling sounds it makes when it sees a squirrel. In December, in the dead of winter, the Draconic cycle makes the new Moon lie down and sit in the bare tree branches like the Cheshire Cat's smile. A cat is Bast, god, myth and folklore. This dead thing behind the glass is not a cat. This cat is not a cat, unless by “cat” you also mean my lap, my stroke, my pleasure hearing that purr. In just this way, you are not you either.

So when Jesus harrows Hell, extracting only Adam & Eve, Moses and Abraham, the entire human race gets pulled up in one intricately tangled lump. Even if only Eve were harrowed, what mother would leave her child in Hell? Would Eve, her burning hair entwined in the mighty bronze fist of her greatest great-great-grandson Jesus, son of Mary her greatest great-great-granddaughter, the Messiah, Christ, He pulling her by the hair slowly up, she rising by the inexorable power of God towards Heaven out of the sucking stench of Hell, the smouldering wreck of Able tucked under her left arm, right hand of iron gripping the eldritch gleam of Cain's flaming skull like a bowling ball, would she not possess faith like a mustard seed sufficient at least to move the sullen mound of Satan off her children? Would not Eve’s ululating shriek of triumph at the moment of her redemption shatter darkness and summon Gabriel to his final Everest, her transcendental screams the Mother of all music in the human soul? Bad Christianity, maybe, but pretty fair Buddhism — universal salvation, pure land Buddhism, namu amida butsu, is the central theme of the Lotus Sutra, and several others.

By the way, this view has some authority, Thich Nat Hanh for one. Originally, I thought “No Mind” meant mindless, or spontaneous, or something. Apparently, that was just bad translation, Beat Zen.But...! Isn’t there something wrong with spirit as mere ecology? Interconnectedness, too, gets a bit prosaic and immagisterially reductionist after a while.I like to believe the immortals do exist, discontinuously. I like to believe Confucius was right, to have no truck with them. I like to think Gödel’s Theorem leaves room for all kinds of three-legged toads and Kierkegaardian theology experiments.

Doubt is how you keep your cup half empty, how you save room for the unexpected tea.

Saturday, 13th of September, 2003 06:00:53 PM

<zippy>
Oppressed at the hands of the man with the PURPLE KNEE BANDS!
</zippy>

Still hoping the I Ching might actually mean something someday? Thurb!

Friday, 12th of September, 2003 12:00:30 AM

There is no old pond —
No frogs, no sound of water —
Cold, white... no one’s here.

I’ve actually owned books by logicians who measure prajna with predicate calculus. I’ve never understood it, either, because the entire booklength thesis develops from a blunder on page one. Things like this made me give up Zen and theoretical Buddhism. I’m not very good at practical sitting meditation, either — the boredom, the pain, the random psychic discharge — but I try. Once in a while, I understand something beautiful. It is a mistake, for example, to think of the Tao as “uninvolved.” I think the Tao may even have a sense of humor. Sometimes, like the Moon, the path you follow follows you.

Thursday, 11th of September, 2003 05:08:09 PM

No more lettuce for RIAA... Actually, I’ve never bought anything from RIAA, but if I did, I’d be boycotting ’em now, after what they did to Brianna LaHara, age 12, honors student. Hiss! Boo!

Not that RIAA’s selfishly immoderate and small-minded sense of outrage when it comes to juvenile misdemeanor compares to Nine Eleven. Real outrage puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? There’s the World Trade Center, on the one hand. There’s the zit on RIAA’s ass, on the other. My opinion.
Actually, my music collection boils down to an old Worst of Jefferson Airplane cd, Andreas Wollenweider’s Trilogy, the Global Meditation series and an embarassing set of incriminating cd’s from a crush I had on Kiri Te Kanawa several years ago. I’d buy Stairway to Heaven from Apple’s iPod factory, but Led Zep doesn’t buy into the 99¢ a pop stuff, I guess. All I've got on my iPod right now is some tonalities from the Japanese Zork soundtrack, and some Tibetan throat singing.

Tuesday, 9th of September, 2003 11:39:03 PM

Imagine what you’ll “know” tomorrow. — K, MiB

Actually, I do know something weird that I didn’t know yesterday. Well, I knew but I didn’t really know, know what I mean? It’s this: Harvard is for real.

The first, meaning the very first, essay I picked up from the Harvard batch of MCATs read like a dissertation by Jean Paul Sartre out of Ayn Rand. I read the first and the last paragraphs, and skimmed the middle in shock and awe. Holy Marduk, the kid wrote as well as I do! And he knew enough to diss the prompt by calling it a “model!”

