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
PolySci He proposed and taught The one named Critias, Critias who with his other Twentynine of them Scalded Athens. The Thirty scalded Athens With the broken wit of his prescriptions. They made the model indicated for the proper terror's reign. Yet, Ghosted by the younger fellow later, His nostrums stick.
allspice, n. 1. The fruit of Eugenia pimenta, a tree of the West Indies. 2. The aromatic spice made from this berry: its odor and flavor are suposed to combine those of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, hence the name.
We often blame the tools, however unsatisfactory a target of our ire they prove to be. We blame, for example, technical difficulties, for many of our most egregious results, such as being unable to provide the regularly scheduled view of the blog we've become so accustomed to delivering up on a practically daily basis. If tools were servants to our talents instead of to our wishes, ah! We'll huddle with them apologetically this fine Memorial Day weekend and see what rescue can be made of it all.
GAAH! MELTDOWN!
We here at HCE acknowledge the very real possibility that young and impressionable recipients of words and images may from time to time experience an uncontrollable descent into utter personal depravity as a direct result of such contact.
We deeply regret the inconvenience, should it prove that our own words and images, provided for other reasons entirely in our view, give fodder for the engines of failed lives.
We hold out the absolving hope that they would have gone astray regardless, the rounders, given some innate constituting requirement in their makeup which found in our offerings encouragement for their sad conflated wrongs.
The Barry Family Standard, set on the infirm footing of its bog-related knowledges, fails toward the good in all its leanings.
It is a stern standard, high if a bit narrow at the base, which is the common standard here at HCE.
It requires of us at times the bit of propping up, the Standard, as the adequacy of its constituting elements succumbs to the flood of human events. The self-mutilating blow to our standard in a newspaper, The New York Times, the string of galling losses of our local nine, the reigning National League Champion San Francisco Giants, a sudden lack of any funds whatever in what we like to think of here at HCE as "the checkbook," (where the standard leans heavily in favor of a positive account), any of these singly would be enough to engender on our part what we would perhaps laughingly in other circumstances call "soul searching" behavior.
A necessary yet painful bother, that. And, if by such inflected blows as all that thrashing about in search may cause, the other standards suffer to be called into account as well, what then?
Meltdown!
Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.
The definition of allspice, as provided in that blue-backed midden of words we have here for our standard dictionary at HCE, is worthy of review for the light it sheds on certain editorial choices made by our given source of wordings:
allspice, n.
The book's definition of allspice refers the looker to Linnaean taxonomy, geography, biology, and crucial questions of taste, to resolve the issue of its meaning.
Reference to taxonomy, geography, and biology are succinctly disposed of by the first part of the definition.
Allspice is given as the fruit of an exactly described tree. We know what fruit is, and tree. We know by the two Late Latin words that the tree is uniquely classifiable in the subtle categories of the Linnaean web of namings. It's Eugenia pimenta and no other.
Likewise the geographical term West Indies is understood to point to just one region of the earth and to no other. Admittedly "West Indies" encapsulates the solecism of its originators in their misunderstanding of where exactly on earth they presumed to be when they arrived at their naming of it, a problem which doesn't occur in the Linnaean system, with its flair for the graduated neologism. Writing it all out in a language no one uses for anything else helps: there's no conflicting other sense to be made of its formulations, unlike the case with your West Indies. But geography goes out into the street to get its names, it doesn't impose them by subtle rulings but finds them wherever they lie in the language. As to the West Indies, we know where it is even though it's not where it says.
On the question of taste a dictionary must rigorously demure. It is not for that. Yet, the question of taste is of the very essence of the need for allspice as a word at all. It must be addressed.
Thus definition two.
Definition two is one sentence curiously and not straightforwardly arranged, as if only through the singularly clotted coursings of its clauses could be captured the evanescent thing at all, taste, without adopting in any way an editorial postion in the matter.
Defintiion two is in a dictionary's eliptical style, which elides the subject (allspice) and predicate (is) of a proper sentence for the significant fragment of its remains.
A colon is rolled out in the midst of it, announcing a new level of precision. Allspice is the thing just mentioned in your other definition, yes; but more exactly: this.
Allspice is said then to equal in smell and taste the combination of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. But by whom, exactly? By our chosen dictionary? Not at all, and this restraint on its part we find utterly admirable.
Just past the colon lies "supposed," the very model of a passive verb itself, with its graceful vantage from which the chosen dictionary can, as a third party, report the conclusions of those who've tasted the stuff. Only implicitly are we given hint of their identity. They are those whose tastes are doing the supposing, but who are they?
They are the ones who gave it the name, perhaps mismanaging the task as they mismanaged so much in the West Indies, making a comparison that will not stand no matter what the suggested ratio of cinnamon to clove to nutmeg. Hence, however, the name.
The smell of allspice, as defined, is the approved smell of HCE.
"Lynch" and "Ryan" long inextricable in The Barry Family Estimate of Irish, itself first set to English letter in the early 13th century during the final crescendo of cross-claim and counter-rebuttal of the Naming. It was a popular argument, the Naming, and the group of them had their pamphlet out about it, hand-lettered given the technology, but nonetheless useful for waving the physical point of it across the view of the alternately disposed. It took up "Lynch" and "Ryan" as example of the usages of naming, mapped the terminology back onto its referents in each case, and dealt out a stinging rhetoric not only to the lot of them, but to their stained naming as well.
Estimate of Irish was acclaimed on its appearance, but not much. The argument of the Naming was so widespread by then among the soon-to-be-called Barry Family that no manuscript, however well-reasoned its dismissals, could halt the coming change. Manuscripts take time to read. What the age desired were slogans: the pithy and encompassing stuff that held the full charge of the speaker's abrupt commitment to the stated case.
In truth they had their shorter words for "Lynch" and "Ryan" already, and the monograph, though well-formed, was soon forgotten by all but the regrettably lackadaisical archivists of Barry Family materials, into whose misplacing hands such items inevitably descended during the long era following the Naming referred to as The Thousand Year Snit. Little of the Estimate survives.
Be this as it may, the relation of Lynch and Ryan long precedes our current age. That we here at HCE readily conflate the Saving Private Ryan with the Saving Private Lynch, given the previous disposition of the Barry Family in this regard, is unsurprising.
That they both make myths is indisputable. The Saving Private Ryan is the myth of Speilberg, its conscientious maker. The Saving Private Lynch is yet straining to be formed, though its good first draft has been sketched, featuring a wounded warrior woman and her capture by the enemy.
The story as passed to reporters by people in the Pentagon (famed home of the accumulated warlike impulses of the United States of America) would go on that she emptied her weapons firing on the foe in battle, and wounded in return, fell into their cruel hands. Daringly, she came to be rescued from her captors by a stirring interdiction of gallantry on the part of a small squad of fellow-soldiers.
