Bogblog

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

introcession (–sesh´un) n. a depression, or sinking of parts inward. [Rare.]

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 Unordered Standards

Recently from staff:
The Quarterly Draft Bogmetric

And:
The Revised Authorized Standard Bogblog Bogmetric Bookmark

Added sign of validity:

Coming soon in the comic American Adventure series:

"Baghdad Funnies"

Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!) has been replaced for the time being in our prospectus by:

featuring The Mage of Baghdad!

Or alternately, time permitting:

featuring The Mage of Baghdad!

April Fools

He didn’t say, the poor man, “A child’s burden of gorse.”

He said, “A Child’s Garden of Verse.”

Might have made the difference, hearing it that way, had the Uncle been able. But his hearing was imperfect as well as selective. Whatever was said, the Uncle would hear what he would.

Of course he didn’t say “ A child’s burden of gorse,” the poor man.

Why would anyone say that?

Idiom? —”Ah, yes, in metaphor, the child’s burden of gorse, weighing down even our most enchanted, carefree hours, representing in symbol that hard freight of life from which we may never be relieved even in the proposed idylls of youth.”

Unfortunately for all the Uncle’s thoughts ran down that unlikely path. Farther down that path he suspected the inevitable slur against his own childrearing practices, the effects of which were wandering uncertainly about the yard.

He searched for the proper riposte. “Their gorse is light enough, thank you, though if I had a stick I’d measure you out a proper burden,” or something along those lines, is what he claimed later to have formulated. All anyone remembers clearly was him mumbling, “… and another swift one, to boot.”

“Swift.? No, no. Lamb, surely.”

Suddenly the Uncle perceived a reference to Swift. Would that he had been mistaken in this as well. But, no he’d heard unfortunately right. Reference to The Dean always engendered the Uncle’s fury, brought on by his long, unhealthy study of The Dean’s most shocking pamphlet.

Seeking to avoid the Uncle’s inevitable eruption, those who had regular commerce with him used the other words for quick exclusively in their dealings with him.

“Swift, then!” he shouted.

The Uncle’s firm conviction was that Swift’s modest essay contained an implied slur against Irish babies. The cannibal act was made even more repugnant by the suggestion of their Irishness. Imagine eating babies! Ugh!

Imagine eating Irish babies! Gack!

French babies, even French babies, presumably, would be less grotesque.

In this regard the Uncle felt his whelp the equal of any man’s: a meal no less tragic, no less tasty.

Swift’s imputed view would not be countenanced by the Uncle.

It was often remarked of the Uncle that he was never in any but a dispersing crowd.

“Lamb, I’m sure, would be correct,” said the hapless young scholar, unawares (In point of fact it was Stevenson, of course, though that is of little moment).

“Correct, ah!” shouted the Uncle. “But when it comes to it, would you not eat my bawn before the Earl of Glouscester’s?”

And so saying, he delivered the poor scholar a prodigious thrashing.

April 30, 2004

Bogsaddening event in our region here at HCE, which tends to recognize the line, as illustrated left, illustrious in its rough way of the currently given shoreline common to the Barrys.

The smudged line matches the smudged definition required of any shore, the rough line suggesting in this instance the agreed standard home region of the Barry Family at this date, the deposit of them roughly 37½° north of the equator, and some 122° west of its English named Greenwich origin as well.

There in the illustration is the western shore, the last and latest land of it reached by the Barry Family's innate though admittedly gradual westerly motion from bog to bog as deposited since before the Discovery of the Barry Family itself. This acknowledged motion west was in fact one of the first gleaned bogknowledeges of that first discovering group of them, that they dispose of themselves roughly westward over time.

Two great bays are there on that suggested line.

