Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, just upstream, the citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.
The controversial Barry Coat of Arms
ampliatio, n.[Latin; from ampliatio, to extend] Using the name of something or someone before it has obtained that name or after the reason for that name has ceased. A form of epitheton. —from Silva Rhetoricae, the famously useful online rhetoric of Professor Gideon Burton, Brigham Young University.
The word for it may have its known etymology. Certainly it had its first mouthing, some one moment of saying which gave, for whatever reason, the newly agreeable phonics of it to language. Fresh spoken, adopted, retransmitted, found once here and again here in the source material, becoming the acknowledged and proper beast for bearing the burden of the indicated reference into speech.
The word for it: once newmade, and by and by the categorically correct and telling thing.
What word? Oh, any word; aye, any word at all.
"How did that thing stay fair?"is what we had to say when Torrealba's blast settled itself over the left field fence in the fifth inning today at Pacific Bell Park, giving the San Francisco Giants a satisfying two-run lead over their visiting rival, the Colorado Rockies club. We must admit our pleasure. When Schmidt, best starter on the current staff, left the game impaired in the next inning, the lead padded by Torrealba's home run was left in the hands of relievers who managed by their evident craft not to give it all back facing what is in higher altitudes a formidable Rockies lineup. The lead returned to two in the eighth inning on matched doubles by Snow and Grissom. Exempting our concerns over Schmidt's good health, it proved a decent outing with satisfactory result. Bonds hit one, as the saying goes.
We are minded of our recent May, a completely different month in the standard Barry estimate. The question of the Naming is never far from our concerns here at HCE, regrettably, so that at the time indicated, Semele's Month, we were consumed by the as-yet unsaid perfidy underlying the mispronounced casus belli of the United States of America which surrounds us here at HCE. All this is a matter of bogsniffing, where the indicated words of our displeasure with the performance of the sources of news we call the media can be had.
At the time, as we discover on further review, we were under the distinct impression that Secretary of State Colin Powell's oration before the United Nations Security Council was intended to be the summa of his country's most powerful argument for preemptively and aggressively attacking and conquering the nation known as Iraq.
Polling data showed that the people of his country were willing enough, given a satisfying reason, to be taken off to war.
But polling data also showed in all the months following the government's first revelation of its inclinations in this regard, that in the public estimate, casus belli had not yet been satisfactorily expressed.
The reviews of the President's State of the Union speech by the sources of news to us here at HCE were couched with the understanding that, rather than the President's own address, it was the Secretary of State's speech a few days later before the United Nations Security Council, that famous circle of dignitaries from around the world, where the telling presentation of the case for war would be made. The president's circle (though famously unmoved by the claimed authority of the United Nations) had this perhaps as a fallback position, unconvinced given the acclaimed limits of their man's rhetorical skills that his words on the subject, however constitutionally mandated, would make the case which had not yet in the public mind been made.
Perhaps this was a matter of "spin," the famously useful tactic of predisposing the intended audience toward a desired perspective, that makes up so much of the interplay between the government and the sources of what's news to us here at HCE.
In the event, the reviews of the President's speech did not fail to include this caveat. However unconvincing his presentation might be, it was the Secretary of State's speech should be considered the full and well-formed saying of the thing.
Thus, in May, when we got around to our thoroughgoing denunciation of the silences of the sources of what's news to us here at HCE, pointing out the shower of Pulitzers awaiting the organization willing to parse the Secretary's speech, we were particularly emphatic in regard to the matter of the now–renowned forged documents which at the time we conflated quite mistakenly, as it turns out, with all the other evident balderdash the Secretary served up that day.
We wrote:
⇒That the chief speaker for the United Sates of America in foreign affairs, the Secretary of State, should in a great speech to a formal gathering of his fellow ministers from around the word provide them with forged documents supporting his need for war is, in our estimate, a great story.⇐
In the long–held view of the Barry Family, adapted from the views of Patrick himself, it is the unshakable duty of the misperceiver to mend that misperception. Should inaccuracy be offered, it must be withdrawn, however much a chore it may prove.
Clearly we miswrote when we wrote about the Secretary of State, as the most cursory glance at recent news reports will show. The Secretary of State made no mention of the matter of the notorious though rather attractively–named "yellow cake" of any continent whatsoever, which false knowledge we proposed. He did not sit before the assembled dignitaries of the world and say anything at all about the matter, having been, it turns out, warned off the subject by his review of the material during preparation for his speech, given a few days after the president's own State of The Union address.
He had his other alarming untruths to get to, including what we took to be PowerPoint™ slides of a cunning and dastardly piece of equipment said to belong to the proposed enemy nation, Iraq: a laboratory or factory for making the stuff of chemical or biological war, mounted on the back of a truck.
Weapons inspectors from the UN, still in the hunt when the Secretary made his speech, were afterwards given the forged documents along with all the rest of the material purporting to support the case the Secretary made that day.
But this is not what we said in May, and we were wrong.
Wrong to misalign the knowledges of the looker there with our false wording.
Wrong to lash out at the Secretary on this point, and wrong to impugn the bearers of what we consider news here at HCE for not reporting what was, as we now acknowledge, untrue.
Although the currents of dissemination were awash with untruths at the time, it is contrary to the stated policy of those of us here HCE who have any thoughts on the matter at all to support in any way the furtherance of untruth in general, or by our inaction, to permit the continuation of our own accomplishments in that regard when they become apparent enough to warrant further review.
We were wrong, admittedly.