The facts insult the storyline in several crucial details, never a good start for any myth, but overall a common enough occurence so that there has grown up over time a wide variety of tools to meet just that eventuality. The career of Mr. Speilberg displays one such tool: conscious artful myth-weaving to cloak the disparately disposed elements of the truth.
That the focus of the warmaking power of the United States of America should turn its attention to saving one particular participant among all those it's subjected to battle, marvelously deciding to relieve that individual from the death so arbitrarily delivered to so many, is a subsidizing theme of both myths.
Mr. Speilberg's myths are enhancements, and known to be. They are of the commercially available form, crafted with all the cunning attention to best practices common to the industry he takes such a leading part in.
Clearly there's the contrast in their privates involved in the two Savings. The one's a man Matt Damon's pretending to be for Mr. Speilberg's sake, the other a woman actually and entirely in harm's way.
Myth's license is allowed Mr. Speilberg in pursuit of his crafted tale, wide license once epitomized in his trade by such gleefully innaccurate potrayals of public figures as Alexander Graham Bell by Don Ameche, or of the young Thomas Edison by Mickey Rooney, or of Louis Pastuer by your other man Muni. And who is it, Henry Fonda going on after Abraham Lincoln as wooden as the nickle you'd never want to own? Ha!
We here at HCE who mind our films have the fond hazy mind for the one about John Paul Jones going aground on the Queen of all the Russias, or some such other utter nonsense, witnessed even then, in what can fairly be described as our unpromisingly formative years, to be what we took for pure artifice. Delivered up by its persuasive powers of Technicolor or perhaps even Cinemascope, and including a number of earnest sea-battles which in spite of the intervening advances of technology were in no way superior to the classic work of early Errol Flynn or the quieter Fairbanks, we yet found a measure of shallow satisfaction in the thing. Or, perhaps the cause of our satisfaction was the pleasant combination of Milk Duds and popcorn in us at the time, always an aide to our serenity when the question is in the balance.
We'll have the rude truths of the Saving Private Lynch given their due by the licensed smoothings of some cloaking myth or other eventually. Perhaps it will satisfy some day, even without the Milk Duds.
The Sardonica
Cruel witness, the Barry Family Laugh, its self-relief against the leg of adversity, the liquid pessimism of its reluctant glee running all over the event. And such a happy sound!
Resistently, obdurately happy, in the view of many: the forever japing thing at the most funereal of times, with the upsnort of its guffaw interrupting what otherwise was marked out as a solemnly silent stretch of ceremony.
Thus the Sardonica, proposed as the recognized ellipsis in services in which the Barry Laugh might accommodate itself, as is unfortunately its nature.
Negotiations on the Sardonica continue.
Oh callow clerk!
Had you been but spared the cruel deficiencies of your age's education!
Had you somehow avoided your immediate, unbending insistent error! Ah!
Should you have not said "Stevenson" instead of "Lamb?" Of course you should have so!
But, no!
Misinformed, you were unbending, immediate and insistent in your error!
"Lamb," you said, and all did hear.
And none cared to correct you from the crowd, many from lack of close attention, certainly, though some instead among them from attending to some other reason to dismiss your talk, ignoring the ready jab of a correction for the summming roundhouse to your general principles they were forming.
Had they but reached such summing sooner, had they but removed the conversation from the clutches of the Uncle's tongue before he had his chance to speak (something they'd long since vowed to do at every turning toward his topic), they might have changed the course of everything, it's true. It's said that in the given chaos of the weather's ways a little butterfly in China with its tiny puff of wing-wind may start the consequential hurricance in Cuba. Likewise was this lacking moment determinate of all that came. Though it was their solemn charge, they made no proper interrupting speech. The Uncle took the floor.
Ah, for you, poor scholar! He took the floor for you!
In the Barry Family Conversation, which made its switch to English before the 13th century but is considered continuous since well before that time, the Uncle's thrashing of the young scholar marks a momentous turn in all the tide of Barry talk, redounding to the credit of none of its participants.
Conatus: Latin, variously translated as "endeavor" (by Hobbes), "essence," (by Spinoza) to describe the inherent motion of a body at a single instant and point. Even if a body's motion is broken down into an infinite series of moments at "rest" (from which arises the paradox of Zeno in which the arrow, considered to be inhabiting a space equal to itself at any given point in time and space, is therefore always observedly "at rest"), an irreducible quality of motion, the power of conatus, remains active as a force however imperceptible such motion may be.
Conatus is a Late Scholastic term, product of medieval scholasticism's wrestling with the problem of human free will, and the attempt to make sense of and distinguish divine participation in the acts of humans.
Hobbes pried the word from its original moorings, applied it as the source of all human locomotion, cause of all our experience of appetite, aversion, fear, ah, the lot. It was still a quality he was getting at, plainly, not some quantity associated with the practice of the new science but a clearer Hobbsian view, of the quality the Late Scholastics had proposed. The irrefragable motile residuum of conatus.
That Leibnitz joined the fray is unsurprising. The term was in play just then, and he had his way with terms, Leibnitz, juggling them like colored ball on his road to the creation of the calculus. He had it contra Hobbes that motion's source must be outside of body or of mind, and he called that source conatus (Theory of Abstract Motion, 1671). On the curved path, at each singular point of it, he saw the instant motion of conatus, a force he later associated with his other man the monad.
Montaigne made the essay the thing, the quick and ready lettering of his own perspective which is so normative in the discourse of our present age: the self-report, mining the lodestone of inwit, which even we here at HCE who should be busy at so many other things, as listed elsewhere, find ourselves engaged in from time to time.
Montaigne's great charm is that he recognized himself as well as he could, knew his own talents and laxities and was able to present his findings of himself, his essays, as the product offered up of one particular fellow's view.
His interests extend to books, and so he writes On Books. What he considers books he lists. He is not at all a fan of the Orlando Furioso or the Amadis, no: well-worn books of his time requiring the approved sneer of any who claim some modicum of learning. They are the hackneyed things, those two, and pointing that out is a claim Montaigne is making about himself. He's a bit of a cut above, Montaigne.
He has no Greek, but Latin and of course French. As a result he counts the classics as a Roman juristiction. He has his favorites among the lot of them. Oh, those Georgics, and that Ovid once, when I had a taste for the stuff, and the this and the that fellow Terrence, Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, and my main man Virgil, ah the classics.
Eh? as we say here at HCE. The Roman work is just the husk of the classics, the Greek the meaty marrow of it. To have no Greek, no ready reference to the Roman's betters, is to have missed the meal, if tasting the classics is intended.
There's no Montaigne on Pindar or Euripides, more's the pity. He doesn't have at Homer, so he has Virgil, the sidekick of the classic's true paragon, for his champion.
