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 aggregating later would host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, set just upstream, rounded by the river on all sides, the favorably disposed cityisle of the anciently and continuously established beneficiaries of Paris, but seeing just then instead what they continue to maintain to this day was the previous place where by the wrestlings of chance and design those parts of present Paris would become. Two Bar.

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

witenagemot, witenagemote, n. [AS. witena–gemot; witena, gen. pl. of wita a wise man, and (ge)mot a meeting, a moot, an assembly; lit, the assembly of the wise men.] among the Anglo–Saxons, the national council or parliament, consisting of princes, nobles or ealdermen, the large landholders, the principle ecclesiastics, etc.

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

And:
The Complete Belated Action Committee Report (Draft)

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Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!)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

September summer

We hail life's glorifying motions, all glorifying motions of life.

Mad March's manic motions, yes, and all the comprehended foolishness of April, ha!, and the fullness of Semele's month of May, yes, and all of those first three months as they may be so measured and so hailed, we who mark them at all here at HCE do so mark them in accord with still–honored standards of the Barry Family, those first three months. Hail.

And all of the other three as well we do so measure and so hail that make up sixmonth: the falling full into it of June, July's advance, and the wanton weedmonth of August.

Comes now summer in September, then, half–rounding revelation of the whole in the summed sixmonth of it, the half–helping of the year's measure poured into September's containing retorts. The sixmonth of it into the full thing's seventh month, the sixes and seven of it, of a year.

The year's twelve months hard to parse from sixes and seven, discordantly endowed objects the two of them will ever be. The year will become one, but how, from sixes and seven?

Eventually the Barry Family devised its own calendric to address this question, based on the reluctant foundation of its boglore.

Given time even a quantity as wan as the Barry Family's habitually inattentive view of the moon in those cloudy millennia in the Paris Basin might be multiplied by the endless if dimly understood number of times the thing was revealed to them down the ages in its constituent suggestive cyclical progress of wax and wane. First there's no light from it at all, so fully waned the moon is, the Barry Family noted, and then the more and more illumination of it reaching the all–encompassing most it makes and then less and less illumination till none at all once more. On and off and all the luminosities between in turn, the moon, over time.

They made what amounted to a concessionary mental note of it, the regularity of the thing, the Barrys did, in the boglore, the recurrent cyclical sloshings of the moonlight noted there and applied directly to their rude measure of a month.

September is the summer of the sixmonth in the standard Barry view.

September 19, 2005

The promise embedded in the rules of baseball is that at the very least given best play the game will end at last, satisfying a significant desire made doubtful by the practices of the game as drawn out in actual play.

Completion graces the game, given best play. The game of ball is of the happy class of terminable things, the formally done and finishable things that have for so long been reflexively sought out in pleasant diversion from the much of life particularly as experienced by the Barry Family down the ages that just goes on and on and on over time in contradistinction to the finally finishable formla end of the eventful game made along the path of best play by its participants, that path marked out in units of decisive outs needed to end the matter of the game at last in baseball.

The completed game is won or it is not, it has that unitary valuation for the given team. Just as outs are the measured units of the game, the game won is the measured unit of the season of baseball along the hopeful path of the club toward the desired goal of championship.

The best–won game of baseball has this fabulous example for a paragon of play: the fortunate winning team records an out on each and every pitch tossed by its pitcher, who throws just three pitches each inning, briskly gathering that required trio of inning–ending outs until the required number of innings necessary to the game is completed.

Every game won, however divergent from this parargon of play, is the functional equivalent of that best–won game by virtue of whatever crude device the club may have found the acheive it. In baseball's long season one win is as good as the next, however gained, and each as good as that one perfect paragon of a game that has yet to be witnessed by humans.

The simplest possible out in baseball requires only one representative from each contesting club, one pitcher to toss the ball, one batter to bat the ball right back to the pitcher, who catches the ball on the fly for the out, all under the discerning eye of the umpire whose pronounced judgement uniquely validates the realized thing. This is the simplest possible out in baseball. Two players, one ball, one pitch, one swing, one out.

Many, many outs in baseball are cognates of this simplest out, though they require more than one player from each contesting club to complete. The batter may manage to hit the ball some other place on the playing field where a teammate of the pitcher, stationed there or rushing there to the intercept the ball's trajectory, catches it on the fly. This out is functionally the same as the simplest out

September 18, 2005

Best play is a continuous function whose instances may be scored here and here along the path of the particular baseball game.

