First one I've been to, on Tuesday. The General who'd been acting as the head of our Directorate is all done with us, heading off to greener pastures. Many gag gifts were given, and then a sweet golf-bag in the Marine Corps colors with a custom embroidered Corps logo and stars in the number he's leaving behind.
In connection with the golf bag, he was also given some Army and Navy towels... with which to wash his balls.
Well, there are some more Olympics happening again, so it is time for another rant about the subset of Olympic activities that are subjective spectacles frequently misnamed as "sports." The lack of an objective "counter" (e.g., "a goal" or "a basket", etc.) makes these events inherently unfair--so much the worse that the judging is rendered in-auditable by the viewer!
Since a fair portion of the appeal of these events is aesthetic--which is immune to adjudication--we are left with the conundrum of how to tell who wins. My simple solution is this: HORSE. Have all parties do a program of tricks to qualify--make it tough and go ahead and use a judging panel--and then have subsets of the qualifiers do ascending round-robins of HORSE to determine the qualifiers for an 8 person HORSE tournament with random seedings. The need to master the fundamentals is preserved, and the need to outdo one's competitor would continually raise the bar of competition, making the athletic and innovative skaters shine even more!
Note: in order to make the judging panel fair, increase the membership significantly and select a random subset of the scores--always excluding judges from the competitors' countries.We were watching the AC Milan vs. Siena match this morning. Massimo Maccarone had a golden opportunity about 25 minutes into the first half--an 8 yard sitter, which he skied over the goal. I called out, "Come on, Maccarone! You have to do better!"
Soren immediately parroted, "Come on, Mac Cheese!"The Story of English, by Mario Pei (this edition from 1952), was an interesting, but really long, tour of the English language. From its Anglo-Saxon roots, up through its long period of reckless appropriation of words from essentially any source.
Some of the great metaphors from Beowulf are listed by way of defending the Anglo-Saxon literature from charges of un-sophistication, grimness, and lack of thought-progression, and I found them delightful. The sea is called the "road of whales" or "playground of the winds," and woman the "ornament of the home."
Apparently it was estimated that Shakespeare used a lexicon of about twenty thousand words in his works. Fewer than six thousand appear in the King James version of the Bible. Milton apparently reached eleven thousand. Some interesting scale: comprehensive dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon fall short of fifty thousand words. Not a whole lot! In the 1950s, it was thought that only about twenty thousand English words were in widespread and consistent use... of them, about twenty percent were of Anglo-Saxon origin ,and about sixty (!) percent of Latin, Greek, or French origin!
The word "remacadamized" (basically this means to repave, in a particular way) can be broken down through its prefixes, suffixes and whatnots, and through that process be revealed to be of Latin-Celtic-Hebrew-Greek-English origin. (re-, Mc-, Adam, -ize, -ed, respectively). Similarly, "Torpenhow Hill," a place near Plymouth (in England), means "Hillhillhill Hill."
To return to a hobbyhorse of mine-the personal names of Puritans-here is a doozy: If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone. For convenience, he was known as Damned Barebone. In the same vein, a man named Breech Loading Cannon fought in the Revolution, and a fellow named Genuine English Tweed in the war of 1812.
In 1646, St. Isaas Jogues related that the 500 souls of (what would be come) New York City spoke eighteen different languages.
Interestingly, the author held out hope in the 1950s, that professionalization of school teachers would not yield a persistent jargon that would find its way into the popular discourse. "Despite PTA meetings and much drum-beating on the part of 'progressive' educators, there seems to be little likelihood that this class jargon wil to any great extent infiltrate the general language." Some examples of the dreaded pedageese? Motivation, frustration, ambivalence, workshop, and K-9.
Library: an Unquiet History by Matthew Battles (0XY), was actually very interesting. Overwritten and laggy, but pretty interesting. I enjoyed some of the anecdotes about biblioclasms--the destruction of books and/or libraries. The possibly apocryphal story of the final burning of the library of Alexandria was cute... the Caliph was asked what to do with the books. He replied "If the books agree with the Koran, they are not required. If they disagree, they are not desired. Therefore, destroy them."