If for one near-ruinous price the fine tool could be had that would do the job right in perpetuity, it is clear that by preference we here at HCE would often pay that price to have the thing on hand. Then, each time we set out to accomplish the task for which it was so well suited, we'd reach to our store of stuff and have it out, consumed through its uses in the task itself rather than still standing in that precendent moment of regard for exactly how without the finest tools it would be done.
It is a comfort of the Barry Family Standard that it permits tools and techniques that are merely good, and do not cost the near-ruinous prices that the finest tool might ask, for the Barry Family Standard is the Good Standard, which, though it salutes better and best, settles genially on itself by choice. Thus often we here at HCE, still subordinated in many respects to the compelling logics of the Standard and its ways, find that we have on hand by no measure the finest tool in each instance for the freshly percieved task, but only some adequate substitute. Often enough with the expenditure of some addtional effort on the part of the operator, the tasked tool, though merely good, suffices.
The matter of the Chinese half-yard, discussed below, is case in point. It is the good and consistent reference to the needed thing, the measure of an English yard, in our view. Though as to actual span it only covers half the yard's known amount, still, with the little extra effort expended in redoubling its values, it matches up quite well with the thing. And in point of fact, it is the blessed disposition of our fortunes here at HCE to rarely if ever need to call the Chinese half-yard into service at all. Though consistently awash in tasks, finding the number of yards does not come up as a matter of course, we find. Certainly this makes it easier to retain the Chinese half-yard as our standard, for we would go, reluctantly though necessarily, to the sort of place where true English yardsticks are made available, and pay the near-ruinous price for the wooden thing, if it ever became necessary to engage in the task of counting yards on a continuous basis.
Often here at HCE it is forseen that some given task will recur. Whatever it is, it will need to be adressed repeatedly over time. It is then we face the need to compromise our ideal of the Good Standard and pay the indicated price for the truly proper tool for it, much as we would rather, following our temperament and training, do otherwise.
Judging successful its conquest solely by that first and most telling sign, the removal of the previously established authority together with any resistance to new rule it may have been able to muster, the United States of America must be acknowledged as owning a warmaking machinery of the highest conceivable calibre. Its recent repeated conquest of Iraq justifies the suspicion we have long held here at HCE that in the employment of arms, a feature of every civil society however constituted, the United States of America has managed to produce a warring force without equal in all of history. Life on the planet itself stands slim chance against the mass of weapons available to the United States of America if the whole battery of them were to be fully and finally deployed. This is not news, but widely reported by even the most lackadaisical of journalists over the course of the most recent fifty years.
How convenient it is for the great elephant seals of the media empires, basking as is their wont on some pleasant beach of Allstory, to have delivered up to them the body of the story concerning Lacy Petersen, for sad example, instead of being required, as is their presumed function, to sweep out into the great cross-cutting currents of the thing itself, patrolling the wide and treacherous ways of it for nourishment of their enormous needs. How can they not favor lazing in their studios with some feed from Modesto or the boggy eastern shore of San Francisco Bay filling out the rest of the hour, rather than having to repeat the tired news that if the United States of America seriously needed to find somewhere the thousands of barrels of nerve and chemical and biological agents mentioned in its claims against Iraq, to cover a bet as example, or to provide a measurable standard against which to judge what searching Iraq would find (at least according to what is claimed was its intelligence), then it would only need to look to some small portion of its own stores to find the stuff?
If the extinction of all Earth's life by human agency is for sake of argument held to be inconceivable, then the United States owns an inconceivably large stock of items capable of the task. This is not news, and it would be tedious for the great figures of the media empires to have to repeat over and over again the sorry story of it, even with the handy shorthand acronym WMD newly employed as substitute for the complete and utter mention of the cleverly branded stuff itself: "Weapons of Mass Destruction." The story has not changed appreciably, except for the enhancement of extinction's delivery systems by decades of cunning technical progress in the matter, ever since the curtain of the Atomic Age fully lifted, and saying the same thing over and over about it is not the mark of news. Still, the bother does keep coming up.
That by impish misdirection the whole subject of WMD has in the public imagination been conflated with the potential aims of shadowy terrorists, rather than serving as a catchall with which to reference the myriad-hued pallette of extirpations actually available to the most advanced of warring nations, is one mark of the failure of the great figures of the media empires to fully keep up with this bleakest tale, of course.
The mythologies average out across the population. The useful bits, the tasks and techniques of Myth's knowledges are shared out among them, included by nearly all in that privileged telling of their own mythology admitted to by their actions.
The mythologies include of course all the described effective behaviors of humans in story form, and as these are commonly known to the population, humans shall, crowded around, say, the site of a prospective campfire, give endlessly variegated advice on how the thing should be made, a report directly from the scrolls of their own mythologies with the commanding footnote, "Blurt this out whenever and wherever the occasion may arise."
We here at HCE imagine that even in the thrall of captivity, his kingdom overthrown in the face of a misread oracle, the famous King Croesus of Lydia, brought before the Great King himself, with all the squads of Persians scurrying around to make, appropriately, considering the centrality of the flaming stuff to their core beliefs, a nice fire for their main fellow, even Croesus, we believe, would not fail to offer up his own telling in such circumstances.
"Some twigs over there now, and give those larger sticks some air, man, or it'll never start!" he'd be compelled to say, even in the face of such adversity.
That Herodotus does not record this tale, though he would write almost any likely thing, does not invalidate it as an example of the given trait in humans. They have their knowledges which they will blurt out irrespectively. This is not to be confused with the rarely excersized task of speaking truth to power, for it is a much more reflexive behavior entirely. To speak truth to power requires prior acknowledgement of the disquiparant relation of ruler and ruled, but at the campfire the words of the knowledges of how fire's made blurt from the lips of the whole assembly.
We here at HCE have long noted the capacity of two-fifths of that assembled population to carry with conviction in the baggages of their mythologies all manner of arrant nonsense. The belief that the sun revolves around the earth, for example, or that humans beings lived at the same time as the famous dinosaurs of the past, or that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, illusions each shared by at least 40% of the population, these are the snakes of purest flapdoodle, writhing bumptiously in the myths of oh so many folks. That it doesn't matter what they think, that their ignorance is irrelevant on a daily basis, is one of the condign blessings of civilization, in a portion of the Barry Family view shared here at HCE.
At the campfire, we find that two-fifths of the advising crowd, though they would unnecessarily repeat or fruitlessly deny what is fully known about the matter at hand, will nevertheless have their say about the making of the fire. It is a sore condition of your smaller groups of humans that such distracting offerings are so much more readily heard by the practitioner of the fire-making task.