The one below is shaped like an elaborated bracket — } — closing it does on one side the open parenthesis of the ocean there, the familiar land going on about its business on the other side. This is the Monterey Bay Area. Just there, on the midpoint of the bracket where it gathers in a point, [  } ⇐ ], is the great bogland known as Elkhorn Slough, and there all along the upper reaches of the bracketing shore range all the many other representations of a bog, the liqueous lagoons and ponds and puddling creeks and the seasonably unreasonable San Lorenzo River itself, descending as it does on the upper curl of the bracket from the mountains massed just north to have its periodically decisive say about what's a wetland and what is not.

The other bay above, the upper bay, loosly scribes a big open B suggestively sketched in shoreline stretching inland and back in two great lobes from its entryway [  ⇒ B ], the famous Golden Gate of California.

The lower lobe is named the San Francisco Bay, and it has no great rivers running to it. The upper lobe is called the San Pablo Bay; every great river of California runs to it through the great adjoining delta to its east.

In the world there is this paragon of boglands, the San Francisco Bay Area, this upper bay and its adjoining delta. All manner of morass is marvellously marshalled there along its hundred of miles of shore, far surpassing, at least as originally expressed, in variety, riches and extent, the more modest known bogstandard of the Barry Family.

All runs to the bog in time, for ill and all. Ah, the pictured scene of the sour intrusive event in our region is reported here, saddening thing it is in the ongoing view of the Barry Family with respect to bogs.

April 29, 2004

Herriman's big thumb is often absent from his lines, which like the lines connecting Ignatz the Avenger's missile to its intended noggin, are instead briskly, directly, and surely scored.

The detail, left, of his "panel six of Krazy Kat" issued Sunday, December 9, 1917, displays his weighted lines drawing down on the upper head of the caricature of a cat, along with the impressive thumb itself (the thumb representing "Konscience" as Herriman has it in the fuller panel, but also surely any and all the other heft of gorse or grouse of inwit accruing in the generally accepted direction which may come to burden the head of its intended).

Caricature gifts the broadest of connotations with the minimum of lines, and Herriman made glib gifted lines. Deft jab, measured by caricature, the big thumb is.

Here at HCE staff was directed to file and staff represented itself as having filed here at HCE the necessary citation in the known archives of the image of the thumb in question.

A search of the files by staff gradually produced the book in which the indicated image rested, Krazy Kat The Comic Art of George Herriman, printed in Japan and published by Harry Abrams of New York in 1986, though staff regrettably was unable to to retrieve from files, or show that it had in fact entered usefully in any file at all the singularly apt detail of the image's actual page.

While staff went about its retraining at the recently titiled SBC Park, big thumb of recently exposed deficiency resting undoubtedly on the ilk of them there in the bleachers the whole while, no effort was spared to retrieve the requested image by main force. In absence of staff, a painstaking search of the indicated book was initiated, past page after page of images distractingly interesting for their own good reason, until the image, on page 60 let it be noted, which had been sought, was found.

April 28, 2004

It is known that in a free market, the freest spreads the farthest. The free press spreads farthest that is free, that costs little or nothing to make and even less to look at, with no hindrance at all to its spread.

The jibe is among the commonest of messages from down there at end of bar, that most easily and freely entered into of the many forms of speech, on average. Although there are at points some other sentiments expressed, the distribution of messages in the freest market for them over time leans to jibe, given conditions down there at end of bar..

The interests of the looker are commonly known, and what the looker's costs are in attending to the message of the maker of the free press or to something else entirely in the free market is readily satisfied by a suitable appeal to whatever those interests may prove to be in the main, an appeal to what's commonly understood as interesting, the delivery of which is among the expected competencies of even the poorest of the free presses.

At the same time it is known the looker's glance is lost who feels the jibe returned back up that look directly, howevermuch that direction may reflect the stated wishes of the maker in the matter. Such lookers look away, much good that does satisfying the maker's plan to have at them all pronouncedly.

Thus the maker's way in the market for a free press is made ready by the delivery of, in the suited styles, the captivating reference to interests of the looker's own, as commonly understood, gulling the looker as need be even into attending to the jibe it is undertsandably so commonly meant to offer.