The rest of the Harvard packet wasn’t up to genius level, thanks Mehitabel’s departed kittens, but it was freaking better than ok. I feel like I wasted my life. Actually, not really, but it reminds me of a funny story about Edward Teller and Leni Riefenstahl...

Deleted DHS Order 59 Pursuant Patriot Act 2001
which is why the Hungarian flagpole there has always been waxed.

Speaking of which, I listened to Joseph Biden waxing large on Iraq on WSUI (910 on your AM radio dial) during lunch. I wish anybody on George W. Bush’s staff understood foreign policy as well as Biden does. It’s all warriors, there, and no diplomats. Actually, I just wish somebody in the NSA had the balls to admit they’re nervous when they consider the long list of loons who have nuclear weapons — or bits they can assemble on 3 minutes notice — Us. Russia. The Ukraine. China. England. France. Israel. Pakistan. India. Iran. The DPRK. Taiwan. Japan. Australia. The Netherlands. General Electric. Boeing. Microsoft. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The list goes on...

Yes, I said Microsoft. According to my slightly overheated crystal radio set, it’s part of Steve Balmer’s scorched earth policy to deal with a Linux-IBM-Pixar axis if the terminators get loose.

Sunday, 7th of September, 2003 12:00:29 AM

Child’s Play My ten-year-old is winning our Slugbug game. The score is 700 her, 30 me. She plays a demure, painless form of the game, just a touch or a tap, but very aggressively with a lot of mocking and “gotcha!” taunting. Besides Slugbug, we also play Cruiser Bruiser (since it involves hitting with knuckles, we don’t actually play that one, just yell it if losing at Slugbug gets to be too much for Dad) and Honda, Wanda. Honda, Wanda is also a demure game, no hitting at all. Ford Bored is so boring, we just laugh at the name. Chevy Heavy puts us to sleep. Perdiddle is the only other real folk car game we play. I wonder sometimes how many people recognize the etymology? It’s from the Spanish, perdido, meaning lost. One headlight, get it? There’s lots of kid Spanish in whitebread American — “goose,” meaning a New York-style rude poke in the butt, is from gusa, a worm, for example.

My favorite Bodhidharma was at the Freer in 1975; nice to see it again! Also, here is the story about the flayed colt, from the Kojiki.

Friday, 5th of September, 2003 10:31:22 PM

Grading the MCAT essay questions is a kind of itinerant labor for college grads in this town. There’s a floating pool of little gray cells left over from the dot com crash of 2001 or something; anyhow, there sure seems to be a lot of us — graduate students, teachers, student wives, old geezers like me who can’t find work at a young man’s game, the semi-retired, and a few unclassifiables I think just think it’s fun. Which it is. The work is fun and socially significant and it keeps a lot of otherwise unemployable Ph.D’s from selling their blood to the Red Cross — plus, from the point of view of college juniors trying to get into medical school, it’s really high stakes. Naturally, I can’t talk about it. What the questions are, etc., is all veiled behind our N.D.A.’s.

But I don’t think it’s any secret that the essays get ranked from 1 to 6 (low to high), by more than one reader. So what’s that like, you ask?

Well, I’ll tell you: Most of these kids turn in 3’s and 4’s, pretty average. Then there’s the “English as a Second Language” 1’s and 2’s, below par, but once in a while you see these ESL students struggle beyond themselves and achieve the occasional 3 or 4. Rarely, most unusually, even higher. It’s been done.

The essays we readers live for are the 5’s and 6’s. They make my day, anyway. They’re not common. It seems like the greater part of all my morning and all my afternoon is filled with the depressing realization that no matter how much of three pages this 3 fills, it’s always going to be a three, and no matter how standard this 4’s Standard English gets, it’ll never rise to a 5 this side of Residency. My chin drops hard and cracks on the desk. I waggle my head from side to side to shake the cobwebs out. I blink, I rub, I drink my coffee, and I slog into the fray again, roughly three minutes per essay. It takes about 20 seconds to spot the trend, the rest of that time is spent trying to refute the evidence and push the mark higher. If you can.

And then you find a 6...

This morning, I told myself what finding a 6 is like. (But people with jobs should not indulge in wit. More later...) “A four,” quoth I, “is a loaf of bread. A five is the jug of wine. A six is Thou beside me, singing in the wilderness!” Thou, you see, because the sixes are accomplished, confident essayists who understand the art and uses of the English language, some of them as though it were second nature, young as they are. The sixes have a voice, even when they’re writing impersonal 3rd person stuff: The author omniscience stands out, the personality blooms — whether that personality is a fact marshalling careful paranoid like Charles Darwin, or a scintillating jewel like Jane Austen, or a kid no one has heard from, like Kerouac used to be. Like Schweitzer used to be. Foo. You know who they are. They know who they are.

