Frigidum!

Two days ago, I learned that I will teach Latin this fall. I read Latin easily enough, but they want me to teach Latin in Latin to students who respond in Latin: I have to speak, write, think Latin! My wife and I have undertaken an immersion process together, and I have begun leaving Latin comments on my friend's Latin blog.

So I was happy to find this.

A change of rules and one clarification

"Find the figure" has been fun, but I need to change the pattern somewhat. To give myself more scope for rapid posting and more time to practice each figure, I am going to start posting several times using the same figure. Once I set out the definition and mnemonic image for the figure I have been using, the subsequent posts will start the next figure.

I think multiple posts will also help readers (oh, that hopeful plural!) spot the figure, but brings up a needed clarification.

When I originally proposed the game, my idea was that readers would look for the line that stood out, that seemed most fresh, most zingy. If that line turned out to be the figure of the day, they win for finding it and I win for successfully pulling off the figure. In other words, you don't have to name the figure: you can just say, "This line seems like it."

OK, now to get some actual posts up!

This figure is so poignant, it just--

The figure for the last post was Aposiopesis, breaking off as though unable or unwilling to continue:

When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

For the mnemonic image, picture yourself holding a giant sledge hammer dashing the end of a large-print sentence to smithereens. Directly in front of you, a giant apple with a face stares at the flying pieces in astonishment. The verb "dashing" reminds you that this figure often uses a dash at the end, but the key phrase is: "Apple see yo' pieces."

I'm trying to give up coffee, OK? It's the best I can do.

Living in the dump

My friend JB and I got to talking about environmentalism the other day. He knows a lot of the Green people are nuts, although of course he doesn't know about Ray Moose and the prehistory of the sixties, so he is generally down on "save the Earth" movements. He doesn't like the fact that the Vatican went carbon-neutral, for example, even though he sees nothing wrong with being carbon neutral. In his view, it symbolically aligns the Catholic Church with an anti-Catholic crowd.

Now he has a point. In fact, JB may have caught onto one of Moose's schemes: just like the Nazi's needed an emergency to get folks to hand power over to Hitler, so today global warming is the Big Crisis demanding that something be done so fast and so effectively that we need to hand over all our power to the government. Sound crazy?

Yeah. Crazy like a Moose.

But then JB brought up an argument against recycling. Of all the resources in the world, he said, surely we have a lot of sand and a lot of trees. So why are we recycling glass and paper? The recycling process loses money, as you can see from the fact that no private agencies undertake to do it: it's always government run. And we are nowhere close to running out of room for dumps and landfills. We recycle, he argued, to make ourselves feel better.

Now let me focus the conversation. I don't know whether his premises are all true: Does glass actually degrade when buried? Do we have that many trees? He could not verify the premises either; he just read the argument somewhere and liked it. At the moment, I am not worried about whether the premises are true, but about whether the argument follows.

JB is an economist, and he has acquired what I call a quantitative mind. He tends to focus on amounts, credits and deficits, formulas, limits, mechanical possibilities. Mathematical thinking has become not just second nature for him but a way of seeing the world. But I have what I would call a qualitative mind, so I tend to focus on form, nature, beauty, goodness or badness. This makes communication difficult.

At the time, I didn't say much of anything. But my reaction to his argument was that I would be willing to pay more for glass and paper to prevent another landfill from happening. The landfill itself is inherently displeasing to me. You start with a prairie or a wood, then you plow down the trees and grass, then you dig up not just the topsoil but all the layers below, then you fill it with trash, refuse, broken bottles, disposable diapers, plastic bags. When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

The thought depresses me. This is not an argument, I know, but could it be a perception of something true? A sure sign of a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood of crime and desperation, is trash in the yards. A sure sign of depression is when a person stops cleaning his house and just lets it go. There is something inherently disordered about just trashing because it's easier and cheaper.