The delivery of the thing in the standard language of its lookers in and of itself increases both the looker's willingness to look and the fixed cost to the maker, for any phrase of any heft as lifted from the very end of bar fellow down there suddenly turned orotund can be fashioned by the known offices and machineries of the press into its very next issue, under keen editorial control, if given such direction, at some fixed cost and at great attentive amusement to all its likely lookers in their known language.

In any robust instance of the free press, the fixed costs of the maker of its message are freely borne by the looker at it, along with whatever other charges and fees may accrue to the transaction. If not, if the free press in this case fails to impress for any of the reasons, the fixed costs must remain, accrue and eventually be demanded of the maker of it.

It is the proved claim of the free market that such arrangements providing for the free press can be made stable over time, with the maker's message made interesting enough for the lot of them it cares to connect with, and the cash flow and the resultant balancing of such outstanding accounts as fixed costs must inevitably entail easily addressed by the adoption of one of the free market's readily available systems of accounting.

The fixed costs of the free press distinguish it from the freely given utterance from end of bar, which is so often unaccountable.

April 27, 2004

Reference is here given to the contentious divisibilities of Undergod.

April 26, 2004

The first duty of a free press is to impress.

The first purpose of a free press is send out its maker's message, leading eventually to its first duty.

The first duty of a free press is to impress.

In any instance of it, a free press is definite when and only when its maker's material actively issues forth into its proper medium of distribution.

The first duty of a free press is to issue it's maker's message, typically on paper, given available resources and what's comprehensible of the maker's message at the time of publication, and to rush that typically paper message to the eye of the intended lookers.

It is assumed that the necessary machineries are gathered, and that associates and staff, however truculently disposed in the wake of some new misfortune rising up out of the midst of their failed lives, are gathered round as well, in the near neighborhood at least of the machine each is meant to tend.

Editorially, the material of the maker's message must be coaxed both from the gathered resources at hand and from that unvarnished message of the maker's own, a message which in parts, denied suitable editorial escort, as often as not if sent out into common view untended, would be judged mistemperately at odds with both known fact and standard mores of public pronouncement, leading directly to a lessening of lookers, contrary to the agreed scheme of the enterprise. The free press is the editorial impression of the maker's message sent freely out to all its likely lookers, in the optimistic scheme of a free press. It is the expectation of a free press that there exists the possibility of universal distribution of the material of its maker, directed with unfettered transport to the susceptible regard of all.

This expectation elicits the first claimed privelige of a free press, the privilege that there be no barriers to its access to the common view, as so frequently encountered in the edicts of entities who weild to their own thoroughly influential satisfaction proprietary authority over resolving exactly what makes the common view and what may be rightly viewed there.

Oh, there are the barriers, even with this privilege. There are the other barriers to be contended with by a free press to be sure.

The first condition of a free press is public regard. A free press is defined by its issue, but does not yet exist unless this crucial enabling condition of the looker is met, too. The firt condition of a free press is satisfied when the willed word meets the willing eye.

Public regard, as roughly defined by its likeliest looker, is free to wander where it will, to collect and disperse as conditions require.

It may be that none, or some number sufficiently close to none to make no appreciable difference at all, of those who regard the issue of the maker's message, willingly attend to the maker's message in the event. The condition of meeting the willing eye not met, the defined issue of the free press fails in this account.

When the issue so distributed achieves public regard, duty, purpose and privilege have borne fruit, and a free press exists.

April 25, 2004

The pressing need of staff to experience the satsfaction of victory on the part of the San Francisco Giants, a need common to all those of us here at HCE who follow baseball, has been amply met by the team's victory in last night's game.

Victory came against the loathed Dodgers of Los Angeles, providing further impetus for staff's return to duty, the scale of possible satisfations deriveable from any baseball game decisively tipped by this addition of its greatest measure of success. For all these many years we've agreed, however we factionalize on other matter still under review, that it is best to beat the bums.

