The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Recently Sighted

November 22, 2008

Recently Sighted

Here's a caricature of Glenn Reynolds, writer of the well known (among people who know about these things) blog Instapundit. I photoshopped Reynold's head on the body of a robot stacking colored blocks (even though I suck at Photoshop), in response to a contest proposed by Brad Reed last year at Sadly, No!, who asked his readers, for his own sarcastic reasons, to submit images of a robotized Reynolds.

I'm pleased to see Brad's chosen to use my caricature a few times since then when revisiting yet another of Instapundit's pronouncements.

On his blog Reynolds is known for going on succinctly enough about the business of being wrong in public, frequently approaching the limit of what might be described as the greatest lower bound of words in any realized rhetoric needed to issue wrongness into the world, with the use of his trademark phrase Heh. Indeed. — words which by virtue of being unleashed on the internet have the power to incorporate a cleverly coded reference to some other more lengthily propounded wrong devised by someone else out there on the web, thereby economically encapsulating the greater amount of wrong in the smaller container of his famous phrase. I imagine on a good day, Heh. by itself is rhetoric enough for Reynolds, an elemental monad of wrong excreted on his blog along with its linked nonsense for the nourishment of his large and avid flock of readers.

Reading Glenn Reynolds and his asociates risks exposure to a debilitating dosage of wrong over time, and it's the chosen task of the folks at S,N! to fashion a palliative out of ridicule, contumely and if necessary, relevant information in an effort to helpfully disabuse readers of the sort of notions that regularly ingesting such wrong produces. Brad's contest to robotize Reynolds was, I suppose, in support of such efforts. Good times, good times.

UPDATE April 15, 2009: Blue Dog Texan, over at Firedoglake, resuscitated my Reynolds caricature today. Good to see its getting wider circulation. Take that, Sadly, No! Contest Winner Person! HA!!

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

The words themselves, however, in the precise carnival train order in which they appear, and such original images which may from time to time be displayed here, excepting of course for those attributed materials the provenance of which, as duly noted, originate elsewhere, are owned by and are the property of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," or me, and are subject to the terms of Creative Commons License 2.5 , by which license (in the unlikely event that such words and original images appearing here are taken up and displayed elsewhere) clear attribution must be attached to those words or images indicating their ownership, to wit: the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," but not me.