I think that is why the Vatican went green, and why Popes have spoken in favor of environmental stewardship. It's not because pollution is causing an immediate crisis; maybe it is, but that is not the ultimate point. It's not because the Vatican wants to curry the favor of the left; maybe the left likes what the Vatican says about environmentalism, but that is not even the proximate point. The point is that healthy human beings clean up after themselves. When we are right with God and right the world, we atone for sin and pick up trash.

We can ignore Ray Moose. This is not his issue.

I can't tell you how bad I have been....

I am afraid I owe my honest readership an apology. Oh, what a bad boy I have been! For two days I puzzled over how to use Aporia, which is talking about not being able to talk about something. Then suddenly I realized that my problem was its own answer.

Now it puzzles me that an online source defines Aporia otherwise. More thought needed on that one.

Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simple enough. An enormous limestone letter A, riddled with pores, stands erect as a man tries unsuccessfully to scale it. Part of his problem is that a huge pitcher is pouring water over the top. So the figure that expresses your unsuccessful effort to express your thought is the porous A, or "A porous", or the "A pouring"--any of these should bring Aporia to mind.

It came to me like a flash under a bushel

After some days of no blogging impulse, an idea came to me suddenly in the shower. It is a splendid idea, creative and subtle, the kind of idea a blogger blogs for.

But it is too good.

It is so good that I can't even begin to describe it, much less to type it. The idea is so perfect and radiant that I find myself unable even to hum about it.

I wish I could express my disappointment at my inability to blog down this inspiration. I can't apologize enough.

But I'll take your guesses in the combox....

A Figure of Splendor

As the semester winds down (or up--take your pick), the blog suffers. But I do want to point out quickly that the featured figure in my last post was Antiptosis, the substitution of a prepositional phrase for an adjective. For example, I wrote "presence of massiveness" instead of "massive presence", and "admiring words of sincerity" instead of "sincere words of admiration", and "America of the mainstream" instead of "mainstream America".

The example of this figure that always sticks in my mind is "tower of strength" for "strong tower." So picture your sister standing on tip toe and holding a rather formidable looking tower in her hands. "On tip toe sis" will forever bring this figure to mind.

If you don't have a sister, you could imagine a nun or perhaps the sister of a friend.

OK, I'm in a hurry of greatness here--more later.

"Awesome speech...."

It has been funny to watch the media of secularity deal with Benedict XVI's presence of massiveness. Garrison Keeler spoofed the Pope, a blogger posted goofy inanities under the Pope's name, and the headlines proclaimed "Us readies rock star welcome for Benedict XVI." In a culture where news is entertainment and entertainment is the biggest news, no one knows what to do with the man whose message is the gravity of truth.

But it could have been worse. Had this visit been delayed, the president greeting (or refusing to greet) the Pope could have been Obama or Clinton. Bush's unprecedented move to greet Benedict at the airport and his admiring words of sincerity were the highlight of when America of the mainstream encountered the vicar of Christ. "Awesome speech", the President said in his American way, and I think he meant it.

The thought of Hilary Clinton camera smiling toward the pope reminds me of the time Bill Clinton did meet John Paul II at the stadium in St. Louis. Bill was good enough to bring the great Msgr. George Tribou to meet John Paul II personally. (Tribou was principal at the high school I attended.) When the moment came, Bill motioned Msgr. Tribou forward and said, "Your holiness, this is Msgr. Tribou--he never votes for me."

Whatever else you might say about Bill Clinton, he knew how to compliment a priest in front of the Pope.

A hand where the head should be

The line that I hoped would stand out in the last post was this:

He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over.

It is an example of Anthimeria, the use of one part of speech in place of another. In this case, "did" is a verb used in place of a noun, while "noised" is a noun used as a verb. It was hard to find a striking instance of this because, as I soon realized, we do this all the time in English. A persevering worker "soldiers on", we "text" our friends on the cell phone, and we bed down in our beds, are housed in our houses, and on and on and on.

Once again, the line between figure and plain English is hard to find. It's a "figure" when it's "unusual", but usual English is highly figured....