Historicaly, the Giants have won so often at their home park (currently SBC Park in the literature), that a three-game loosing streak there is unusual. A recent occurence of just such a streak was enough for staff to pour its ever-portable rancor onto the subject, their surliness as they went about their chores at least in this instance justified, given conditions, in their view. Whatever its cause it meant no more than the customary curled lip from most of them until the cruel excuruciating extension of that streak in Los Angeles on the stolen land of Chavez Ravine past Friday night.

April 24, 2004

Staff drops tools.

A work stoppage, that periodically engaged whim of staff, is proposed, brought on this time we are informed by the travails of the Giants baseball team, source of much mournful attention over the course of the past week of games, and really, much more than the ordinary esprit of any staff might reasonably be expected to bear up under without recourse to such palliative exercises as are rarely countenanced in the workplace, but must, staff feels at this time, be sought elsewhere for the duration.

Go Giants, in that case.

April 23, 2004

The Barry Family craved another place soon after the Romans came. The Barry Family, for so long associated with the Paris Basin, made gradual retreat eventually westward away from its great new Roman brickworks there, among related bands of folk who advertently or not brought with them the spoor of town and city, of the urban Roman thing they'd sought to avoid which quickened now wherever they happened to go.

The Romans turned the clever colonization schemes of mediterranean cultures inland.

An endless shoreline of possibilities was attended to by the Greeks and their colonizing polis, plantable franchise a polis was all along the immediately available Mediterranean and Black Sea shores, though, being fine-tuned to the strategies of the sea lanes (necessarily a preoccupation in such places), never in the west really turned full attention inland, perhaps because even the expansive Greek populace was overmatched by the sheer scope of "shore" to spread out on, or because historically inclined instead toward the endless inand east made so accessible by the investments of the famous Alexander, or simply because of some relict sensed prejudice in such society as true Hellenes made of it that, no, even taking Alexander into account, on self-defining principle Greeks would not go inland on a bet, itself an anciently expressed core reservation of great numbers of human populations over time: alarming area, inland, to them.

Alexander pronounced Iskandar to the east, is we guess the legendary subject of a recent film made in far Maylasia.

Alexander had scant need to make the initial colonizing gesture of imposed urban settlement when he went east. He pointed here or here and said make one, make a city here, yes. But the installation of a city, however peremptorily initiated, was a commonplace in those parts, the famous home acres of civilization itself. The urge for urban settlement preexisted his entrance almost everywhere he went. Alexander did need to colonize instead the means of controlling each urban area by substituting in each case his own sort for the antagonized authorities of the previous regime.

But this is not the same thing as starting fresh, which must be allowed is the innovation of Romans in the west. Many Europeans who greeted the Roman intrusion inland descended from those same people who, three hundred years before, had intemperatedly overrun young Rome itself, burned things, broken things, gnawed on the mysterious urban matter of Rome for the six weeks or so it took to come to the conclusion that it was best to retreat, utterly strange taste the big city Rome offered up to their standard appetites.

The Romans dried off the marine Greek plan of polis and fit it to the minimal toolkit of the camp, the camp the intrusive entry point of their dry land polis which would cleverly unpack itself once the camp was well-established there. And they made inland with it, the Romans, with their wholely preemptive urban brickwork, eventually reaching the Paris Basin as the Barry Family has no need of reminding.

April 22, 2004

A veteran's draft letter

I oppose the draft for empirical reasons, having experienced it myself in a once-famous war.

There is nothing at all to recommend it, nothing, except to those who avoid its imposition.

They will manage to have their own more objective view of the matter, is what I've found.

Although I favored avoiding the draft no less than the next fellow did in the last few years of the sixties, I failed to embody its avoidance at the time, unlike the many who for all their many good reasons for not serving did not serve, and who from all reports, had quite a zany time of it instead.

