A Sophist And His Monologue

Nicked with stealthy little Internet ninja powers from dukesnorre's general vicinity.

( Question meme thingy. )

Thomas Jefferson's advice to young Peter Carr in 1787 is to read the Bible as he would "Livy or Tacitus":

Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement. If that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus is also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside prejudice on both sides, and neither believe or reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but the uprightness of your decision.

Now that's just adorable. The man is quite quotable, provided he can shut up about vineyards for a moment.

Happy Fourth of July to all our American friends out there in the big wide world. If, by chance, you could find it in your hearts to somehow barbecue Martha Stewart this year, that would be lovely.

Oh, and let's be careful out there:

So apparently the Beer Hunter has-- no, wait, that was back in 2007. Everyone carry on.

Speaking of trolling, I should mention historians also know how to play. This longish bit of copyright infringement is George Peabody Gooch describing the one and only Hippolyte Taine's treatment of the Emperor, and the response he got from the family after the biography was published. (Gooch may not do perfect justice to the respective cases, but he does eminent justice to the magnificent lollerskates the protagonists wear.)

( They all go on with this for decades, I kid you not. )

I'm obliged to inform you that the trees have gone insane and are having sex with everything.

This ain't a professional opinion or anything, y'know, but did you ever notice that once Martin Luther gets old, sick, and paranoid, he sort of graduates from "frequently disturbingly trolly" to "The incarnate 4chan of 16th century Europe?"

Now would seem an appropriate time to set up a political dead pool for the Rt. Hon. Dr. Gordon Brown. Will he go? Will he stay? Will be both stay and go in an improbable twist of British political proceedings? The drama thickens, the wheel of fortune rolls! Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets, and make them large.

Edit: And the first round of betting goes to Dr Brown. The Historian is not yet History. We'll be waiting for round two. Stay tuned to Mystery Politics Theatre 3000UK.

Voting time. Heading off to the circus soon. I'll be throwing my copper penny of a ballot at whichever random dancing monkey twitches and convulses in the most amusing manner.

Like most languages enamored with prepositions, English is entirely dedicated to the art of concealing where things actually are. A casual tourist will discover that doing things around the house does not involve rakes, restaurant cars supposedly situated on trains don't require grappling hooks to access, fighting over something doesn't mean you have to be able to fly, and so on. Often it takes ages for a reasonable person to figure out that the words "to" and "from" only have the most tenuous and metaphorical relationship with the physical world.

But the real affront is what's called preposition stranding, which, much like all known Polish, is to language roughly what Cthulhu is to geometry. What you do is that you take these tiny little words you can never get straight, sever them from their beloved nouns with a hacksaw, and then sort of casually throw them around the sentence in order to cleverly mislead your enemies.

Using the dread Necronomicon, I intend to raise the hungry spirit of Japanese Horror Movie Bishop Robert Lowth. He will then proceed to haunt the English-speaking world, wailing and moaning most piteously in Latin, until such time as everyone agrees to fix this. This is the sort of chicanery up with which we shall not put.

Now, if you've read this bit of news and/or rumour, you'll note it lists "domestic help" among the candidates for a new, more chipper existence. Yes. Domestic help. Now think about it. This raises a variety of questions. The first and foremost is, will there be a separate consumer interface for the Global Poisoning Satelite, or will the Kill The Pool Boy option be programmed to an integrated home remote?

I mean, it'd be awkward, particularly since your average flat will be pretty computerised in a few years. What does this button do? Click. That's the kitchen sub-menu. What does this button do? Click. That controls the air conditioning. Oh, and what's this button? Click. Well, shit, it turns out that activates the giant orbital death satelite and offs Ivan. Sorry, Ivan, I thought that was the ceiling fan. Guess those Piña Coladas ain't forthcoming, ha ha, eh, Ivan?

See the problem? I mean, you need product design for these things. You don't want to be in a situation where you want to turn on the home entertainment system, but instead end up with a gardener spasming on the porch and foaming at the mouth. That sort of thing upsets people. If the Saudis ever start marketting this thing, there'll be so many customers carrying a chip on their shoulder, let me tell you.

I was digging up stuff on how South African English accents sound, and I ran across this again. Lots of fun, and a surprisingly valuable writing aid, although they still list a few more languages than they actually have samples of. (Including, for whatever bizarre reason, Esperanto.)

Once the kitten apocalypse comes and I become wealthy beyond compare by looting and robbing my fellow men, I'll become one of these to escape my obligations under the draft. I was going to lie and cheat until the British gave me a token citizenship, and then flee to some unnamed loser country with my books in tow, but this is so much better. Is there a manual?

I grant this sort of thing makes it a little difficult to settle down in a nice castle somewhere and build monsters out of body parts, but you have to admit, it's an infinitely charming idea.

I just have to get a physical copy of the Arthaśāstra one of these days. But my problem is, which version to pick? I've got absolutely no idea!

A UAE newspaper on the new Star Trek film (link may contain minor spoilers). Emphasis mine:

We then cut forward a few years to Iowa and see [various things that you see in the trailer]. It’s exhilarating stuff and immediately lets us know that this is Star Trek with its phasers set to stun.

So yeah.

I stumbled on this:

Upon the return of a ship, city leaders would be invited to celebrate aboard, with plentiful food and imported drinks available to everyone including the ordinary sailors. When the barque Jeny, which had departed Oulu in the July of 1869, returned there in September 1871, a feast of pea soup and French wine was served; on this occasion one Nikke Ringvall is known to have consumed twelve whole bowls of pea soup, which at the time was considered an achievement.

Uhh. Okay. That was important? Peasoup Guy was important enough someone wrote it all down and preserved him for the ages?

It's charming, really. Now, you can go out on a Friday night, get ripped, and the next morning you can wake up naked and battered on the floor, with a little marching band of blue goblins emigrating out of your mouth. But then you forget, they'll forget, even the people you called at four a.m. will forget. But if you create a record of what's happened, you have something to fall back on. It may not be particularly reliable, of course, but you'll have a point of reference. And hundreds of years from now, it'll still be known the town exported a single barrel of lingonberries to Stockholm in 1755, that guy will still be Peasoup Guy, and you'll still be the person who danced Macarena on top of the car wearing a bra on your head.

Internet users beware.

Bored? Stressed? Missing the single great Soviet contribution to office productivity? Saunter over to the Infinite Cat Project and stack some cats.