But the mnemonic image is simple. Picture a woman named Maria, but picture with one body part where another should be--a hand switched with the head, for example. (If you don't know anyone named Maria, attend the nearest Catholic Mass and you'll meet two or three.) If the Maria in question happens to be your father's sister or mother's sister, you're in luck: "Auntie Maria". If not, then picture her covered with ants and you have "Anty Maria".

Plant your bombs to bomb the plants

Nature lover that I am, I receive no less than two nature magazines. These excellent and thought-provoking journals, My Big Backyard and Ranger Rick, not only provide my children with endless fodder for paper snippings but also introduce them to such backyard friends as the humpback whale and the harp seal.

Today's mail brought letters from both magazines urging us to renew. Most pointedly, they argued,

"Renewing promptly saves you further notices and conserves paper."

The threat that, should I fail to renew, I will be harassed by further notices and thereby guilty of killing trees gains its full irony when you consider that they would have me subscribe to a paper magazine. Seems to me I saw a moose on one of those magazines recently.

But the incident reminded me that I have intended to mention a bizarre spin-off of Ray Moose's early radical years, ecoterrorism: terrorism to save the environment. There is even a non-organization to support this movement, the Earth Liberation Front, whose thesis is that we must fight to free planet earth from her human invaders. While they have no power structure or leader, they provide a cover name for Moose-alikes:

Any individuals who committed arson or any other illegal acts under the ELF name are individuals who choose to do so under the banner of ELF and do so only driven by their personal conscience.

(If you choose to visit their site, I should warn you that they also peddle viagra. Get the connection? I don't, either.)

Long ago, when Ray Moose first saw that the sober notion that we do not live in a trash bin could be transmogrified into the engine of a rock'n'roll, drug-promoting, counter-culture hippy movement, he tried the rebel alliance look. He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over. It didn't take, and neither did his slogan, "ELF-help", so now he plays the other side by enforcing environmentalism through Big Brother government.

Thus Ray forged the last link in a chain well described by a priest here at the university: we have gone from "Yes to Christ and no to Church" to "Yes to man and no to God" to "Yes to the whales and trees and no to man."

A post as dead as a post

That last post was a puzzler, and I apologize. For some reason I felt compelled to blog on the distinction between substance and accident, even though it hasn't appeared in the news for quite some time. And I have a feeling that I will have more than one occasion to reference the "cat first" principle.

The figure was an obscure one: Antanaclasis, the repetition of a word in the same grammatical form but with a different meaning.

The title of this post is a good example. Jesus' saying, "Let the dead bury their dead", is a good example. Ben Franklin used Antanaclasis well when he said, "Your argument is sound...all sound." But my attempt at Antanaclasis in the last post may not have been all that good:

On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance.
...
On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

I'll have to make another go at it later, on the side. Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simply a line of identical ants marching over a closet door: "Ant-on-a-closet." This does not quite distinguish Antanaclasis from Polyptoton, but as a figure of a figure it comes close enough.

The Atoms or the Moose

It would take a great mind many years to untangle the tangle Ray Moose has unleashed. Mine is not a great mind and I do not have many years, so I'll keep to simpler points. I don't know where the root is, but maybe I can expose a main branch of Ray's system.

Consider my cat as an example. If I glance up and see him, without reflection I think: “A cat!” He seems to be one animal with various parts, including legs, tail, and teeth, that serve his purposes.

But if I look at him more analytically, and especially if I recall my high school biology courses, I recall that he is composed of many systems: muscular system, skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system, and so on and so forth. These systems themselves are composed of a multitude of cells, and the cells in turn are composed of some unimaginable number of atoms, which in turn are composed of something smaller whose name I forget, which in turn is composed of something even smaller whose name maybe nobody knows—but let’s just stop at the level of atoms. My cat is composed of some unimaginable and incomprehensible number of atoms.

The key question is: Which comes first, the atoms or the cat?