Many of these people were the smart kind of people who given the rational choice between, say, going to war insted of going to college, and the freedom to act on that choice, chose to go to college and in fact did go to college instead. Anyone not free to act on that simple rational choice, or choosing not to employ its rather straightforward plan of avoidance for whatever peculiar reason, had his other avenues of avoidance, including, and especially, the National Guard.

Objectively, among the avoiders, is where questions about the draft's utility are always resolved.

I say no.

The cruelty of the draft is that it provides the required number, whatever chosen number that number may be, to carry out the far more objective wishes of those who avoid being drafted in their place.

A rough two hundred and sixty thousand of them drafted for the great purposes of World War II were given up to its successful conclusion, their lives in trade for success. They died providing that required number, that number needed to win the thing, which was a great burden of a number to be borne, but borne nonetheless for the sake of the desired victory. The draft made that number of them available, provided the required number to secure that goal.

The draft is always there to provide the required number to any argument for war, however miscalculated that argument may be, though errancy in argument alone has rarely weighed against the success of any argument for war, and the prospect of universal conscription in a sufficiently robust population makes war of any size available to even the poorest of arguments, many of which have won the day in their time, if not the ensuing campaign.

The draft increases the likelihood that some poorly conceived objective of avoiders wins the argument for war, and ends the lives of young men selected by draft to carry out some ruinous folly on their behalf.

The draft itself disinterestedly serves both the best of arguments for war and the worst. It serves any argument for war at all with its required number.

I will avoid being drafted if it comes to it eventually in Iraq or in the famously continuous wider war on terror. I am an avoider this time, excluded I am confident by age and prior service.

Think what you will of the required number in Iraq, fellow avoiders. Good war or bad, it's out there.

— peter ramus

{Presumably from an earlier draft circulated, for example, ⇒here on April 20, 2004. — ed.}

April 21, 2004

George Tenet, current Director of the very knowledgeable Central Intelligence Agency demonstrating the principle of the "failed field sobriety test" in response to a question on another matter entirely in his appearance before sceptical 9/11 Commissioners.

Mr. Tenet has subsequently asked that he be allowed to clarify his testimony further in secret session. So far it appears staff is resisting.

(Following a link at Wonkette to "Best. Screen. Capture. Ever." by Presurfer.)

Equality and Liberty

Just as the word "country" has been so recently and advisedly replaced in our lexicon by the term "homeland," so the word "liberty," long a staple of American discourse, came to be replaced over time by the term "freedom."

We here at HCE have reservations about the subsitution in each case, following the Barry Family's natural conservatism regarding serviceable usages. "Country" and "liberty" seem to have plenty of tread left on them, but they're no longer given by default.

Public discourse is now invested with the vaguely formidable construction "homeland" and the only loosely describable "freedom" instead.

Perhaps the irresolvable tension between equality and liberty in all the modern arguments over governance soured political philosophers on "liberty's" use over time, impelling them to seek an agreeable alternative to the consideration of its barbed nature, although there's little evidence of that in the contentious literature of freedom.

deTocqueville weighed in on equality and liberty, and Gary Wills does a good job of following him along to his conclusions in an admirable smackdown in the current New York Review of Books.

April 19, 2004

An admirable smackdown of Alexis de Tocqueville in the current New York Review of Books, from the ever-contentious intellect of Gary Will.

April 18, 2004

An important note from staff

Draft Temporal Bogmetric

Recognizing that any currently eyed entry may call to mind some previous curiosity of the Bogblog, for the looker's convienience each new entry in the Bogblog going forward is now individually marked with an id, opening up the prospect of immediate re-inspection using the common features of hypertextuality to recall for display the requested entry's page.

Conventions

As is known, the first entry of the Bogblog is dated March 3, 2003, which is annotated 03.03.03 in the metric borrowed begrudgingly by the Barry Family from the Uncle's intrusive mathematics for this purpose.

