A List of Analogies

 
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
 

Happy Computus

Putting Easter where it belongs was as grave and momentous a battle as the Roman-inspired calendar has ever experienced, with the class of those who cared to note the event eventually splintered into factions which continue to this day to maintain their own prescription for dating each year's Easter.

To say "Happy Easter" today of all days perhaps inadvertently endorses an argument that had them shouting from the lecterns all over Christendom some time ago and hasn't ended yet. To say "Happy Computus" is much more even-handed.

Hazel Dickens, June 1, 1935-April 22, 2011

Daddy died a miner and grandpa he did too,
I'll bet this coal will kill me before my working days is through
And a hole this dark and dirty an early grave I find
And I plan to make a union for the ones I leave behind

Stand up boys, let the bosses know
Turn you buckets over, turn your lanterns low
There's fire in our hearts and fire in our soul
but there ain't gonna be no fire in the hole

tl;dr

Self-fullingness from sfgate:

Human minds evolved to constantly scan for novelty, lest we miss any sign of food, danger or, on a good day, mating opportunities. But the modern world bombards us with stimuli, a nonstop stream of e-mails, chats, texts,...

Closely Watched Flowers

Technically A Gaze

Dogview

What mockery of Louis Quatorze could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 furniture hardware

With Sufficient Cowbell

Sunlit

Still Life with Tomatoes

Some Last Notes Before Leaving

 
I see more than one site pointing to this video of of LCD Soundsystem's last show, performed awhile back at Madison Square Garden, almost four hours of that kind of music. Here they are more briefly on the Colbert Show in their very last television appearance:
 

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
LCD Soundsystem - I Can Change
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

 

Recorded Yesterday

Capital Crime

 
People are subject to the death penatly for some crimes. Not infrequently, innocent people are convicted of capital crimes, and if the Supreme Court is any judge, they are not entitled to any recompense should prosecutors proactively interfered with their right to a fair trial.

Not all people are subject to the death penalty, which in theory should weigh upon every person equally. Corporations are a class of persons who can do anything they choose without fear of extirpation. But if it makes sense for other people, it makes sense for them. There are some crimes they should be made to die for. To be fair.

Rueful emoticon goes here

 
This past weekend Talk of the multiverse by Brian Greene on C-SPAN [rebroadcast tomorrow, April 2, 8a.m. PDT] lit on the notion of a great set of universes expressing all possible paths of physical progress emanating from whatever beginning we may choose to assign. Each outcome has a range of possibilities (built on the existential premise that something will eventually happen) and each probability, in a suitably ergodic setting, is eventually expressed, each leading off into its own range of possible universes in turn. Probablities collapse around some value in the event, and off each universe goes from there on its own peculiar way.

Something will eventually happen is the existential premise of baseball, too.*

So, for example, Edgar Renteria's home run in the deciding game of the 2010 World Series had a probability of occuring before the fact, along with the more or less knowable likelihood of each and every other possible outcome of his at-bat as well. In the event, in our universe, he hit a home run, I'm pleased to note, and in that moment of decoherence denied every other universe where some other probable outcome obtains, where Renteria is not even a baseball player, or hits into a double play instead. All possible alternate iterations of universes are counter to our fact, since he did hit that thing, we know for sure, a home run once improbable improbable no more, forever, for us.

Our universe is the universe in which redoubtable Renteria did so stroke that decisive shot. All those other universes are all well and good in theory, but in practice, in the universe we've got, that homer is the done deal, I'll have you know. Such knowledge emerges from the well-recorded resolution of a set of probabilities into that singularity of a stroke put on the ball by Renteria. We must believe that anything probable may well occur in the future. It is the nature of probabilities to probably happen at their naturally given rate, and we can know that any of them might naturally occur, without being able to do more than believe in the likeliest outcome with any certainty at all. Nevertheless we can rightfully put aside impertinent universes that do not carry us along with Renteria's known home run to our present state.

*The highlight of Opening Day for the Giants was the play of Brandon Belt in his first game in the majors, who played a highly credible first base and went 1 for 3 with a base on balls at the plate, battling Dodgers closer Broxton through an eight-pitch at-bat that ended the unfortunate game with a liner to third.

[In many universes it is said catcher Posey does not make the rookie mistake of trying to force a play with bases loaded and two outs. He's got Tim Lincecum out there on the mound in all pertinent universes up til then. Insert for crying out loud here. All he needs to do is corral the ball and get it back out to his pitcher. A flub on Posey's part, pure and simple, leading us to the present sad state of our known universe…]

Big Ball Down in LA

Go Giants


—via Metafilter.

Nearing the Real 2010

Spring Training is over, the stiffness of a winter away sluffed off now by vigorous repetition of all the characteristic motions of the game in preparation for the actual Season, the one ending with what those in baseball call a World Championship.