Also, the author has an unhealthy obsession with the Widener Library. Just... ick.
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, by Jacob Bronowski (1XY) was disappointing. I was hoping for a much better account of epistemology. Or an epistemology. Instead, was treated to a lot of outdated material devoted to the obvious proposition that our sense-impressions are not necessarily in close congruence with reality, and a half-hearted disavowal of reductionism in either science or philosophy. Oddly, the most interesting bit, to my mind, was when he gave account of the McCarran act and the difficulties it created for intellectuals visiting or living in the U.S.
I was led to read a bit about it and found that before he became Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau was unable to enter the U.S., because of his political leanings. The world was a crazy place when we were all terrified of communism.
Currently I'm reading The Story of English, by Mario Pei (4XY). Pretty good! Frisian!
Despite the relative economy of exposition, I learned quite a bit, and enjoyed this one a fair bit. Interestingly, among the first translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into Old Greek, the Septaguint, was later repudiated by Talmudic scholars, who declared that the day on which the Law was translated into Greek was as awful as the day the Golden Calf was cast. They appointed a fast day to remember the day of infamy.
Another important translation, called the Codex Argenteus, dating from the sixth century, was written on purple parchment in silver ink. Only about a half of the leaves remain, but: silver ink. It narrowly survived a watery demise during a shipwreck in the seventeenth century; the protective wrappings served their purpose.
Translation is tough, make no mistake: in the translating the King James Bible the translators utilized many English words for the same Hebrew or Greek words, without necessarily taking into account the denotations! An interest in "equity" led to katargeo, appearing twenty-seven times in the New Testament, is rendered as eighteen English words. The opposite problem also occurred: the translators made the word "trouble" represent a dozen different Greek words; "bring" took on the duty of translating thirty-nine Hebrew words; "destroy" served for forty-nine Hebrew words: weaksauce
Time prohibits much of a recounting here, but I also learned about the remarkable Julia E. Smith and her Bible: impressive lady!
Finally, there was a neat tabular accounting for changes between the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version. In order to reduce ambiguity, for example, Psalm 50:9 was changed to "I will not accept a bull from your house" from the delightful "I will accept no bull from your house." I know I think the latter would be better: the Psalmist as Shaft.
This book, People and Politics: an Introduction to Political Science, by Herbert Winter and Thomas Bellows (DDC = 32W.XYZ) , was terrible. Puerile and poorly written, it is easy to understand why it took so very long to read (even leaving aside the fact that I've only been reading a few minutes a day in the evening). The few passages and footnotes worthy of... well... note, are noted below.
Paul Goodman, "The First American Party System" in William Nesbitt Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), does not refer to some awesome entertainment manual compiled by George Washington.
From a British MP's letter to a constituent:You know, and I know, that I bought this constituency. You know, and I know, that I am now determined to sell it, and you know what you think I don't know, that you are now looking for another buyer, and I know, what you certainly don't know, that I have now found another constituency to buy.
About what you said about the excise [tax]: may God's curse light upon you all, and may it make your homes as open and free to the excise officers as you wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your rascally constituency
Robert Bendiner, Obstacle Course on Capitol Hill (New Your: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964). An obstacle course on Capitol Hill would be rad. I'm picturing something like Double Dare, with legislators rooting through slime to get at the phone numbers of wealthy donors.
Got back from Ft. Benning this afternoon. It was pretty neat. For part of the exercise I was in the gunner's seat in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Fired off a bunch of rounds of its 25mm Bushmaster cannon--and its 7.62mm coaxial medium machine gun--at some old tanks down range. Here's a picture:
(photo by Spc. Rodney L. Foliente, 4th Inf. Div. PAO, here)
Also exciting was firing the M240B light machine gun, pictured above.
Super cool, and kicking like a mule, the .50 cal M107 sniper rifle was a lot of fun. I put my shots where I was aiming, at 450 meters. Here's what that lovely lady looks like.
It was highly amusing.