Best play is a continuous function whose enactment from time to time by those engaged in the game has the happy effect of moving the thing right along to its ending, which is no bad thing in and of itself. However sweet, however sour the sighted out that ends the game or the season at least the thing is over, even in the face of all the trying evidence of lapsed motion contrarily indicating that the game and its season hardly move along at all in the currently accepted sense of move along.

The game is nominally terminable, but only by best play, for its only unit of movement toward that ending, its only constant measure of the game doing any moving along whatsoever to counter the accumulating evidence otherwise, is the constant called the out which when collected with others of its kind eventually must achieve that warranted limit of outs in a game or in a season, arriving finally at the claimed ending of the game or season for each team by that last provided out.

In the Major Leagues of Baseball the most desired out is that last provided out warranting the famous World Championship of Major League Baseball to a favored club of ballplayers in each season. That's the avowed goal of all the lads that play the game, to make that out, to catch that ball, to make that play.

Crowned or crushed are the desires of all the players on the teams of Major League Baseball each year. One team is allowed the fair title of World Champion; the others must put to rest their unwarranted hopes forever in that last provided out of their own year, each team's limit of outs reached before the only out that fully satisfies the season's goal, that singular out at last owned by only one squad of ballplayers each year.

In best play the pitcher's pitch is lofted true, the batter's swipe is rightly swatted, and the preventive paw of your other player produced to satisfy the pathending side of the argument for best play: the end–promising out.

September 17, 2005

With best play in the instant the requirements placed on the catchable ball by the clever strictures of the game of baseball are successfully discharged by the player.

In the moment the player must catch the ball, or, errantly, not catch it at all. It is either done or not done, the ball stopped or not quite caught on its way as the occasion reveals.

That the ball must be caught is a condition of the game of baseball. It is the stern requirement of best play in baseball forever that your player must make that play, that your player must catch that ball, right then when the ball comes catchable.

It is in no way a moral imperative that your player catch the frisky bounding thing as it approaches, no.

However often we here at HCE who follow the game at all have resisted the surmise that at root the bobbled act just witnessed was in fact sadly consistent with the fundamental moral depravity of the individual involved, for the most part we are satisfied that enacted errancy in baseball is a condition of the inherent technical difficulty of consistently best play in the game, being a mixed matter of malbent talent and misapplied technique in the sad moment rather than that sour resultant cess of wayfaring sinfulness we might at first have suspected.

September 14, 2005

In any religious dispute it remains unclear how much of the blame for the dispute falls squarely on Undergod, though waves of the finest minds down the ages have thrown themselves at delivering up precisely that judgement on the ill–realized Gods of others for all the greater good and glory it does their own.

Properly flaunting that judgement is always your well-weilded tool in the more vigourous strains of religious dispute.

The Barry Family has long and publicly urged caution when attempting to remove Undergod from anywhere, based on the Barry Family's long–irritated familiarity with the inevitable disguised return of Undergod to all the mispent devotions of all your insistently mistaken others whose gods the Barry Family abjure and foreswear and are pleased to deny incredulously, as required by the standards of the famous First Commandment forever and ever.

The standard Barry Family view is derived from the image of Undergod named in the boglore either "Undergod?" over California or conversely "California" divided by Undergod? which, depending on the momentary needs of the religiously engaged argument, may require that California go into Undergod so many times to make a point or Undergod go into Calfornia to make some necessary other.

Attorney Michael Newdow, previously failed petionioner before the Supreme Court of the United States (Newdow v. That Darn Pledge), returned to federal court with better standing to make his case that Undergod be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance said each morning in the United States by students in public schools.

The Supreme Court dodged artfully away from grappling directly with the underlying Undergod of the case as originally brought by attorney Newdow in ruling that attorney Newdow didn't have proper standing in partibus infidelium to seek judgement in the case as presented.

Subsequently attorney Newdow cast about for some better clients than his own begotten kith and returned again to federal court with much the same case, where the judge, congnizant of the previous ruling of the Ninth Circuit which had not taken the petioner's standing properly into account, ruled that, with that blem now removed from its presentation, the previous ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court on attorney Newdow's case must presumably stand.