In the larger group, your overarching civilization as example, with its multiplicity of concurrently engaged activities to attend to, the commentary on any individual act of making fire must make room for all the equally nearby subjects of civil attention, and as a result, the certain ignorance of two-fifths of what might be said about making a fire is silenced nicely by the fact that little will be said about the act at all, given the raft of other blatherings that draw the civil tongue. That it's likely your man would offer up precisely the wrong description of where the twigs must lie in a properly preparatory pile is avoided by the fact that he'll be going on about the disposition of the local nine or the weather's chances, or the doom, the doom says he, that is our sorry lot, instead. As a result, it is as if the firemaker were alone in this respect at least, effectively or not going on about the task without the inevitable commentary of the pack, tongues loosed on the trail of all the other subject matter as they are.
It is the civil way to contain all misknown knowledges in this manner, carried hidden in the polyphony of civil discourse itself, believed but unelaborated by the irreducible many. We give it that, civilization. It is not the absolving detail, but a fondly favored feature of it, nonetheless.
Arundhati Roy of Kerala of the blessed beaches of the great far coast of the wide Indian Ocean, claims, in her recent address at the famous Riverside Baptist Church of New York, that during the run-up to the recent warfare in Baghdad, first city of the Downtown Historical District of civilization itself, the media empires responsible for the dissemination of news to the United States of America (which surrounds us here at HCE) willingly managed to spread the misinformed canard that Saddam Hussein was in some way behind the cataclysm of September 11, 2001. But it was worse than that.
Once taken up, the media empires by their own inept editing of the claims and counterclaims and innuendo that lifted up the great raft of war during that period, allowed this and like misperceptions to spread in the population.
They carried out no salutary campaign of correction once the false notion took root. They failed to insist by weight of their presumed authority as keeper of the facts, that the thing was just not true.
And this was their great violation, a free press freely violating the minimum standard of its own craft. When war started fully 41% of the population, by some statistically valid census of views, held that Hussein had done it. And the press did but demure. Right there in the subtext of what it takes to make our standard for a newspaper is the vague threat to inform the public by way of printing the facts of the given matter. Saying nothing in the face of inaccuracy, though long a practice here at HCE for other reasons, is not our idea of how to deliver the news. Silence is consent, goes the old legalism, and so was the unlistened whisper the media empires put out when the idea took hold that September 11, 2001 was the fault of Hussein.
It is in no sense the judgement here at HCE that the removal of this one calumny will tip the balance of our regard for the bad man himself: his name will forever be spoken with the same disdaining sneer we set for Stalin, whose long-awaited death celebrated its fiftieth anniversary recently, even without that falsehood added to his lore.
Undoubtedly for many so deluded by the false thought, this one wrong view was quite enough to endorse the obvious wrath coming out of the nation's capital at the time, clear casus belli. But Saddam Hussein hadn't done the thing at all. It was in the news at the time, who had done it, and it wasn't him, but your other man entirely bin Ladin. A robust free press would have quickly stomped such nonsense down like the disallowed snake of Patrick. The nonce would not have been allowed without the interposing staff of truth each time it neared its saying, each and every time until it rose no more.
The media empires relayed by polling data the rise in the population's imagination of the untrue thing with an occasional throat-clearing reference to the truth in some editorial byway, but mostly the tone was objective, of all things, as if reporting on the false thing's existence was the story, rather than the more telling detail that two of five Americans had no idea what was going on at all in this important respect, in spite of the assumed responsibility of media empires themselves to publicize precisely those details needed to resolve the matter completely in the minds of a citizenry considering war: over and over and over again, like the date on the upper corner of each newspaper page, if necessary, to get the point thoroughly across.
Taking up the subject of the good reason for a war is the most solemn duty of an informed citizenry in a civil society, if we believe what we've heard about the matter here at HCE.
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. Compared to it the public's delusions about Saddam Hussein are in fact just one expression of the constantly annoying propensity of two-fifths of any population to believe almost any old thing; to answer for example, if asked and on reflection, that the earth is the center of the solar system rather than the sun. At HCE we remember to take a clue from the name solar system whenever the question arises, and never find ourselves in that two-fifths as a result.
But that the Secretary of State, from the center of the global stage, in what was seen as the one great moment his nation needed to present to all the world the argument for war, should chose to profer shabbily prepared documents of patent falsehood, forgeries so amatuerish as to fail the most cursory examination, as best evidence for his case, this is the very stuff and heart of what we mean by news. The story has everything in our estimate to draw flotillas of Pulitzers its way. Perfidy in the Halls of Power! we see the headlines scream, except that we don't see any such thing at all.
As to motive, as a matter of course we give the benefit of the doubt to our standard sources of what we consider news here at HCE. Every enterprise has its characteristic lethargies we find, and the media empires that serve us news here at HCE (having their other profiting interests consuming them in this time of economic malaise) may not have sufficient resources to expend on marshalling the journalism needed to track the story down, however great a story it might be. Alternately it may be that the media empires have resources sufficient in all but quality, that in fact no one who works there is capable of such a bold prizewinning effort. They don't have the stuff for a Pulitzer, poor enough standard it is! We here at HCE lean toward neither explanation of this failure of our sources to do their given job of work. We have, instead, our doubts.
The practices of English up through and beyond the age of Shakespeare encouraged the use of an impressionistic transcription of lettering. Words as written then delivered the commonly agreed term mapped back upward by their lettering through the writer's own mispronunciation of the way to say it for quite some time before spellings became normative.
It is a finding of the Barry Family that the English language, the Barry Family Standard as far as usages are concerned, is an evolving language, and that the chief engine of its evolution is its primordial regard for the services of mispronunciation.
Mispronunciation founded the language, in the Barry Family view. There on the southeastern shore of the last place for Celts, later to be dubbed "Ireland" in the new norm of English, the Barry Family, according to its own accepted lore, took part in the creation of the new thing itself, the English language, as proposed by the various mispronunciations of the thing that did not quite yet exist from the mouths of the variously-languaged crew that had just then assembled there from the shores of southern Wales. Flemish folk were there in number, and the Normans, overseers of the move, and the wide range of kinds of Celts who'd previously backed into Wales in their retreat from a Europe which clearly now belonged to others.
That the Celts had no one proper way to pronounce things among themselves, added to the Flemish flair for glottals and the Norman need for at least some small measure of communication among the preposterous crew, led to the early understanding among all of them, in the Barry Family telling, that, though none of them could quite say it that way yet, even with all the various proposals and counterproposals of pronunciation being made, all under the stern eye of the Normans who required in fact some immediate progress in this regard, there was some standard to be had, if sought.
The Barry Family, newly arrived in Ireland, caught up at the time in its own engulfing controversy of the Naming, took on English then, just before it had even become, and had its own agreeable mispronunciations to offer up, to be sure. But even the mispronunciations of the Flemish freebooters were aggrandized to the needs of the proposed standard. Any way of nearly saying it deserved its hearing in that climate. It was acknowledged by all among them that, however much each and every speaking of the proposed thing was mispronounced, given the Norman spur, they would have at English as their common way of saying things.