Often it is the case that apology becomes prolog to excuse, and of the many available to us here at HCE, certainly the depleted staff with its manyfold duties forever interposing their distracting requirements — ah, no, we'll not hide there. A simple scanning of the text of the Secretary's speech before we made our words, or during the process of editing which we have long held to be a feature essential to their proper placement on the page, would have been enough to alert us to the misformed basis of our inaccuracies.
It was the other fellow entirely, it turns out, who offered up the unappetizing specter of the yellow cake, you see. We'd heard it somewhere. That at least is true.
As has been noted below, in the matter of lying we are not entirely satisfied that our talents meet the needs of the task, though we keep an open mind about our chances of improvement over time.
But with respect to the unforced error, the inaccuracy arising out of sloppy thought or insufficient research, we stand opposed, and remain everready to resume the sanctified standard of discourse which is the goal of all our utterings once the appropriate correction has been lodged in the record.
On mendacity, on:
"The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.
"Thank you."
—President George Bush, July 15, 2003, in the presumably though unreportedly startled presence of Kofi Annan, Secretary general of the UN at a photo opportunity in the White House Oval Office.
Here at HCE those of us who are capable of lying have no great talent for the stuff, as is evident. Certainly we have the common tools at our disposal, but forever find ourselves inadequately served by their use. Sifting through the results of our offerings over time, we find no single glaring fault with what we've managed to create, no consistent structural or theoretical weakness automatically signalling the falsity which, by common consent, is best left undisclosed under the circumstances. Yet it is there, it surfaces, regularly foiling what plans we'd hoped to advance with our mistruths, and as we are ever conscious of this, further gives to our use of the technique the halting and uncertain delivery guaranteed to return the animadversive rather than the acquiescent evaluation of our auditor which is, as all who've made any serious study of the subject will agree, its proper goal.
Still, perhaps out of some as yet unrealized hope that further experience in the art will sharpen our skills, we feel the time has not yet come to completely abandon our efforts in this regard. Then, unfettered by the woes which have so often been the consequence of our attempts, we will finally find ourselves able to speak as freely as our famous president.
Irregular stubs of fennel like remnant teeth in a broken boxer's maw, though countably more of the things poking out there from the soil than might be successfully targeted in a single human combatant.
Those twelve–foot stalks of it are removed for now, hacked down and hauled elsewhere. The gums of the boxer having no further teeth to offer up, in that respect, at least, what's done is done: toothroots but relic; that happily arrayed dentition and its ease of gnawing forever lost except to memory. As to the fennel, this is not so. It is subdued, but only just.
In principle disposed as we are to the long–term eradication of the stuff from the paddock which surrounds our housing here at HCE, still, we have not yet taken to chemical warfare, the method ever mentioned in the assured opinion of those, called gardeners, who make a living growing, or alternately, resisting the growth, of the citizens of the famous plant kingdom.
Theirs is a cunning we have never known, a relation to the ways of plants, with its knowledges and tools of art, which we here at HCE, following in the tradition of the Barry Family, do not posses. We are told of feeding some thing, a bush of roses as example, of spreading some dusty something or dousing some liquid other on it, or alternately, in another season, of the pressing need to cut back what has been previously gained from the uses of those dusts and liquids. We listen, we hear with fresh surprise. It is a plan, we admit, but foreign to our way.
Left to its own devices, surely the eighth day of the month would come and go unremarked, just as the previous few days, unencumbered by our powers of description, have so ably done. It is not in and of itself, this eighth day, sayably different from them, on close inspection. Were we not saddled with the many instrinsic cares of the Barry Family and the admittedly more arbitrarily chosen desires of our efforts here at HCE, we'd spend no words on it at all, would we?
And yet there is the review to consider. Often in the past, before it occured to us here at HCE to write such matters down, such activities as should be completed by the first of the month, particularly those involving the dispersal of what by any rational measure seems an inordinately large share of our collected wealth to the many and varied organizations laying claim to their portion of it (legal claim, as we, much to our chagrin, eventually came to acknowledge in those earlier times when we mistakenly hoped that by some cleverness, stratagem or device we might perhaps decline, evade or elude the notices whose graduated levels of increasing severity, frequency, and solemnity became regularly resident in our mail) faded effortlessly from our conciousness as the month progressed, and by the eighth day of it was made effectively unthinkable by our talent for disregard.
Ah, those days, those days! It is our firm view that we will not see their like again.
The review includes, as has been noted below in the Bogblog, all the many possible acts which may have been best finished by the month's first day. Rigorous necessary attention must be given over to this effort, we admit.
Still, we travel to Pacific Bell Park today, instead, home of the defending National League Champion San Francisco Giants. They play the formidable St. Louis Cardinal club, which thwarted only days ago in their own home yard the Giants' hope of securing a four–game sweep of victories there.
Necessarily we put aside our review.
It is written that the Giants, who have striven for so long in the great American agon of baseball, have not, since the year 1912, travelled to St. Louis and won four games of baseball in a row from the admittedly redoubtable Cardinal club which plays there.
This saddens those of us here at HCE who have a taste for the game, and our hope is that this failing may be rectified this very day. We will travel to the Sierra, the famous mountains at the easternmost reaches of our home range, listening closely to the signals of our radio for such good report as may be forthcoming in the matter.
The season, the half of the one way of counting it in point of fact, by measure of games played, stands done. With June's ending complete and tucked away, the famous San Francisco Giants ballclub, pennant–holding champions of the National League, maintain their grasp on first place in the western division of that league. Daily they strive after excellence, and we here at HCE who have a taste for the game unflinchingly support all immediate as well as cumulative expressions in that regard.
The year, the half of the one way of counting it in point of fact, by the modern measure of its months, stands done. With June's ending complete and tucked away, comes now July, begetter of the once–new year's second half and all its requisite resultancies.