But then I had to go and flog the analogy. Which was relentless. This was exciting, even (subversively) more interesting than the stuff I’m trying to concentrate on. “Hey, yeah!” I remarked silently within the precincts of my skull, “it's like THE DESERT and THE OASIS! Cool! From one to three is the Desert! The one’s the hot, blazing sand! No wait! The ONE’s the SAHARA!! The TWO’s like rocky desert!! The THREE’s like a dry wash, a gully coming up on the OASIS, with a hint of green and scent of water on the air! Hey, wow!! And the FOUR IS THE OASIS!!!“

And there I was, crowding among the camels, wading in the brown pools with the dung and the flies and the rustle of date palms overhead, pushing and shoving the woolly brown flanks, trying to get to back to THIS KID’S HALFWAY DECENT FOUR ESSAY, yelling greetings to the caravanserai... when, like a thunderbolt, I thought, “Wait a minute! What about the book of verses? What part of this is that?” Thank god, I think all I lost was about ten minutes.

After lunch, it occured to me, the book of verses is me. That’s what I bring to the adventure, my experience, my past, my ancient college themebooks, my sixes, my day. But by then, the fit was past. I stayed with it the rest of the day. The kid who went with me into the desert got a solid 4. Later, I found two 5’s. Later, I found a six.

Thursday, 4th of September, 2003 07:54:00 AM

Faux Disnée Like, something happens every single day? Du-uh!

Wednesday, 3rd of September, 2003 10:50:52 PM

08:46:19 AM, and all’s well...!

Ok, it’s funnier on yggdrasil.local. You should try php at home :-)

Wind Chimes: Tao in Mao. Hmmm... Tao vs. Mao...? No. No, not there either... Must be the brain slugs.

Tuesday, 2nd of September, 2003 08:59:25 PM

Bill Scherle died last Wednesday, evidently. I didn’t know, I just heard about it. I was part of the little band of Harkinistas who defeated Iowa's 5th District Congressman in 1974. When we went to Washington, D.C. that winter, we sort of thought we’d won the election, so I (as Harkin’s demi-anointed press secretary that year) ignored the former Congressman’s list of recipients for the USDA Yearbook and sent them to our own list of friends. Victor, spoils sort of thing. Somebody complained to Wild Bill, and he stopped by the Harkin office at 504 Cannon H.O.B. and asked for a copy. I gave him the book on my desk, the last one. Gutless of me, I know. But he didn’t come back, either, and that’s what counted. Later on, I flubbed a few other things, including failing to love the D.C. dinner reception circuit and professional staff cliques, so I left — the only things I remember fondly (aside from laughter) are the National Zoo (heh), being coolly lied to by Peter Jennings when he called to discuss the alleged content of an upcoming ambush with my freshman Rep, and some parts of the Smithsonian. The Hope Diamond, for example, which appeared to me like a haze of disassociated reflections. And the Freer Gallery, which, as luck would have it, had an exhibit of Chinese Buddhist paintings and statuary which have stayed with me to this day. (There was a large wooden Kuan Yin in lordly repose, my favorite.) Eheu! The times! The people! I was part of a booster rocket on another man’s career, now I’m detached, fallen, submerged in a Caribbean of private blues. Like Bill Scherle. Sobbing violins. R-R-R-R.I.P.

Monday, 1st of September, 2003 01:46:32 PM

Labor Day. Relax. Last night we watched Chicago, Bob Fosse’s hard-at-work prequel toAll That Jazz. It won Hollywood’s self-calibrating Best Picture Oscar (2003), no surprise there, butalso shlurrped Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction andBest Supporting Actress (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Waxing reverently cynical, I can see why. It’s like watching a couple of gold doubloons chaseeach other in a blind beggar’s cup. Or a flashy accident, like a lightning bug en demise.

Sunday, 31st of August, 2003 11:40:41 PM

Winston Churchill: A young man who is not a liberal has no heart. An old man who is not a conservative has no brain. [N. B.: Oscar Wilde, on quotation]

Mao warned against “wooly-minded” liberals, who invariably seek compromise and tend thereby to cool off the proletarian rage which must eventually purge society; in other words, liberalism is a trap for Marxists, because it postpones revolutionary change.