Norman Mailer takes exception to Sartre's godlacking existentialism in a revealing demurer published in the Nation Magazine.

We here at HCE do inflexibly spurn as required the artful god supposed by Mailer to heal the sorely lacking existentialism of Sartre.

September 13, 2005

Berkelely is a nearby city to the east across the bay from the San Francisco of the Barry Family.

The home range of the Barry Family radiates roughly out from that well–known intersection formed in San Francisco by the eastern end of 29th Street, at that spot where it meets and there terminates at a slightly oblique angle against the outer reach of lengthy Mission Street on that old street's old way southward out of town, the home acres ranging out from there in that generous valley realized between steep–topped Bernal Heights on the east and spire–tipped St. Paul's Catholic Church on the west of that intersection.

Mission and 29th is the arguable center of these acres, although it is not to be supposed that this arguable center is the habitual location of any particular member of the Barry Family at any particular moment in this day and age. It is rather the passable spot out from which to draw the place of the Barry Family in recent times since its introduction to those home acres all the decades ago. From this spot the standard fractal shoreline shown here can be adduced, and adjacent to that shoreline the fortunate current range of the Family.

Constantly the Barry Family was minded by mention of Berkeley of its own members' irksome history with the historical fellow himself. The boglore was awash with all wit of the Barry Family dashed against that dry fellow in his time, lore of an earned grudge passed around from the one of them to the other down the years just in case his name came up again.

The pronounced word Berkeley carried from the boglore the obligatory "Gaah!" into the Barry Family conversation, followed by an equally obligatory recitation of as much could be brought immediately to mind of the brief contra Berkeley long argued by the Barry Family as a result.

Unarguably, in its own home region the main mention made of Berkeley in the hearing of the Barry Family refers almost exclusively to the university and its city cited previously east across the bay. The standard Barry Family response to the pronounced Berkeley has evolved considerably under the pressure of these circumstances.

Although the prudent "Gaah!" is ever ready to be voiced in Barry Family conversation, it is now customarily withheld by default when the name of Berkeley is pronounced in the home region of the Barry Family.

September 12, 2005

The audience for it is told twice, quite explicitly, that some people leave for 2046 to have at their memories, and it's the place no one, or is it just the one fellow, ever returns from. There are these glossy imagined trains that take you there, to 2046, trains heading to that fantastic place where the elements of memory may be reengaged to suite the needy seeker.

Your man Chow is a writer who writes a story called 2046 about that fantastic future place. He is Chinese, a hack journalist living in the Singapore and Hong Kong demi–monde. He is the one who goes to 2046 for us, and curiously enough, having reengaged his memories there, he returns… Japanese.

The world this now–Japanese fellow attempts to reenter is as much the writer's fantasy as 2046, of course, purportedly being the 1960's in Singapore and Hong Kong, but utterly stylized by the writer's revisiting.

These nightlife precincts prowled by Chow and his ilk, these tawdry hotels and restaurants are the stuff of the fiction of film noir, and not that of the known record of sad true circumstances in Singaporei and Hong Kong in that time at all. But this is the story that comes down to us from Chow.

There is the endless return of the changed fellow from 2046, and there is the utterly changed past of Singapore and Hong Kong that Chow the author describes as his own.

The past world this now-Japanese fellow attempts to reenter is populated by not a single communist, remarkably enough, though in terms of Chow's particular interests, perhaps the less said of communists the better. That past, that film noir 1960's outfitted with its accoutrements of chipped glasses and paint–peeling apartments, is the better place than any founded on fact for Chow to investigate the unresolveable mystery that dogs him even there, the mystery rising up out of his own sadly rebuffed love and his own sad rebuffing of love himself.

David Denby writes in the September 12, 2005 New Yorker, of Susan Sontag's great love for the modernist masterpieces of film, and of her disappointment with what she described in a 1995 essay as the "ignominious, irreversable decline" of that art form into a "discarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's attention."

She would have liked this one a lot.

September 11, 2005

Now yet longer gone in the Bogblog below, the sad recollection of that saddest event, September Eleven, and the image of two humans holding hands, chosing to jump off rather than to burn there in that consuming catastrophe and as witnessed on that day just then fatefully going, that day resolving into the smoke–shrouded skeletal image reflexively brought to bear on those of us here at HCE reminded to consider that sad catastrophe on an annual basis.