The first in the sequence of 03's in 03.03.03 enumerates its "March," the third in the familiar twelve month cycle of a year.

The second .03 makes its way three days along the cyle of thirty-one days of the enumerated month, the month March of the origin date having the maximum number of days allowable under this scheme.

The final .03 counts by clever convention the given year itself, which count may go on for all we know, but eventually by the agreed standard of the Barry Family defers to the Roman Calendrics in the matter of the sequence's active enumeration: the third .03 represents of course the third year of the third millennium since the well-known origin impressed on us by Romans.

We thus compactly express our original entry by month, by date, by year, as 03.03.03 of the given millenium.

With a light swath of code we append the fragment identifier with a simple hash mark (#) to the address of its related Bogblog page, and the unique identifier calls up precisely the entry we require.

By the addressing conventions of hypertextuality, # may not be followed immediately by a number. Staff proposes by the present scheme a letter, a, meet this requirement by substitution: a for the initiating 03 of the count of the third millenium, so that, as example, the fragment identifier a04.18.04 identifies the third millenium fourth month eighteenth day fourth year of the count more colloquially given as April 18, 2004 at the head of the entry being considered, with the present millennium unvoiced but understood.

In the scheme of staff, calling from the Bogblog the location April04.html#a04.18.04 will forever retrieve this current entry, unless of course the entry sought is properly a part of the contemporaneously experienced month as well, in which case the page address is unfailingly given as index.html of the Bogblog. As of this writing, the proper address in the Bogblog for this entry will continue to be index.html#a04.18.04 until by its completion this month is no longer current and the page and thus the entry is finally and fully granted its permanent id of April04.html#a04.18.04 instead.

Lookers may retreat to the starting point of their search, however defined, as would be expected, by using the well-known Back button of their browser.

— Staff

In other new today, April 18 marks the 98th anniversary of the famous earthquake and fire that laid waste to the city of San Francisco in 1906.

The Barry Family, so recently removed from Ireland to that new city, was fortunately spared, although, as is evident from the photograph, much of the city was obliterated.

It is cold comfort that the scene, matched in the ensuing century by countless similar photographs of devastated cities throughout the world, was in this instance not caused by the willful agency of humans.

April 17, 2004

Wither the Leader Misled? (PartII)

Q: (Egyptian President) Hosni Mubarak is saying the new U.S. policy on the West Bank could escalate violence. How do you respond to his concerns?

BUSH: Yes, I think this is a fantastic opportunity. You know, the fact that (Israeli Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon said, We're going to withdraw from territory, is a historic moment. And it creates a chance for the world to come together to help develop a Palestinian state based upon a solid foundation, a foundation where the institutions are bigger than the people, just like our respective governments are founded.

"Where the institutions are bigger than the people" in the stunted lexicon of the President may serve as a placeholder in his rhetoric for the familiar idea that no one individual or group of individuals is "above the law," which phrase is often trotted out during those too–infrequent periods in a nation's history when its chief public malefactors are held accountable for their acts, but is taken to mean, in the main, that the nation encompasses by its self-defining laws all the acts of individuals it claims for its own and that the nation so constituted serves laws rather than the interests of individuals, making it a good and proper social order.

We leave it to the auditor to decide whether President Bush means his words in that way, or whether he understands them to mean just what he says.

As it stands, "…where the institutions are bigger than the people" baldly describes the current landscape of civility surrounding us here at HCE; we give the President that.

Institutions are enormous hereabouts (we know of a common hamburger stand that has sold billions, as example. The bank clutching the mortgage to what we have become accustomed to thinking of as our house here at HCE is part of the formidable Chase Manhattan enterprise, casting its menacing web of finance all across the globe of Earth from what we gather, and abetted by our own complicit relation in its wiles each year at tax time when its usurious interests are by that advantageous convention of the tax code, removed entirely from our account). We do not need to be reminded, given the constantly intrusive examples of enormity such institutions visit on us here at HCE. No: we will give the President that.