Mispronunciation has been the norm for English speakers from the first, and its witness in the Barry Family goes back to the charming violations of its soundings by the Flemish folk who'd come along to Ireland, and the way their misdirected mouthings caused, if only for the mirth of it, the widening of the new standard to include, if only ironically, the possibility that the Flemish way was the proper way of speech after all. The Barry Family would often say it in the Flemish way, for fun, around the Normans.
Our version of the monkey story here at HCE requires that said monkeys did pound on the provided keyboard a given sequence of keys, resulting in the gathering of a known set series of symbols, each mapping directly back to the one key whose pounding made it and only it appear. This is handy for our purposes.
The monkeys, it is averred elsewhere, did produce a list consisting mostly of the letter "S," and this too is quite agreeable if our claim is that from any handy edition of Shakespeare's collected text, say for example, as found in The Norton Shakespeare, or in the earlier Oxford Press offering edited by M. A. Craig in Dublin, or even in the pages of the curious Shakespeare Complete as published by the World Syndicate Company of Cleveland, working backward by some formula of substitutions, we could readily arrive at the monkeys' given output.
"Sum" is the addition of the elements of a given series, and is given in mathematics by the symbol S. So for each monkey "S" as given, and they are said to be plenteous, we could substitute by our understanding of the mathematical S some given stretch of the desired text, mapping the first stretch of it to the first "S" as given by the monkeys, and the next stretch of text to the next of them, and on until we had used up all the text and all the monkey's "S's" in a concordance. The other symbols given by the monkeys could be used to control the building of the proper book to put the proper text in, perhaps, or be set to zero and of no account at all. We'd have our Shakespeare's words, read backward onto the monkeys' product.
Thus with any and all arbitrarily chosen editions of Shakespeare's text, by simply mapping backward onto each gathered "S" as made by monkeys, the whole exact sequential stretch of the desired wording, projected originally to require the services of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards to accomplish, has been done.
We avoid then the whole cumbrous debate over how we'd recognize the moment when the desired text had been achieved in all the long trials of the infinite monkeys as first proposed. What yardstick for its measure would we use but some other edition of it we had at hand? But we already have, or can produce if needed, what we really mean when we say "Shakespeare's words" here at HCE. Making an actual concordance between the lot of them and the recent product of the monkeys is of course made difficult by the absence of the critical copy of the monkey's work product itself, which we have admittedly made no great effort to track down. We feel the principle is irrefragable, however, that we may proceed successfully no matter how the symbols might actually be deployed.
It would be amusing to some perhaps to let the multitudes of the monkeys have at it still, producing as they would the complete works of eveyword. All the editions of Shakespeare would be there, confusing the issue, as well as all the Homers and near-Homers and not-quite-but-almost-Homers and even all the stories of the playful Jayson Blair made truly told by the blandishments of utter variation.
Nevertheless we'll let the infinite monkeys be here at HCE. Their work is done, for our purposes.
The previously referenced monkeys typed mostly "S," it is said. Five pages of useful poundings gathered up there among the other monkey actions they performed on the equipment, piquantly described in an AP dispatch posted on the internet's Yahoo News.
Recently disclosed perfidies in the dissemination of what is considered news to us here at HCE, by way of television and the newspapers in particular, have put us on heightened alert to the need for a more nuanced evaluation of such fundamental qualities as trustworthiness, accuracy, and the proper paces of the English Language to which some stories might aspire. Not that we are anything but vigilant in this regard as a rule, but we do find from time to time that our guard has relaxed to the point where an all-to-easygoing acceptance of the gist of some story might prevail over a further examination of its credentials, taking up for truth some nugget of information embedded there without the full brunt of our critical apparatus being brought to bear on it. A mistake in the current climate, we admit.
That The New York Times, our given standard in a newspaper, should allow callow offhand careerism, a flippancy toward facts, and plain plaigarism to color its articles, is understandable, given the trade. Recently such Times articles were often enough written by the reporter Jayson Blair (casting call for Dave Chappelle, maybe, or Chris Tucker reprising his Friday role in Smokey Goes Uptown), creating in his time at the newspaper over 600 articles of ambiguous veracity under the unwatchful sniff-testing radars of the very noses of the paper's editors who, seemingly under the impression that it was his, not their, responsibility to check the facts as he'd assembled them, a nice offloading of what would otherwise be considered one of the main reasons for having editors at all, remained unaware of the liberties he was taking with their pages for quite some time. At the New York Times the editors have their other things to do, leaving the footsoldiers of the enterprise to do the error-checking of the thing and the editors to attend staff meetings and issue occasional proclamations "standing behind," in the parlance, the questioned words of the reporter. Their reporter Blair took this practicse for a good long ride.
It is noteworthy that at this same newspaper the question of Jeff Gerth comes up, whose famous articles on Whitewater in the previous decade first stirred the tide of impeachment against the president, articles which, after years of public investigations costing about $60 million, proved, in the balance, to be pure hooey in a sauce of speculation.
There was no story in point of fact, though nothing much was done about it at the Times. The editors set Mr. Girth loose and stood behind.
Mr. Gerth turned his attentions to Wen Ho Li, who he helped imprison on the strength of his innacurracies. The Times in that event stood behind for quite some time, until forced to publish in its corrections page a shamefully necessary near-apology for its role in the matter.
Thus sensitized to the need for a more robust evaluation of the mere facts of a given story, we here at HCE gingerly accept for now the datum of the monkeys' most frequently selected letter, said by sources to be "S" in the previously indicated story. We trust the transcript of their labors will bear us out in this.
King Lear is a family of plays ascribed to William Shakespeare. There are the various reasonings behind choosing which of the things is the true spawn of him, which a lazy copy, which some fabulation of some other writer entirely who cannot write as Shakespeare at all.
Putting aside here who he was exactly as a pleasant yet deferrable contention, we here at HCE salute Shakespeare, Able Man of Letters. We salute him in general and in particular, as we count the ways.
In general because he or someone like him or a small committee of them who represented him was able to lift up by the requiring gestures of its poetry the whole craft of theater he had scribbled out, and permanently, somewhat intransigently in fact, demand of us its care and attention, for which we have been so amply repaid.
(It is useful in the continuation of Shakespeare in this general sense that a large majority of what Englishseaking populations he might be known to are readily convinced to make room for performances on stage and readings at the universities of what's left. Whiffing the remotely Shakepearean will send most off on some other task, seek some agreeable distance and happily leave the field to the ones who'd care to be there. In a similar spirit hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco on a given day agreeably leave be the place where a game of baseball will play out between the local nine and its scheduled contestants.)
