The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): October 2009

October 26, 2009

Farewell to Geocities

Geocities shuts down today, and xkcd offers an homage.

October 24, 2009

Postponed

October 15, 2009

A Blast From the Past

Twenty years ago today my friend Steve and I went to the second game of the '89 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. We sat in the right field bleachers, where we had a great view of a guinea fowl being tossed from the stands at Candy Maldonado as he chased down Dave Parker's wicked line drive in the corner. Then a walk to Dave Henderson, and I remember sitting down, almost falling over backwards like a puppet with cut strings, as everyone around me rose to cheer Terry Steinbach's home run leaving the park.

Mike Moore was on that day. What can I say? The Giants hitters were no match for him. The A's brought in Honeycutt and Eckersley to finish off in the ninth. Four hits for the Giants, and I left the park gloomy. Steve didn't rub it in. Too much. A's up two games, Giants not looking very competitive.

We drove back to Santa Cruz, wondering what fate might bring.

October 09, 2009

First Annual Nobel WTF?! Prize Awarded

I suppose if the Norwoogians can award their Peace Prize to renowned war criminal Henry Kissinger, they can award it to anydamnbody they chose, including a fellow whose chief recommendation is that he is not George Bush. Of course, with two wars of his own going on, it behooves our President to think hard about what he's going to say in his acceptance speech. He's got some 'splainin' to do, for sure.

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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.

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