But when President Bush says, "Yes, I think this is a fantastic opportunity," in response to (Egyptian President) Hosni Mubarak's concern that new U.S. policy on the West Bank could escalate violence, it is not to be supposed that President Bush's words are to be taken literally to mean that President Bush endorses his own policy as the surest path to that end, though that may be the plainest reading of the phrase.

Suffering an assault on its meaning for decades by the enormous institutions of advertising, the word "fantastic" has taken a serious turn. As used here by President Bush it is influenced by all the many advertising dollars spent on making it mean "highly, highly estimable." But it means "illusory" first. The President seeks not to say that his new policy strives for an illusory opportunity, however accurate a self-criticism that will surely prove.

Although we are congenitally fond of a good fight here at HCE we subscribe to the common notion that the Israeli/Pasestinian fight is not a good fight at all, for all the many reasons, and that a continuation of it at a higher pitch is not fantastic, but rather the forseeable result of all but the most adroit manueverings in that sad arena of civilization.

To make sense of what President Bush's regrettably formed words mean, rather than leave them pointing to a meaning that make no good sense at all, requires us to consider the rhetorically necessary statement of the contrary, e.g., rather than lead to violence it will lead to a (fantastic) new opportunity for peace, a phraseology easly accessible to the suasive likes of Prime Minister Tony Blair and many previous presidents of the United States, including even President Reagan. But even better spoke it stays unlikely.

April 16, 2004

The Other Ould One of ours here at HCE, the one who sailed on the Lucania at the age of nine to San Francisco with a flood of siblings led by a 15 year old sister, the one listed as "Batt" on the ship registry who settled into the Irish colony of the Mission District there, the one to whom we here at HCE are partially affiliated by descent from one of the explicitly spawned results of his quite evidently common conubiality, that was the fellow could never come inside without it being called a "Batt Cave, now," by some wag.

He put up with it well enough, The Other Ould One^(ηςε) .

April 15, 2004

Little did we ever forsee here at HCE that Incuriosity, exotic substance that it is in our experience of human beings, would ever reach so high a place in public discourse, and with such good reason.

April 14, 2004

The President's chosen tie was the only brilliant thing behind the podium last night at his historic press conference, as evidenced by The Quotidian.

Happily, there is a venue for excellence in America yet.

Barry Bonds, the best baseball player, hit the 661^st home run of his career in last night's game, one day after tying his godfather Willie Mays for third on baseball's all-time list of home run hitters. Remarkably, the ball was caught by the same fellow who caught the 660^th home run the day before.

The fellow who caught the ball, Larry Ellison, is not, to our knowledge, to be confused with the fellow of the same name who runs Oracle, the famous software company headquartered quite nearby our own vastly more virtual enterprise here at HCE. On the other hand, Mr Ellsion is meant to be confused with Arnold Schwarzennegger, the famous current governor of California, by virtue of the fact that, since his appearance in an inflatable raft in McCovey Cove during the thrilling days of last year's gubernatorial recall meldown, Mr. Elison has consistently and to our taste somewhat irritatingly outfitted his own head with a mask simulating the head of our current governor.

Mr. Ellison brought both balls to Barry Bonds. No negotiating, no rushing off to ebay, he simply gave them to the ballplayer.

Admirable.

April 13, 2004

The best baseball player, Barry Bonds, famous member of the reigning National League West Division Champion San Francisco Giants, hit the 660th home run of his remarkable career in our presence yesterday at SBC Park in the team's home opener.

It must be said that a crowd of more than 42,000 ecstatic voices shouting "Barry! Barry!" as was the case on the completion of the deed, pleases us greatly, however much our natural modesty, in principle, at least, militates against our joining in such public usages of the name. We did, if memory serves, say, "Whooh!" with great feeling.