We salute him in particular, naturally and obviously, because of the words. They are choice, in the Barry Family estimate, an estimate adopted here at HCE in conjunction with the whole Able Man of Letters designation and its entailing apparatus from the Unordered Barry Family Standards, many of which we currently ascribe to.
That we who follow the Barry Family Standards must ourselves invoke at times various Findings in regard to proper wording with respect to Shakespeare might seem to indicate that we fall in the camp of those who would argue for the possibility of one true choice of words for the whole canon of the thing, which might, by careful emendation, be retrieved from the surviving materials by the delicate exactitudes of literary scholarship.
However, we do not. We find that the magnificent textual remains named Shakespeare's have their shabby spots along some edges, leaving forever equivocal the true wording or indeed whether any wording at all had been intended except by some other fellow plumping up the relict pages of the true stuff itself. There is no question that arriving at the true King Lear suffers from the crucial and intractable differences between the versions of it we have left.
There's nothing to be done for it among those who gather for Shakespeare except to reserve a smaller field there for those who would seek more exactitude in the matter of King Lear where they can exhaust on one another their arguments about its text while we who have our other interests in the stuff go on about our more agreeable business.
If we leave for later argument the question of who he was, and likewise must accept the limits to our accurate knowing of his words, then the simple sentence, "He wrote," becomes an unwriteable reference to Shakespeare without quotation marks about each term, signalling their variable and to some extent arbitrary nature: "He" "wrote." This does not scan as English in the Barry Family view, however close it hits the mark. It's a statement that cannot be pursued inside the proper confines of the grammar of the language, given just these two terms without elaboration. The amorphous referent "he" is ill met by the imprecise condition of what we mean by "wrote."
Nevertheless, and simplifying, he wrote King Lear, however construed.
Recently six monkeys were assigned the task of recreating Shakespeare's words by pounding in whatever arbitrary order they might chose on a computer keyboard provided them for that purpose.
It is said in some circles that given an infinite number of monkeys pounding an infinite number of keyboards, in time the entire works of Shakespeare shall be produced. This seems unarguable considering the infinities involved, although it is not clear that a nearly infinite number of works quite like the desired corpus would not be made available by the procedure as well, perhaps being completed before, perhaps being completed after, the one we'd hoped for when we set out. Given our intrinsically equivocal understanding of the text of King Lear, many of the proposed texts so made might fall readily in the range of the arguably true value for it, confounding the issue of whether we had yet reached the copy of the canon we required to prove our point and set our monkeys free.
The six monkeys assigned to it did five pages worth of lettering, expressing mostly by their resulting labors the letter "S," it is said. Suffering as they did from what in other contexts we would describe as a severe shortage of manpower, not even provided the fundamental one-to-one ratio of monkey to machine described in the prospectus, it is unsurprising they got no farther along toward the stated goal than they did. The general soundness of the procedure is rather buttressed than undermined by their efforts, for if it were necessary to show a priori that a monkey can in fact address a keyboard successfully at all, it has in this instance been shown, and may be taken as given from now on.
Of course it is quite easily demonstrated that, beginning with some arbitrary value for the works of Shakespeare freely chosen by the investigator from among those currently available, say for example, as found in The Norton Shakespeare, or in the earlier Oxford Press offering edited by M. A. Craig in Dublin, or even in the curious pages of Shakespeare Complete as published by the World Syndicate Company of Cleveland in 1925, it would be possible to work backward step by step from the chosen text, by some properly elaborated series of subtractions, perhaps involving the sequential replacement of one letter or one word at a time, to eventually arrive at the five pages the monkeys did in fact produce. We leave this, the Inverse Monkey Problem, as an exercise for the student of such things.
Still, the question does arise. At times it isn't readily swatted away, pesky persistent idling matter it is. Matter of the weight of taste.
The dog has its rhinosophies, its collocation of its knowledges of smell. Taste gives an extension of those knowledge into another medium of contact, mouthed sense of the furthered meanings of the smelly thing itself.
In the more human systems of regard, smell is there, and taste as well, though taste in full in humans is hostage to the nose's operations, as is so evident by taste's almost utter absence when a common cold or some such other obstructive something comes between it and life's odors. The knowledges of the human nose to begin with are a poor basis for rhinosophies at all, from the benchmark of a dog. The dog is colorblind, with respect to the seeing of things, and the human lacks, equivalently, the sublimity of detail available to the snout of even the lowliest of curs.
Once the fang has brought it in, the tasting of the dog is the briefest thing, the moment of ingestion delayed not a bit, as is so commonly the case with the human. For the human the smell comes clear, its meanings are read back into the object, a better and more adequate rhinosophy established, only in the gradual gnashings of mastication producing taste. Taste is that little something extra needed by the human to have an adequate rhinosophy at all. For the human, in the main, and given the proper winds, it doesn't fully smell like anything until it's tasted. For the dog, burdened by the better snout, the scene is made by the smell of it.
Once the dog has smelled it, it has the knowledges it needs for your full and rich rhinosophy. For the human it is a matter of taste.
Odd little thing then, taste in a human. Often occluded by the nose's weak smelling to begin with, but yet essential in making up a useful rhinosophy at all. Like the little jockey making a useful thing of the horse you've put your pound on, taste harnesses smell to the advantage of all concerned.
It is often the case of the various processes occurring here at HCE that they are accompanied by an equivalent dynamic. Which is to say, some subsidiary something has taken charge of the larger purposes we envisioned for our enterprise, pawed as it is by the encouragements of the whip hand of the dependent process. Often, generalizing from its prime instance, we here at HCE call this dynamic, "taste."
Although there is no disputing taste according to the Latin, in the rest of the world it is a wager made by its owner that its littler sensibility will have its charge successfully home. At times we find our enterprise coasting a bit wide of the rail in this respect, admittedly, spurred by some transitory taste's expression.
Mousey the Cartoon Empire, for example, seen as a self-sustaining long term source of residual income, hovers at the event horizon of the enterprise's well-established virtuality, the elaborated field of cartoon noir untrod. Trammelling elsewhere for now, our tastes pursue their other goals, however much we recognized the further attentions needed there.
It is a commonplace here at HCE that on the eighth day of the month we pause to consider our course of action thus far, although at times we find ourselves so harnessed to our other interests that even the introspective moment itself is deferred. Technically this qualifies as distraction.
The view is a celebrating view of the Midwest, a vision of the proper place to play the game of baseball, as is shown.
Of the nuns it will be admitted that inculcating the practices and procedures of forethought was included in their intentions for us, often as they would unsubtly bring its felicity to our notice. Over time we have accepted the preferability of its uses in the whole wide range of human events, not merely in those involving us which may have occasionally spurred our learning of the things they taught about it then.
Among the rudimentary knowledges necessary to operate the business of forethought, the nuns would have at the inarguable units of the measure of space and of time, practising the sharp slap of their fescues against the slab of blackboard on the wall up there in front, where the indicated measure had been written.