Numerous pairs of people chose to jump instead of burn that saddest day, which sums our partial understanding of the resulting event here at HCE.

In this post–New Orleans world nostalgia grows for good old nine eleven.

September 10, 2005

Department of And Then…?

SULLIVAN: It's Friday, four days since Katrina hit. Everybody in the region is clamoring for the government to send in troops. On this day, President Bush makes his first visit to New Orleans. He calls Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco to a meeting aboard Air Force One on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong Airport. According to city, state and federal officials, the president tells the governor he will send the troops, but only if they and the National Guard answer to the White House. Governor Blanco says she needs 24 hours to think about it.

— transcript of NPR report tracing Hurricane Katrina timeline

The transcript moves on from this telling moment, with the president's response to Governor Blanco's statement unrecorded. It would be useful to know what he said in return. Being the President, and presumptively in charge, he might have reminded Governor Blanco that it was her duty as his subordinate to give her answer immediately under the circumstances. If she answered yes, he would take control of the National Guard and immediately send troops. And, if she answered no, for all the reasons resonating in Louisiana politics against federalized troops in that state, he would invoke, as necessary, the broad powers granted him under the Insurrection Act to take control of them anyway. George Bush was in charge in that moment, but the record of what if anything he did in the event peters out at just that point.

September 9, 2005

The various browsers lie in wait for the code of, e.g., the Bogblog, each browser with its own given ability to display persuasively enough what claims to be the standardized message made for its use by the Bogblog on a purportedly daily basis.

No robust collection of installed browsers, each advancing along the proprietary path cleared by its individual makers toward the adequate representation of a standard enough message could possibly be expected to display in exactly the same way the precisely offered code however properly transmitted by way of the famous internet to the wide range of computers hosting those browsers, on monitors as variable in size and capability as the market for such devices will allow. No. Things will be seen in their own sweet way on each of those devices, as it stands.

The vast majority of machines capable of recieving the odd message accoutered in the standard formal wear of the internet in this age are equipped with the forbidding Intertnet Explorer, which through some quirk or lapse or so–called bugginess in the browser will never adequately represent the intended view of the standard message should that message contain some stretch of code which in and of itself is unobjectionably standard, but inevitably causes the browser, Internet Explorer for Windows in sad point of nameable fact, to render instead a consistently inept display of that intended view. The regrettably common view provided by Internet Explorer for Windows may well compete with the canonical standard of a view intended by the standard message in these instances.

Nominally the required business of all the collected browsers including but not limited to Internet Explorer is to complement rather than compete with what is offered up in a standard way, but there is really no helping that. Tact requires that the author of the given message recognize and defer as much as necessary to the common limits on what's inherently expressible to such a crowd. Some expressions, though formally consistent, valid, and useful by the graces of HTML and its assorted associated syntaxes such as CSS, javascript, and their other ilk, will do no good at all in the context of that collection of assorted browsers. Commonly enough in each browser certain standardized messages will fail delivery in spite of being properly formed.

But the browsers, in addition, much to the credit of their makers, are capable of giving fair form to a wide range of messages which are formally in and of themselves only nearly standard, lapsed messages which are yet decipherable and lead to the immediate display of the browser's best shot at a standard view in spite of the garbled understanding of those standards evidenced in the manner of the message itself.

Most of the most frequently browsed sites on the famous internet only casually adhere to the standards set for the display of HTML, CSS, javalscript and their ilk, and yet browsers as a rule are able to make some common sense of the mishmash of coding errors if those sites and display as near as needs the intended message so ill–sent through the offices of the famous internet from those sites.

Even the displays of Internet Explorer for Windows are generally most forgiving of the gargled message. As little mind as its makers evidently gave to satisfactorily squaring its capablilities with, e.g., the proper display of vaild CSS declarations in the first place, the makers of Internet Explorer for Windows did on the other hand graciously and evidently spare no little effort in allowing for the commonly corrected display of a whole host of missent declarations, as are so regularly offered up from many of the internet's most frequented sites.

