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, set just upstream, the favorably disposed 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

telergy n . the influence one brain is supposed to have over that of another at a distance through hypothetical mental force.

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Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!)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!

January jollies

ustice is often possible among the humans.

Attempting to extend the palliative order of justice to the other animals brings on all the known difficulties.

What meet justice is there where human greets the dog, as example? Surely only the clique of them who are the humans among a crowd made up of dogs and humans would own any interest at all in that consequential quality should some pasing regard for it arise among them. However strained its effort, the given dog will poorly appercieve what smells like justice to the humans. Justice is not noted by the dog, however much the dog may figure in its measured consequence.

Mercy, though, ah well, yes, the dog notes that, along with unmercy's contrasting dole at times in the consequential acts of human justice.

By dint of the mercies it recieves the dog is at play in the field of human justice, and by daunt of the rougher justices it remains.

It may appear at times that those of us here at HCE who speak for the dog do take with a grain of salt the entailed mercies necessitated by our adopted position in the matter.

There is some justice in this view.

To this day the hint of all the justice long visited on pigs besetting the Barry Family down the millennia in the Paris Basin survives in the tropes of those of us here at HCE descended from that ilk.

When finally justice reached its cathartic if gradually achieved culmination in the unhousing of the swine forever from the abode of Barrys on reaching the southwestern shore of Ireland (influenced not only by the interactive presence of the cumulative pigs themselves as they played their consequential role among Barrys all the while, but also deriving admittedly from due deliberation on the part of Barrys regarding the expressed position on the matter of the pigs offered up consistently by neighbors down the ages and just as consistently by the odd visitor from afar) the Barry Family did what was simply merciful by no further extending its long established harping on the justices inherent in its usages of pigs in the first place.

Reaching Ireland the Barry Family expended all its mercies on the argument of justice for the pigs, exhausting in that momentous transaction what little natural store of the gentle substance its members were endowed with: justly or no, in principle the pigs were foreverafter excluded.

Mercy spent in that tremendous act, an evident asperity entered into the Barry Family conversation, scenting what sparse measure of kindlinesses its members were capable of delivering unprovoked with the dry sage odor of suggestive substitutes for the depleted quality.

Certainly, as regards the dog, the quality of mercy is constained here at HCE by temperament and training.

January 29, 2006

January 26, 2006

"…deposited by a concrete dog with square intestines."

Alan Temko, longtime architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and model for the character Roland Major in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, died yesterday in Orinda of conjestive heart failure. He was 81.

Among Alan Temko's many lasting contributions to the Bay Area for which we will be forever grateful is his succinct critique of Vaillancourt Fountain in San Francisco's Embarcadero Center, a phrase so perfectly married to its subject that no one familiar with both can ever concieve of their divorce.

Major sat in his silk dressing gown composing his latest Hemingwayan short story—a choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night. He’d just written a story about a guy who comes to Denver for the first time. His name is Phil. His traveling companion is a mysterious and quiet fellow called Sam. Phil goes out to dig Denver and gets hung-up with the arty types. He comes back to the hotel room. Lugubriously he says, "Sam, they’re here too." And Sam is just looking out the window sadly. "Yes," says Sam, "I know." And the point was that Sam didn’t have to go and look to know this. The arty types were all over America, sucking up its blood. Major and I were great pals; he thought I was the farthest thing from an arty type. Major liked good wines, just like Hemingway. He reminisced about his recent trip to France. "Ah, Sal, if you could sit with me high in the Basque country with a cool bottle of Poignon Dix-neuf, then you’d know there are other things besides boxcars."

— from On the Road by Jack Kerouac

January 24, 2006

Civics Lesson

The Fourth Amendment according to General Michael Hayden, director of the NSA from 2001 to 2005 and now principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence, in response to questions at the National Press Club yesterday:

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use --

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the --

GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable --

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says --

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard --

GEN. HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."

And so what many people believe -- and I'd like you to respond to this -- is that what you've actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

General Hayden's remarks shed light on his new role outlined in a briefing on June 29, 2005:

QUESTION: Can you tell us what precautions or safeguards are going to be built into the system at the new National Security Service at the FBI to reassure Americans that there won't be domestic spying beyond a tolerable level in this post 9-11 environment?

After some throat-clearing:

GEN. HAYDEN: I'm pretty confident, and coming from the background I come from at NSA, which deals with these civil liberties questions routinely, I'm pretty confident we can do this and do it in a way by any reasonable judge, that American liberties are well preserved.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

January 19, 2006

Department of 1,000 Dances

Soul/R&B legend Wilson Pickett died of a heart attack today (Jan. 19) at a hospital near his Virginia home, according to a spokesperson for the artist. He was 64.

Pickett is survived by his fiance and four children. He will be buried beside his mother Lena in Louisville, Ky.

—Billboard

January 2, 2006

Our cautious view of the San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 2006, page D2:

The speech act is in and of itself a fact, once uttered or symbolized in a formally recognized report of written language. It may contain as best it can a reflection of some other fact, or distill that other fact in the retort of opinion which is the unavoidable birthright of the speaker.

Or it may, and often does, represent a placeholder for the missing fact or as–yet uncrafted opinion of its maker.

Nonetheless we find ourselves vaguely unsettled here at HCE by the series of lowercase "x's" given third place of the three something-or-others that are listed under Inside. The other two something-or-others are similar to one another, the third, not.

It is elusively different, in a way we cannot tease out from its context.

From previous experience we might expect that the words "Boyle" and "Clarett" mark the names of the two pictured individuals to the right, and would hazard to guess that the first two something-or-others of the list, each beginning with uppercase "x's" might stand for an unspoken fact or opinion about either of the two of them, which is to say that we might map the as-yet ungiven meaning of the first of the something-or-others to the first of the given named images (Xxxxx ⇒ Boyle), and the second to the second (Xxxxx ⇒ Clarett).

The third of the something-or-others defies our knowing (xxxxxxxx ⇒ Unnameable). It points Inside, we take it, to something or concievably everything else in there, or not. It could very well be a misprint.

As with much else in this new year, we await clarification.

January 1, 2006

In the bog the balanced hoof is but an aspiration, a transportation devoutely to be wished in going forward.

Balance is a prospect rare in that equivocal clime. In the very least of bogs the hefted hoof falls forever subject to the innate indeterminacies of the bogsurface. The justice of the move is quickly known, the micromanagement of the prospectively just step ever subject to the naturally selective attentions of the stepper there.

The injustice of the misspent hoof in the ageless quest for the seemly step drew the close attention of the Barry Family in the era of the Discovery of the Barry Family.

Using the crude notation then available, its new members derived the bogtrotting aesthetic of the Standard in a Step, whose discerning practices influenced the traditional motions of the Barry Family in all its ranks and ages.

In the bog the justice of many a step is indeterminate in advance, the micromanaged offering of the hoof held hostage to the failed balance of a mistaken object.

The unjustly offered step, abjured by the Barry Family in its daily bogpractices, could not fail to occasionally result from any unmanageably random evidence of bipedalism among them, such as might be offered in an unthought exercise in movement about the common point of the Discovery.

And yet, intractably human in this regard, the Barry Family could not fail to trot about, however failed an enterprise the unjustified step might prove in the event.

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 descend to the desired annum).

 

Volume III: 03.03.05 to —;

Collected incompletions of the current year, by monthname.

Volume II: 03.03.04 to 03.02.05

Accumulated incompletions of the indicated annum.

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.