The Unordered Standards
Book, ½–yardstick, machine, fire, table (2004)
No given table can hold all the many adopted standards of the unordered list of things acknowledged by the Barry Family. Displaced unknowingly perhaps by some mischance of memory, lost regrettably to the near neighborhood of the assembler's searching paw, or excluded intentionally by some canny editorial manuever of its maker instead, the boundary of the unordered list, elusively unlistable itself, goes unmentioned in the usual run of representations of the Unordered Standards of the Barry Family.
Such is the case with the image above, which strives with its few robust elements to both symbolize the minimal toolkit of unordered standards deemed commonly necessary by the Barry Family and suggest at the same time by a certain opacity around its edges the necessarily incomplete nature of such entabling gestures.
The prominent book implies always in Barry Family iconography the proprietary founder's interest of that group in the coursings of the English language over time, an interest which has long expressed itself in such concentrates of literary leavings as found at hand in the Bogblog.
The ½–yardstick is of course the famously constant Chinese half-yard of wood mentioned below in the Bogblog, long since taken to be 18 inches worth here at HCE, giving over the other half of the yard to whoever cares to share the measure.
The complex machinery of the nut and bolt stands here for all machineries of any complexity at all.
Fire, pragmatically referenced by the somewhat ill-lit representation of a small lighter to the right of the book, is a standard adopted by progenitors of the Barry Family in that vast immemorial time before the Discovery of the Barry Family itself. The pre-existence of the standard of fire was among the earliest and canniest of the discoveries of that era, great good its continuance did susbsequently, in the main.