The World Series trophy won by the San Francisco Giants in 2010 was sent out on a long proud progress by the club, visiting among other spots the site of the last Polo Grounds the Giants played in before leaving for San Francisco. And, as it turned out, the thing itself came to Santa Cruz as well.

The Santa Cruz Boardwalk is the perfect house for such a public spectacle. It's got gaudy public celebration built right in. Two lines formed .

The Tour reached all the way to Santa Cruz

Lots of people lined up to have a photo taken with the Trophy

Others formed a shorter line for the chance to merely sidle by at a respectable distance from the thing itself

The photographer kneeling right is, I aver, in the very instant during which the official photographer busies himself picturing the same happy people, recording for the public his best view of what will appear on the front page of the next day's Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Mis-en-meta-abyme?

CSI: Edwardian London

 
From The Case of Oscar Brodski (c.1912) by R. Austin Freeman:

"May I trouble you for your lens, Jervis?" he said; and, as I handed him my doublet ready opened, the inspector brought the lantern close to the dead face and leaned forward eagerly. In his usual systematic fashion, Thorndyke slowly passed the lens along the whole range of sharp, uneven teeth, and then, bringing it back to the centre, examined with more minuteness the upper incisors. At length, very delicately, he picked out with his forceps some minute object from between two of the upper front teeth and held it in the focus of the lens. Anticipating his next move, I took a labelled microscope-slide from the case and handed it to him together with a dissecting needle, and, as he transferred the object to the slide and spread it out with the needle, I set up the little microscope on the shelf.

"A drop of Farrant and a cover-glass, please, Jervis," said Thorndyke.

I handed him the bottle, and, when he had let a drop of the mounting fluid fall gently on the object and put on the cover-slip, he placed the slide on the stage of the microscope and examined it attentively.

Roundup of Today's Authentic Roadrunner Sightings

 

From Norwood (1966) by Charles Portis:

"…I like the Road Runner."

"Yeah, I do too."

"I could watch that scutter for an hour."

"I believe I could too."

The bread man began to rumble with quiet laughter. "That coyote or whatever he is, a wolf or something, every time he gets up on a cliff or somewhere with a new plan, why the Road Runner comes along on some skates or has him some new invention like a rocket or a big wrecker's ball and just busts that coyote a good one." He laughed some more, then fell into repose. In a minute or two his face clouded with dark memory. "Noveltoons are not any good at all," he said. "It's usually a shoemaker and a bunch of damn mice singing. When one of them comes on I get up and go get me a sack of corn or something."

On Wisconsin

 

 

This Year's Model

I ♥ U

"Atum" of the Patriarch, heh heh.

Atum (Ra manifested at sunset)
by way of Wikipedia. 

Hosni Mubarek, deprecated as ruler of Egypt, has transferred himself to Sharm el Sheik, which is a lot like not being in Egypt, for most values of Egypt, and probably as far as he might be expected to get away from Egypt for now given the understandable reluctance of other nations to take him in and the countervailing bulk of Egypt's people insisting that he must nevertheless go.

He didn't take his form of government with him, but rather left it in the hands of the military. The state of emergency persists as the sun sets in Sharm el Sheik.

Atum goes off. What will replace him but Ra again in the morning?

Civilization 6000

Currently Cairo deserves attention. Egypt has been expressing civilization in an unbroken sequence of daily events for more than six thousand years. People who've inherited what's resulted from that prodigious expenditure of time and effort are not presently satisfied with their lot. People of Cairo have dragged with them to Midan al-Tahrir [Liberation Square] for the past couple of weeks all the burden of influences those six thousand years of events have bestowed on them thus far, and have demanded, as immediate recompense for the condition in which they now find themselves, that the one in charge of Egypt, Hosni Mubarek, be removed.

There are other demands that may or may not have unconditional support from everyone in Tahrir Square. Oh, sure, cancelling the State of Emergency declared by Mubarek shortly after Sadat's assassination and under which he's ruled as he sees fit for the past thirty years. That. Probably only the revanchist few in the crowd who think that a permanent state of emergency is as likely an organizing principle of civilization as any other, would argue that, yes, Mubarek must go, but the state of emergency should continue with somebody else in charge of it. It's really not that kind of crowd. Not that such calculation is absent outside Tahrir [COUGH USA COUGH].

Mubarak, at any rate, is scheduled to ease himself out in less than half an hour. Yet another in that yet unbroken line of momentous Egyptian events to add to the thus-far continuous lot of them.

UPDATE: Mubarak draws the line at relinquishing power, admits that the state of emergency just might be eased eventually at some unspecified future date given suitable conditions down the road. Ahem.

Happy Birthday Jimmy

Every year on this date James Joyce's birthday pops up to remind us that there will be at least six more weeks of Logos.

Drawing by Augustus John

Charlie Louvin, 1927-2011

Concealed Carry

 
How's that working for you, AZ?
 

One One One-One

 
Happy New Year anyhow.