Thus they schooled. With little or no remorse the arbitrary and somewhat idiosyncratic uses of the English "yard" and Roman "month" of it, became our constant, instant, and monopolizing means of measure as a result of the nun's installations.
Forethought remains one our favorite activities here at HCE, however little aptitude we have ever shown for it. Nevertheless, like most, we can spy its deployment by others readily, and are forever alert to the possibility that forethought may be afoot (to think the thing through beyond its present point, taking the planned measure of the future and drawing the present to it, this is a deeply cunning tool, in the Barry Family view).
Oracle is the domain in which forethought deploys itself. The forethought stories of Oracle are the adapted presentation to the future of the prethought stories of Myth.
Myths contain our knowledges, and our knowledges contain all the many necessary tools and procedures we might deploy to engage our knowledges in the event.
We know what a yard is here at HCE. This is but one of our knowledges, of course, but it will do for example, which is to say, e.g. it is known to us, this simple thing we call a yard.
It speaks the measure of a commonly agreed distance among humans, and we support our fair share of the standard for it here at HCE, our tool of it, embodied in a wooden representation stamped with the symbol of the Officemate International Corporation and, with another, larger, stamp, titled in capitals to one side WOOD DESK RULER.
Of the difficulties with our adopted half of the standard yard here at HCE, we feel the least of difficulties is its size. It is not in point of fact or length a yard at all, for on the stick edge of the thing is printed all along the long side of it the series of successive inches of it, and only 18 at all of them are indicated.
But this will do, as it is the easily doubled half of the thing we'd have our knowledge of, the yard, previously given as 36 of the little things.
The final set of words printed on the stick are, in small caps, the words MADE IN CHINA. It is of interest to us here at HCE that we are thus presented with the Chinese version of half a yard as our standard and emblematic representation of the English thing itself, but with the simple and acknowledged transformations dictated by doubling, predict that there should be no great or lasting confusion when our needed yard is being bandied about.
Just as our Standard Dictionary satisfies our need for an approximation of the needed book, our Chinese half yard satisfies our need for an approximation of the needed distance here at HCE. In either case, we here at HCE who have use for either tool fully acknowledge that finer discriminations might be necessary at times, discriminations readily produced by the more exacting resources commonly available in the superior civilization surrounding us here.
But it will do, our half of the standard here at HCE, as will the Standard Dictionary when cleared of the appurtenant cargo on its surface), it will serve, as is the tendency of all standards, as a pointer to the perfectly defined tool itself, should reference to that unlikely resource ever become necessary. It is the loose but effective yard we adopt here at HCE as our standard, the half of it, embodied in the Chinese half-yard, which is both sign and symbol of half the agreed amount, however much that may prove to be.
It is a provincialism to use the yard at all, admittedly. The famous metric system has the measure of the thing in all the rest of the world, and the yard and the measures it conveys are an archaism, although universally and usefully understood by all those in our immediate neighborhood here at HCE. Additionally we use the yard because, seared into us by the hard efforts of the nuns, the parts and products of the quantity became forever and reflexively available to us for all purposes at what we thought even then was a very early age.
Thus habituated in our adoption of what we must admit is the less general standard than that indicated by the meter, we with gingerly self-reproach will use it nevertheless. The conversion from the Chinese half-yard to the meter is the implied but rarely executed transformation necessary to put us square here with the all the better ways of saying it.
Likewise and of course, we have the Fahrenheit for temperature.
The mire advances over time. The books papers pens, cups with crisp crusts of coffee within and about, come on apace, overfilling that flatter tablespace in front of those of us at HCE who, given the onset of writing, would do it here. Our first preference encroached on by the impending tumulus.
The Standard Dictionary rests close but unavailable beside the nether elbow. It has all its broad blue plateau covered with six other items and an overleaning edge of papers from the taller pile of them beside the book. Had it been immediately available, we might have found the word impetus, and, properly described for our purposes, used the very thing in some wide-ranging theme regarding the Scholastics and their digging around in the soils beneath conatus (conatus as described below the motile essence of event, proposed by the Scholastics as the founding quality of all motion). However, the piled book as described is down, permitting us to avoid the opportunity.
Myth is the handy encompasser of knowledges each human makes. Here in myth, we like to say, we have that receptacle of our own regards, regards each of us is bound to pack along with us and dispense in the consecrating motions of our acts. Myth has its stories, its trends and tales, applicable at a moment's noticed need to offer motive reason to event. In your given population common elements of myth are shared out among them all. These elements include, at the very least, the stated names for things, language for the way myth's said.
Beside their invaluable assistance in quality assurance, the valued ring of beta-testers here at HCE from time to time turn aside from their otherwise strict attention to the task for which they've been brought around, to instead submit reports of their own disparate interests, interests that would otherwise certainly have escaped our attention here, given the immanent encroachments of the previously elaborated mire on the tabletop and the consequently plangent need for some remedial rearrangement as discussed above.
Thus we have the story of Ashleigh Banfield, the very made-for-TV story of her (which we like to call HCE's Beatitudes of Ashleigh Banfield just in case there's a development deal out there).
Ms. Banfield reported recently all throughout Afghanistan and the Middle East for the cable news channel MSNBC. One of her fellow employees, Michael Savage, called her a slut quite publicly, considering that he was on air on his show on MSNBC at the time he said it. She was at first promoted by the network, given all that face time the making of another Sawyer or Walter might require; a face to drape a franchise on, ran the hopes, perhaps.
In her reporting she met up with the irreducible fact of it: people see things in different ways. She gathered the stories on either side, of people informed by starkly differing myths, and the tragic consequences of the countertellings in their actions. It made for the grim footage so common from those parts of the world she covered. She found in her reporting the simple and newsworthy fact of these irreducibly divergent views.
She dyed her hair, which caused a ruffled spin of commentary for some while among those who talk about such things. Perhaps it was during this period that Mr. Savage gave his slur, or perhaps it was later, just piling on. Struck she was by the horrifying acceptance in some Palestinian family of the sacrificial self-extermination of their child, which she bothered to report. But is this not grotesque, a good made out of the child forever lost in any family's telling? Is this not news, this dire divergent view? Should it not be known that people think this way, and why? Or should it not be faced by Ms. Banfield, if she'd keep her job?
Dramatic tension of it as she gives her London Lecture at Kansas State University on April 24 of this year. Inchoate thing her speech, overall, no great gift for the rhetoric from the transcript, but the overwhelming need to say in whatever broken way she might find for it the story she has brought from where she's been.
Her bosses roar at her for saying an aside to the effect that the war has its telling on both sides of the bullet's path, on the side of its landing as well as where it's come from, an otherwise unarguable precept in less contentious times. But they will not have her loose her lip on it, and extract from her an apology for what it might have meant to all her colleagues.