You have to recognize the absurd “dialectical materialism” which underpins this modus ponens argument — if (but only if) “d.m.” describes anything real, the conclusion actually does make sense. But Marxists live in a narrow, glassed-in, hothouse world of exotic intellectualisms, so their lush anti-liberalism is probably just unresolved Oedipal issues of some kind.

On the other hand, if you actually think “woolly-minded liberal” is a conservative epithet, you do not recognize the Communist impress on American thought left over from the Cold War. Communists taught the campuses how to organize, how to protest, how to write and rally, how to inform, how to register voters, how to expand the ranks of voting masses, how to agitate, how to oppose. Those minds, formed in pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War, now permeate America unanalyzed, unselfcritical and unaware of the forces that created them, although perhaps richer for the experience.

I am a great believer in the distributed wisdom of groups, whether family, kith, kin, clan, tribe, nation, or committee; Allthing, Entmoot, jury, legislature or the voting electorate, but I worry about groupthink. The question is how to tap into, how to mine, how to query and collect that distributed wisdom? Opinion polling, a kind of multiple choice among the limited subset of options we can think of, is no venue for the discovery of solutions we can’t imagine. Isolated or even disaffected pockets of legitimate human experience tend to come back and haunt those who overlook them. Genius is local, so kings must progress, and must collect.

We in the West insist that only the vast impersonal systems of secular capitalism, universal franchise democracy and darwinian self-interest can be trusted to focus the best advice of the best minds on the most intrasigent problems. Granted that we’re all still unaware of lives steeped in ironic anachronism, a Newtonian universe of godless automata in a post-Einsteinian millenium, what else are we missing in ourselves? The rub up against Islam should be interesting.

Saturday, 30th of August, 2003 10:36:38 AM

Waaayy too many tomatoes... :-(

I know! Let’s lob a few at SCO...!!

Friday, 29th of August, 2003 07:13:20 PM

Why not kill two birds with one stone? We can buy off North Korea and solve a seriousgroupthink cancer in Houston by outsourcing NASA to Pyongyang. We could hire theRussians to supervise. Otherwise, senior NASA management will look at the report, ponder whatif anything is "implementable" and commit the U.S. to another Daedelus Walk in 10 years. [My opinion?Screw Mars, let’s keep the Hubble Telescope alive!]

Thursday, 28th of August, 2003 08:17:05 PM

Training to grade the MCAT essay questions is fun,just like training a neural net, except using people. Now I understand those A+ nerdsin college (our group of 120 or so is full of them). Perfect back-propagation scores.

Wednesday, 27th of August, 2003 09:36:30 PM

I’m invisible at Walmart.

Tuesday, 26th of August, 2003 12:00:11 AM

Open Source absolutely rocks. I was spoiled by dBase II, long ago, and I’ve kind of resented paying for it and not havinga world-class database like it ever since. Now there are two: MySQL,and PostgreSQL, both of them scot free on the Internet.You factor these bad boys in with the Apache web server and PHP, which allows you to administer every aspect of yoursystem using phpMyAdmin and any garden-variety web browser, and stand back in drop-jawed amazement. The synergy between these packagesis stunning. They run on any Unix platform, including Linux and Mac OS X. It is as though by sheer dumb luck you happened to drive your clunker into a fly-by-night used car dealership run by conehead socialist evangelicals, andyou drove out in an Andromeda-class galactic starcruiser — free! As Marx & Co. used to say, “Everyone for elevennis?” [Trust me: I can misquote Victor Borge with the best of them!]

And now for something completely different: A three-minute segment of the sound track to the ancient Japanesegame of Zork!

Monday, 25th of August, 2003 03:16:34 PM

mars 20030824The Red Planet nearly at its closest approachto Earth in 60,000 years, as seen last night about 9:47:38 p.m.through an old Celestron C-90 catadioptric. Exciting, huh? Cedar Rapids skyglow doesn’tquite wash out the glint of the little spacepod in Capricornus, well on its way to Grover’s Mill.

Monday, 25th of August, 2003 09:46:39 AM

Drive carefully. Kids are back in school.

Sunday, 24th of August, 2003 04:48:11 PM

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
              — Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending a Staircase
Quoted in Graham Nelson’s Craft of Adventure,a bit of esoterica which should give you some idea how seriously text adventure game programmers used to take themselves, in the same league as horse collar and bridle polish salesmen, Bauhaus architects or golf magazines. Dunno whether Douglas Adams or Jerry Pohlgot into the racket first (I think it was Adams, dragged into it by his Magellan-like sense of discovery), but I know for an a priori fact there weren’t any rules before Adams, except the ones Crowther & Woodsdug up in Colossal Cave.