Internet Explorer for Windows provides the common view in this age, the democratized standard view. Failing to properly display wide swaths of proper code it does on the other hand commonly display what's commonly mistaken for proper code by the makers of even many of the most popular sites on the internet. Were the browser to adhere to the the standards of the browseable internet so tightly that only formally valid expressions were displayed, much of the recently renowned World Wide Web of the internet would be simply unavailable for common view.

Though on the one hand it does not seriously pretend to meet the formal stated requirements for proper display of standard messages on the internet, on the other hand entirely Internet Explorer for Windows fruitfully enough accommodates the expectedly common gargle of messages arriving from even some of the most frequented of sites.

September 6, 2005

Bad cess to the Dodgers has long been the only pleasant outcome in a season of otherwise self–inflicted ruin for the San Francisco Giants ballclub down the years, as those of us here at HCE with any interest in the game at all can attest from forelorn and lasting witness of our favored club, those Giants.

To see the Dodgers fail, to have the Giants themselves administer the terms of that failure on the field, became the shrunken extent of our own personal hopes for the team in the bleak and continued years of their failure to be champions. Down the years a winning record against the Dogers became the agreeable enough substitute for the outright championship our regrettably confirmed suspicions about the Giants forebore us from seriously considering. The difinition of a successful season was adjusted to acknowledge the full satisfaction of this amittedly shrunken yet still ambitious hope.

A winning record against the dratted Dodgers became over time the accepted standard of a good year for our reduced purposes here at HCE. Our hopes concentrated: heads up ball between our favored team and the decidedly derided foe from the spuriously described "city" of Los Angeles to the south of our own home region. Often, happily, our hopes, focused on this more realizeable goal, were satisfied completely in this regard, and even in the wrack and ruin of what otherwise would be considered a miserable year in retrospect given the complete record of the thing, the salving grace of the memorable doom of the Dodgers applied to any of those years is gift enough to gild our glummest recollections of those failed times.

We recall such moments as the homer of Joe Morgan that extinguished the Dodger's chances one year, utterly elimninating the dastards from the race to reach the World Series of Baseball with that fine momentous blast, and the dramatic and consequential homer of Brad Johnson in another year entirely with all its similar effects. Good times, ah, for all of it!

September 5, 2005

We take what pains we must to limit our attention, those of us here at HCE who pay any attention at all to the game of baseball, to the baseball engaged in by our favored team, The San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball, who yearly contend for the desired World Championship purported to be the prize of that organization against that score and a half or so of other baseball clubs teamed annually to have at that Championship for themselves.

At the very limit of the season is the desired goal, the World Championship of Baseball itself, reached by good fortune's end each year by this or the other one club alone.

By the rigour of our own attentive focus over the years solely on the progressive fate of our own favored club from day to day during the baseball season to the general exclusion of all the mass of other detail forever offered up on the marvelous subject, we have avoided in the main here at HCE until now the complete monopolization of our time that would be easily effected should we attempt to pore over even a significant fraction of the material made available on the subject which contains no mention of the San Francisco Giants at all.

Trained in San Francisco from an early age to give Oakland no mind, those of us here at HCE who follow the Giants applied this precept to the Athletics ballclub when that club moved to Oakland some years after our favored team had settled in the Bay Area. We pay them little mind, as being of Oakland.

Oh, of course we've heard over the years of the successful seasons of the Oakland ballclub, winners of numerous World Championships and contenders for still more down the decades.

Word does get out of Oakland.

But we don't care. We care for the Giants, whose own desired progress toward those same past championships gained by Oakland misfortunately if foreseeably enough were resolutely denied our favored Giants in each of those very years of Championship for Oakland.

The great good goal of Championship of the San Francisco Giants is as yet permanently, sadly and properly denied them for all the good reasons down the years, as our own witness will attest and as supprted in the sorry records of baseball officially authenticating the good given gathered reasons for that denied hope which might only rarely be blamed directly on the play of the Athletics themselves, but rather came as a consequence of the Giants own enacted unlikelihood, authenticated in the event, of ever playing baseball nearly well enough to take the prize by any likely actions of their own, regularly subtending the miserable mean of baseball with the insufficient behavior of the aggregated clutch of them clustered in the Giants dugout in those years.

