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| "Do Not throw out!!" |
March 19, 2016
March 15, 2016
March 10, 2016
You May Drive Out Nature With A Pitchfork
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| Dredging the Shoaled Harbor Mouth, Santa Cruz CA, February 2016 |
March 09, 2016
March 04, 2016
Tidying Up The Context for Patrick's Day
Lismore grew in time to be a great religious city, and a school of sacred sciences, to which pilgrims from all over Ireland and scholars from beyond the seas resorted.
—Patrick Power, Waterford & Lismore A Compendious History of the United Dioceses Cork University Press 1937 pg. 5.
As late as the 15th cent. the primacy of Lismore, among the Sanctuaries and Schools of Munster, seems to have been tacitly acknowledged. In recognition of the status in question, special immunities were granted to the city and church of Lismore, as well as to the attached manors, by the Provincial Synod, held at Limerick in 1453. These included freedom from exactions by anyone, even the Lord of Desmond, or the king's representative.
—See Appendix XIII.
Freedom from exactions sounds like a pretty sweet arrangement but the sordid truth is that, at least as passed down through my family's recollection, it was earned as tradeoff for Lismore locally settling with firm finality the whole snakes-out-of-Ireland controversy fomented from the first by fans of Patrick and occasioning there in Lismore as elsewhere throughout the Wooded Isle centuries of objectively unnecessary commentary ornamenting almost every conceivable aspect of the matter.
This local settlement did not countenance expression of certain divergent views, divergent in the sense that they strayed too far from the hard won consensus that for the good of all this snake-related nonsense must cease and Patrickology must move on.
In this way my forebears enlisted in a project of not only denying a place in Lismore to the snakes per Patrick, but actively subduing any idle talk of them as might arise in Lismore's vicinity from time to time as well.
February 27, 2016
Illustration
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| The Pines(detail) by Franklin Booth, via John Holbo at Crooked Timber |
Booth's style nicely replicates the effects of woodcut using pen and ink. The clouded sky in the detail above is typical of the myriad of precise strokes of varying thicknesses he applied to every centimeter of his work to achieve the desired effect. There is nothing of economy in Booth's style, and still, the tree at right is pure suggestion. Composed of countless scribed lines, it's as much an impression of a tree's appearance as any Van Gogh ever drew.
February 26, 2016
Endorsement Season
Overshadowed by the Chris Christie endorsement of Donald Trump today was an endorsement over on the Democratic Party side of the contest, as Robert Reich endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. Reich has been admirable on most issues he's cared to speak on publicly following his time in Bill Clinton's Cabinet in the '90's.
Still, there was the big bully deferring to the bigger bully on the Republican side, which understandably hogged most of the day's stage.
February 24, 2016
Etymology Enacts the Plausible Yarn To Explain the Well-Known Name
Richmond Talbott was a slide guitarist and blues singer, and an old friend of Jorma Kaukonen. Talbott (then known as Steve Talbot), Jorma, Steve Mann, Tom Hobson, Perry Lederman and a few others were the acoustic blues guitarists on the scene in the early 60s who were the hottest and most sophisticated pickers, although only Kaukonen went on to success. As a private joke, they all made up “fake blues names,” and Talbott chose as his name “Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane.” A few years later, this play on the name of Blind Lemon Jefferson was later borrowed by Jorma’s new band.
—Ross Hannan and Corry Arnold, Freight And Salvage
One Way of Looking at Washington's Birthday
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| This Year's Peak Magnolia Came in February |
February 22, 2016
February 18, 2016
Annals of Government Intrusion
Bruce Schneier on the FBI's demand that Apple hack the security of the iPhone.
February 16, 2016
The Not Necessarily Pimping a Butterfly-Style Reference of the Month Club
If Kendrick Lamar was Walt Whitman to our age, aiming his fervid poetries at the heart of what's now America, would we white ones recognize that of him?
February 14, 2016
Annals of a Dead Supreme
Instafear!
If this is indeed the case, the Senate is presently in the midst of a 10-day recess (not a pro forma session), and under Noel Canning, President Obama possesses the power to make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court until noon on February 22, when the Senate comes back in session.
February 13, 2016
February 11, 2016
The Supremes Step In
The Government's Carbon Emissions Plan has been put on hold by the Supreme Court, catching everyone off guard.
This planet is so fucked.
The Rude Talk of the Presidential Campaign, Part the Millionth
Back in the day, from Eliabeth Warren's perspective, Hillary Clinton's work on the bankruptcy bill amounted to little more than putting lipstick on a pig, if by pig we mean the voracious capitalist financiers behind the measure, for the bankruptcy bill as a whole gutted the very protections bankruptcy is meant to offer to specific classes of the insolvent, particularly holders of credit card debt and student loans. It was to institutionalize a condition of debt penury on vast numbers of Americans instead of offering them the clean slate bankruptcy had always ostensibly been intended to provide.
“While this amendment may have provided some political cover, it offers virtually no financial help to single mothers, since the overwhelming majority of ex-husbands don’t pay any distributions during bankruptcy,” the endnotes read. “Of far more importance was the fact that the bill would permit credit card companies to compete with women after bankruptcy for their ex-husbands’ limited income, and this provision remained unchanged in the 1998 and 2001 versions of the bill. Senator Clinton claimed that the bill improved circumstances for single mothers, but her view was not shared by any women’s groups or consumer groups,” said Warren.
It would seem Clinton was offering up an attractive yet basically meaningless amendment in exchange for support of a bill no conceivable Democrat before the time of Bill Clinton, the first post-modern Democrat, would have thought of voting for. Ever.
February 01, 2016
The Americans Begin To Elect A President
Waiting to see how the spurned narcissist takes news of his defeat tonight in Iowa.
January 28, 2016
January 07, 2016
January 06, 2016
Snort
1 September. Oliver Sacks dies, my first memory of whom was as an undergraduate in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don't think I knew what a placenta was, except I knew it didn't come with chips.Jokes at the expense of placentas are so beyond the fringe.
— Alan Bennett, What I Did In 2015 (London Review Of Books, vol. 38 Jan. 2016, pg. 6.)
January 01, 2016
December 31, 2015
A Note on the Calendar Year
The ball dropping in Times Square is meant to signal the moment 2016 officially begins in America, though those of us on the West Coast remain unconvinced. We're partial to a later midnight unqualified by the ghost of Dick Clark. That midnight, the one going on in New York when the ball drops, the one sanctified by Dick Clark's ghost for the benefit of a grateful nation, is a fine midnight, having now passed, and cause for a certain kind of person to celebrate, I warrant, but fundamentally unpersuasive. We have it down as still to come at this point around here.
December 13, 2015
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