Darwin laid down no laws at all, observing merely that our genes predicate our past survival.

On a completely different note, I found my first email brochure from the world of Islam in this morning's spam bucket. The first harbingerof strange days ahead? I was touched. Someone sent me (and a hundred others whose emailaddresses begin with dc...) a scholarly, well-written precis on the nature and hopes of Islam! As it happens,I have read the Koran, many years ago in translation, and found therein much to like and little to convince.

For example, the Koran speaks of the heavens in the same descriptive, pre-Copernican terms as Ptolemy — the sky as a series ofconcentric crystal spheres enshrined in what I am told is some of the world's most exalted poetry. But is Satan's fallmeteoric, or are meteors actual falling angels? Great poetry inspires us to act as though it were literally true. A foolish insistenceon literal interpretation throws God into jail with human intellect, which is the true blasphemy.Human minds no more grasp God than cats understand calculus. Yet I am kind to my cats, and I hope God will bekind to me, whatever She turns out to be.

Fundamentalism is fundamentally despair, therefore evil. It’s better to remain humble intellectually,to entertain doubts and cultivate wonder: Gabriel spoke poetry to Mohammed. That single fact, in the mind ofsomeone who likes poetry, creates a beauty like the Taj Mahal. Maybe, like the lamp in the niche, it even makes mea Moslem. But that is between me and God.

Saturday, 23rd of August, 2003 11:54:22 PM

We curse each other by familiar household demons. The great calamities and disasters, like earthquakesand tornados, are “acts of God” because of their agnostic provenance. So, if you think about it,very few of us have had enough traffic with the devil to understand the crimes we trust our courts andcops to deal with. According to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a product of the Hindu middle ages, thefirst whiff of evil is a joke. That’s why it’s a bad idea to crack wise in airports. And that’swhy cat killers are wife beaters, three years and thirty years down the road. Book ’em, Danno.

So, do we really need the Ten Commandments carved in stone in some Alabama courthouse? Reminds me of a joke.It’s not a great joke, but it isa joke, goes like this, “Well, I’ll tell ya, Pilgrim. You can have my religious doubts, andchurchly indecisions, and general unwillingness to send some other fella to Hell without putting up a damnedgood fight about it, when you pry them out of my cold, dead skull.”

Friday, 22nd of August, 2003 11:18:35 AM

Hell U Say!In my next life (sound of wistful sighing), I wanna be a Honda cyborg. And what’s with these so-called “Laws of Robotics?“Humans are paranoid, sure, but there’s no call to golegislating Robot Morality, as if anyone could. Beam me up, Fujiko!

Thursday, 21st of August, 2003 11:43:32 AM

Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 doesn’t seem to like my 2001 dual-USB, chiclet iBook’s Apple Trackpad mouse emulation very much. Iinadvertently set “Tap ’n Drag ’n Tap” mode during installation, somehow, which I founddisturbing until the fey silliness of moments near 2 a.m. kicked in.

Trackpad sensing in general seems to be highstrung and oversensitive, which makes workingin familiar Gnome and KDE environments difficult. Some KDE widgets & gizmos which, I sort of suspect, behave nicely intheir native x86 environments crashed and burned — some xscreensaver components, KDE backgammon, konqueror, etc.I put it all down to trackpad bugs, or maybe just bad karma. Even the graphical installer was bitten — I couldn’t get focus in the textfieldthat would allow me to enter a root password, e.g.

But I’d rather use Red Hat’sklunky old reliable red, white & blue install-safe option anyway.

Also, Geek Edition provides few hints about how to set up“Mac on Linux” (mol) emulation. I saw it’s there, but by then, I’d blazed past theAutopartition step, and you don’t want to do that. Also, there appears to be no obvious Firewire support, althoughthe supported hardware page says it’s there, somewhere — meanwhile, my FireLight SmartDisk 20 Mb external hard drive is A.W.O.L. Maybe I’ll find time this weekend to explore thisthree star Unix playground some more, but for now ... l8r g8r.

Wednesday, 20th of August, 2003 11:04:56 AM

Ah. The untamed Internet. But we’re just mimes & poseurs, here in the West. In Japan, the ’Net is evolving in strange and beautifulways. Maybe I’ll contribute a note or two on that topic later, but for now... Americans with no language skillsare among the poorest denizens of this sorry Earth. Myself included.

Tuesday, 19th of August, 2003 04:48:23 PM

Dudette, Redux I saw Natalie Maines getting out of a Radisson Riverfront elevator