Habitually we drop our hope for the Giants and our admittedly focused interest in the game of baseball simultaneously when mathematically necessary each year, when the number of victories needed to achieve the prize of Championship excedes the number of games remaining on the Giants schedule, and it is not impossible, e.g. in the 1970's, a decade in which the Oakland ballclub won some not inconsiderable number of championships, that the fate of the San Francisco Giants and our own closely related interest in baseball had been finished and done with by dint of their bad play months and months before the culminating moment of Oakland victory, which we admittedly greeted with the inattention appropriate to our settled view of that club and its city.

By the time those considerable seasons were thoroughly played out by the Oakland club, we here at HCE with any interest in the game as described had invariably moved on to the other matters entirely, as we invariably will when the subject turns decidedly toward the agreeably unspoken matter of Oakland, a place where Barrys themselves have been known to live, gingerly enough, from time to time, a subject just as agreeably unspoken as all the other agreeably unspoken subjects heartily acknowledged among the commonly enough met lot of them of the Barry Family.

Naturally over the years we here at HCE who follow the game at all anymore have gathered together an established set of suspicions to complement our baseless but pleasant hopes for the ultimate success of the Giants team.

This year such suspicions, confirmed by the wince–inducing play of Giants day after day after day on fields all across the nation gave up like cudgel blows the manyfolding reasons for a failed season on the part of the Giants, a season much like the many recorded seasons of them down the ages in which our hopes, pinned once again against the last wall of its refuge, the hard foreseeable limit of mathematical elimination, set itself to fail once more.

Without question, when it comes to the failed season, our interest in the game pales, gutters, and dies out in concert with our hopes. We start of course with our great customary hope in spring that the Giants will achieve the fair prize of championship as a consequence of our admittedly unwavering alliegance to that club, a hope never yet satisfied, made impossible in that annual moment of elimination when all the grown suspicions gather in the official record to confirm the utter lack of any remaining hope for championship at all.

Many a sad June has arrived in the many failed seasons of Giants baseball over time in which, with no more than a third of the season gone, suspicions about their chances for championship have grown sufficiently robust to put into question the necessity of all but the most fleeting further interest we might lend the detailed progress of that year's Giants toward that year's recorded failure (Formally the predicated losing season may only be completed when that last out is recorded in that last game that scuttles with finality the probability of reaching the desired prize of Championship. The chance of achieving that prize becomes zero, none, forever, sadly enough, with that last decisive out, and we are released, chastened again, from our focused interest in the game that year).

Such a year it seemed was this year, the 2005 season of Major League Baseball, in which the Giants, in the main, have not played good ball in the least. Barring the most rousing finish, the Giants will not win half their games this year for good reason.

And yet hope, punch-drunk and reeling toward elimination, by a quirk of serendipitous circumstance completely out of the control of the Giants, lives on this year. Yes, the club has regularly played bad ball, but even that bad ball has failed to underperform by much the bad ball played by all the other teams in their home division, each of which for its own reason this year drags its own freighted baggage of suspicions behind.

San Diego's club currently leads the pack of them in the home division of the Giants with a record of 68 wins and 67 losses. With a record like that San Diego's club seems as likely as not to finish off by winning about half of their scheduled 162 regular season games. They've established a clear claim to mediocrity over the course of the season by their play, we'll give them that.

The Giants, with a current record of 62 wins and 74 losses, have no such claim. To finish the season with no more losses than wins will require that the Giants win 19 of their remaining 26 games, a level of play the club has given no evidence of being able to sustain for such a lengthy period all year long.

Ah, but still and agonizingly we cannot lay our staggered hopes to rest. Their own poor play which in past seasons has served well enough to eliminate the Giants from contention has not been enough on its own this year. They are not yet out of it, and our interest, dragged in train with our undead hopes, continues, irtrtitatingly enough.

September 2, 2005

Advice is typically the thorniest of the offered roses of the stuff, compassion, particularly advice based on firm opinions.

Ah, but advice, ah! Compassion's great trumpet, advice! Ah!

In its day that was the stuff for the Quotidian, advice, great magazine of measured argument it was in all those many years of its ascendence among the reserved crowd of them among the Barrys who bothered to read the printed stuff at all.

"An argument brought to the Quotidian is well met," muttered Sir William Temple somewhat irritably it is said.