April 8, 2004

The ethereal nature of virtuality has its advantages. It has its disadvantages. Here at HCE, the enterprise , so-called, virtual since its inception long years ago, has both benefitted and suffered from this fact. The overwhelming majority of initiatives taken by the enterprise have proven consistently virtual in thought as well as deed down the years. Necessarily the income of our enterprise has been even less than virtual in this time, leading us to view the following small but striking nugget of information with the same sort of rueful shrug that might seize the shoulders for example of the little penniless human child at the window of the candy shop.

WASHINGTON (April 6, 2004: 7:32 AM EDT) — More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn't pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.
(…)
Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.
(…)
The analysis found that even more foreign-owned companies doing business in the U.S. — about 70% of them — reported that they didn't owe any U.S. federal taxes during the late 1990s.
The basic federal corporate-tax rate for big corporations is 35%. But the federal tax code also offers many credits and loopholes that allow many companies to pay far less than that.

(— from an article found on the website of CNNMoney to which Wall Street Journal Staff Reporters John D. McKinnon and Rob Wells contributed)

April 5, 2004

Here at HCE at times we despair for our friends the human beings.

Oh, we are thrall to our own consuming interests, yes.

Always, irrespective of the condition of the wider world as we have come to concieve of it, there is the as-yet lapsed resolution of our firm unswerving plan to address fully and finally the encroaching fennel in the side paddock, for example.

Oh, and to pay our bills on time for once, to mow and perhaps even water the lawn this month, to bathe and cloth and feed ourselves as time and temperament may require, to attend as tradition dictates to the archives of the Barry Family boglore — to arrange, annotate and present for public inspection the sorry story of the Barry Family, lot of good it has ever done those down the ages who've been drawn to that unhappy task — and, as well, at least among those of us here at HCE who find ourselves married, to derive and supply such succor as we might from our engagement in that institution, ungay thing it is in our own particular experience.

In truth, our obligation to engage in these and like matters consistently overfills the time we have available to attend to them.

And yet, in addition, all the manyfolding sad conflicted acts of the human beings bear down on us as well: all runs down to the bog in time, in the confirmed view of the Barry Family. Thus word comes incessantly from afar of misadventure. The groups of human beings organize to murder one another, regroup, reprovision, and murder once again all down along the age-old chain of human deeds.

They have their reasons, yes, the human beings. We are given to understand they have their reasons.

Their reasons are examined and explained to us. This group has this reason, and that group that.

The famous United States of America which surrounds us here at HCE has its reasons for entering into the misadventure of war in Iraq. This is what we are given to understand. These reasons have proven quite fungible over the course of the first of many years of war there. Eventually, of course, as time and circumstance require, they will reduce to that one irreducible and irrefragable argument:

Just because.

April 4, 2004

Opening Day.

At this point in the baseball season Barry Bonds, whose accomplishments in past seasons have recently drawn suspicion from many quarters, as voiced by those sort of people who are naturally suspicious and never shy of announcing such doubts as they may reflexively entertain, to the effect that such acomplishments were tainted — must have been subject to unnatural enhancement — has collected in four plate appearances so far this year, three hits (two doubles and a home run), two runs, three runs batted in, and a base on balls in nine innings of work.

It will be admitted that his home run barely cleared the wall.

April 2, 2004

Sometimes agument needs but the fullness of time, as revealed by The Quotidian.

Bogsniffings:

(Should our business plan here at HCE go not too far awry, this portal to the previous year's Bogsniffings will someday be attended by the necessary machineries of commerce, erected to collect the agreeable sum on the looker's entering there — something much like the estimable Paypal system, perhaps.

At present, the Bogblog is freely entered to whatever depth the looker may choose to reach.

Use the Volume control to select the desired annum).

 

Volume II: 03.03.04 to —;

Collected incompletions of the current year, by monthname.

Volume I: 03.03.03 to 03.02.04

A year's worth of freely sniffable Bog in one compact spot!

Up↑

One click away, the very top of the Bog to you.