The revised standard version of Ms. Banfield's marginalization is then given by the article which appeared yesterday in the famous New York Times.
It remains unclear why the disposition of the matter involving Scott Peterson, so avidly pursued by what we call the media here at HCE, is worthy of greater attention than the civilization of Baghdad, so recently interrupted. Nevertheless, this is the case, as the forlorn fact of the murdered woman, pregnant with child, found flotsam on the eastern shore of the famous San Francisco Bay, has the media's full focus.
Still, there is the attractive headline to tear us away from the media's preferred considerations, found on page A23 of the San Francisco Chronicle for May 4, 2003. It reads:
Hard–core weigh next step"President Bush says the combat in Iraq is over, but hard-core peace activists have no intention of leaving the battlefield," is what the first sentence of the thing proposes. Scent of the buccaneer off the phrasing, bunch of them truculently gathered, grumbling the undone violence of their intentions, in public.
Still, it was at least a link to what we had thought to be the matter at hand here at HCE, so recently shocked and awed as we were by events precipitated in the name of the famous United States of America upon that city on the Tigris, the city of Baghdad, which we have long taken to be the very downtown of civilization itself. We have no complaint against Paris, or the recent hegemonic role of New York in this regard. Still, the millenia weigh strongly in Baghdad favor. Gathered there are all the knowledges and discontents and glories of that region's civilizings, that region from which civilizing itself first sprung. To see it once again undone is galling, to be blunt.
The site is not the blankest of slates, but the question does arise, what exactly will we replace Baghdad with? If it would be the better place than what's been removed by bombs and the prying paws of the populace itself, set loose on the place under the inattentive eye of the invader, precisely how will this better city be made? It's a question that daunted Robert Moses himself, under far less invidious conditions.
Or can a better Baghdad be? The Barry Family has its other bog-related view of things, and sees the little likelihood of that. Where are they ever well-made enough? There may be some list of Fifty Finest Places (which we would insist include the vaunted local city of San Francisco, should it come to that) but it's overbalanced by the ill-made tens of thousands of them spread around the planet. In city after city, not excepting Baghdad itself as it was, the commonest experience of life there is civilizing's commonest expression: poverty. The Barry Family stands against poverty on long-standing and unbending principle. The Barry Family does not countenance its own, nor acquiesce readily in another's, in this regard. The Barry Family does not think anything good will come of civilizing, on average, if its average condition is poverty.
The poor of Baghdad were spared this time the ultimate of war's choices, extermination. They now pre-populate the city that will come out of all the actions required or allowed by the interests of the invader. That the city, which we guess they will call Baghdad all the same, will fail its poor, is foregone.
It is meet, and it is fitting, and it makes a fine commentary on our own woeful day and age and all, to see Empire Maker finishing ahead of Peace Rules in this year's running of the Grade I Derby of Horses held in Kentucky each spring at Churchill Downs.
Your favorite Empire Maker, owned by royalty and sired on the sublimely shat soils of Juddmonte Farms itself, that paragon of paddocks of Kentucky, could not return with victory, though it beat out Peace Rules, your other likely candidate when they went off.
Peace Rules, entering the stretch by too placid a course, after surrendering the lead to the eventual winner "…continued with good courage to save third position," according to the official race summary. Good show, giving to the pacified paws of its proponents six dollars each on a bet of two.
The dog's regard, gathered in the nose, is another way entirely, well-suited to its disclosing rhinosophies of knowledge, however tangential they may be to the hand-eye cleavages of humans.
It is not clear if the measure of the fastest horse would ever come up with the dog. Presumably the dog would join the pack of of its own kind empirically seeking the answer by chase if the question ever needed to be addressed.
Language gives its other field of negotiation between perception and reality. Oh, the physical activity itself is such a field, it's true: there's no happier rejoinder to its coursings than the smooth removal from the place the falling beam would go, as example. A dog can do that. A voiced expression of personal interest such as "Yeow!" or "Waah!" in the human or the dog is quite common in such cases. The beam falls, there is the necessary move, yet the word officially addressed to the moment deploys in its saying all the full weight of enacted wishes on the matter, which no mere repositioning of the hoof alone can ever hope to do, no matter how necessary as a first step.
But say you run to catch with mitted paw the batted ball in a contest of the game of baseball. You'll be preoccupied with the task. It's no easy thing in every case to bring your man the ball successfully out of the sky, however well-equipped and trained a talent for it you may have. You'll need your other and attendant voices to give full throat to the moment, even if you have a decent jump. We who crowd the stands at Pacific Bell Park, home of the National League Champion San Francisco Giants, provide precisely such a service with our throated moans, giving with conjoined voice the necessary hopeful wording of our wishes.
Clarification
The Uncle's event horizon means whatever it means. It is an object, manipulable. He puts it where he will. So by his calculus his very zero has an event horizon. We describe an object and we say that it is smaller than the smallest quantity we can name. This is conceivable, if innumerable, by itself. But we then square that object, multiply it by its own current smallness, to produce some something smaller still. But what do we say of this new object? What is its magnitude? It has bubbled off towards zero, captured by the event horizon of it.
But the first object, infinitessimal though it may be, is just enough of a number to be operated on mathematically. And it has the utter charm of being the smallest number we can make.
On the jar, images of dancers circle. The outer surface is surrounded by a glaze of them, result of translation from performed act to figured essential some time ago by the slick hand of the potter. There is no motion there, but the intimation of it comes all across the ages.
It may need other knowledges to know what mannered dancing like that meant on a jar. Why and for what and who owned that nice thing back then, and what did they make of what it meant themselves?
It is no trouble at all to see what they do: they dance, motion agelessly imagined on the surface of the clay jar.
Given the disposition of the dog here at HCE it is necessary to adopt an approved smell. Given any dog's need to feed the rhinosophies of its knowledges by the ever-vigilant insertions of the snout, it comes to this: To sniff is not to see. It is your other quality entirely, the smell of it, and calls for its own recognitions in some formal way.
We therefore have the approved smell here at HCE. It is the smell of allspice.
When we say "here" at HCE we mean here:
This image roughly sketches the western shore of North American between the 36th and the 39th parallels north of Earth's famous equator. This shore is the main range of the Barry Family, and the home of those of us here at HCE, who live quite near 37°N 122°W (in the common scheme of measure) which itself is said to be exactly depicted in the image given below:
The first of it is Semele's day, given to all the embrace of it that public dancing expressions can evoke.
We have in our one month the sense of striving and embrace, then all madding acts of such transformed by celebration into foolishness in the very next month. That would be your March and April in the given calendrics, as shown below.
By May all the endorsed activities of humans, all the contingent motions of their making, have been incorporated in the year. The first day of it celebrates the lovely surprise of embrace. It is Semele's day.