Of course the Quotidian descends directly from the Diurnal Journal of that curious lot of Barrys who'd finally got around to Late Scholasticism as the direct result of the chance discovery of the rudely discarded printing press cast so discernably bogward in the literary–critical expression of some crowd's body of work one day. The previous printer's identity and fate go unrecorded in the Barry Family annals. No one ever came to claim the press in all the long time the Barry Family cared to have at it.

The initial club of them, of Barrys gathered round the press, its bogfinders, saw immediate practical advantage in the space beneath the main work surface of the thing where there existed, in spite of the intervening continuation of machinery here and there underneath, plenty of space for the soggy lot of them to get in out of the rain which as it happened was their primary shared concern at the time of the chance discovery of the press. They were quick–witted to do just that, agreeably entertaining and enacting the good idea of getting out of the rain with all the controlled alacrity gained by millennia of practice in that useful manuever by their kind.

There they, the finders, took the opportunity to talk while they dried, and drying well and warming to the happy idea as graduated stages of unwetness embraced them, explored thoughoughly in conversation during that long–drawn period of their drying the proper remit for the singular good service given by the press in drying them, however unwittingly offered up by the object itself, by some grand and arbitrary gesture of their lively own kind on its behalf. Operating the press to its capacity, reanimating its machineries, returning it to its productive uses through their own complementary engagement with it, that was the stuff of their talk.

Sure and of course forever fitting to offer up good service to the foundered press in return for the good it would do, etc., etc., they said all that at some great length as they agreeably dried and considered the sufficiently reciprocal gesture on their part, something projected to balance the satisfaction of the chance dryness delivered up to them so satisfactorily then and there by the admittedly unwitting thing at the very instant of their own admitted and bespoken need.

It did not fail to escape the canny notice of its finders there that content, endless content, at length would be called for unquenchably by that press should they chose to give it such service as they were capable of, yet the inclination of their talk turned just that way, toward jsut that commitment, so pleasantly influenced they were in the instant of their drying there.

Being Barrys they had their own regular access to all the millennial backlog of the Barry Family boglore, to all the scattered tumbrels as example full of literary leavings engendered by the rivening contentions of the Naming among them —; the residuum of centuries of that stuff lay strewn about. If every day a press were to print some representative foolscap from that capacious store of the stuff, the matter of the Naming alone would need years before the press was subjected to its culminating pages.

It seemed worth a go.

Thereunder the loose talk of some remit to the press dried into a plan of action. Thereunder, warming to it, the finders resolved to make a daily journal putting it all in print, all of it, the whole lot of it as any press might reasonably require of its agreeable servants who down the ages might attempt to satisfactorily serve its endless operation with endless service agreeable to that endless operation, all as a returned kindess for the momentous and quite singular dryness that so pleased the finders just then for all the reasons.

The finders initiated there and then that strain of lives among the Barry Family exclusively wasted down the ages in perpetuating the finders' fond resolve that day to operate indefinitely as favor due the foundered press.

Soon enough the finders of the press, directly returning to it the favor of dryness it first bestowed on them, built a congenial shed for the thing's eternal repose.

Next the finders in their rude style reconstituted and repopulated as best they could given the inherent limitations of staff derived from the available pool of Barry Family members capable of such tasks, as many of the specialized functions proper to the press's operation as they could manage in that shed.

Soon the few found funtioning clerics and compositors the shed could bear gathered there under the guiding hand of an Editor chosen for the stern eye ever intent on the ongoing remit due the press, and it was begun.

From the first issue of the Diurnal Journal all the practiced gifts of argument lying naturally far from dormant in the unabated conversation of the Barry Family gravitated toward its pages, ported there by members of the Barry Family persuaded to pay any attention in the least to the Diurnal Journal, whether as a condition of their employement there or as a consequence of idling about in places where, once produced, it managed to appear.

All the frequented gifts of argument, forever giving if ever unforgiving expressions common to all Barry Family conversation since at least the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, were themselves vivified and and engaged by the publication of the documented sore point of the Naming which was the first advertent task taken up by the newly assembled crew of the Diurnal Journal.

How editorial control was wrested away from the finder's original intent, and the enterprise redirected instead toward the good service of the higher argument in general is the story of the founding of the Quotidian.

Bogsniffings:

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

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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!

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