In high school, we were taught to think that the atoms come first. On this model, a cat is like a car, a complex system of parts that work so well together as to achieve an appearance of unity. What really exists are nuts and bolts and belts and so on; “car” names the cumulative effect of these parts in relation to each other. Similarly, what really exists are atoms; “cat” names the cumulative effect of the atoms. The atoms are first, and cause the cat. On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance. This is the first and original atom bomb: the one that blew up my cat.

But suppose we turn it around, and say that the cat comes first and the atoms second. On this model, what really exists is one thing, namely a cat, and the atoms are effects arising from that one thing. In this case, the atoms are the sensible radiation or working out of one thing, like the visible glow that testifies to an electric charge in the air. However comprehensible as mechanisms, the various systems in the cat are nothing other than the cat itself working itself out in the mechanical arena. On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

How can we decide which is true? A change in theory would make no difference in the arrangement of atoms, so we can’t leave it to scientific studies or super-duper microscopes or any other version of seeing, touching, feeling, hearing, or smelling. Ray Moose relentlessly (and unknowingly) advocates that the atoms are first. But how can we decide?

Of all the animals in the world, we have an “insider perspective” on one only: ourselves. Hold up your hands; clap them together. Look with your eyes, and realize that you are looking with two eyes rather than one. You experience yourself as one thing, no matter how many parts you may have; if anyone pokes your hand or your eye, you will say, “You poked me!”

It may seem unscientific or even mystical, but it’s an immediate experience that trumps any later argument: I am first, and my atoms are second.

Does this seem arcane? This one question—which is first, the atoms or the cat?—decides whether moral evil exists, whether we live in our houses, whether we know anything at all. The Moose has no idea.

Resting on his laurels....

My apologies for that very long post last time. So long was it that finding "the" figure would have been practically impossible.

But for the sake of the record, the figure I meant to practice was anastrophe, reversal of the ordinary sequence of parts. For example, the sentence "Slowly moved my fingers over the keys" puts the verb before the subject, and the closing line about man the "dweller universal" puts the noun before its adjective.

For some reason this figure is just not natural to me. I need to practice it more. My wife read over the previous post once and spotted the new figure instantly because she has read my prose for more than ten years now and has never seen it before!

Fortunately, a mnemonic image is easy: picture an Olympic champion standing on top of a giant trophy, and think, "On his trophy." Not only does it sound like "anastrophe", but the reversal of order between the champion and the trophy reminds one of the meaning of the name. And, as the title of this post suggests, the picture is a familiar one.

The content of the post raised more questions than it answered, but in the end it was directed against Le Corbusier, of whom I know little more than that he was either an employee or indeed a pseudonym of Ray Moose. Under this name, or through this man, the Moose pursued modern art (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Sir Cube Lore") as a basis for bizarre furniture (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Rebel Curios"), and in general deceived mankind (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Lie Obscurer") into swallowing an architecture not created for mankind but for the glory of Le Corbusier (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Be our relics").

I was reminded of all this recently when I ran across a website proclaiming "Easy Room Makeovers". I spotted right away that "Easy Room" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Ray Moose"--and who wants a "Ray Moose Makeover"?

Living in our houses

Last weekend I visited a friend who owns a Steinway baby grand. He told me about the history of the Steinway brand, the unlikely success of its orphaned and impoverished founder, and how the Steinway is manufactured--literally, made by hand--today, but I could hardly pay attention. Slowly moved my fingers over the keys, and aching in my arms and back stirred old, old muscle memories: how I would lean into the instrument and in it sing, my voices weaving in and out of each other, finding in an old familiar rag the intensity. Some said I had a gift for it.

Then we moved away to graduate school and there was no piano around, and everyone studied late and woke early, and years went by and I did not play and did not play. I remember when I came home for vacation, sat at my parents' upright piano to play the old favorites, and discovered that they were gone. The muscles tensed but nothing moved, like the stump where arm used to be. The piano was for me a limb lost.

As my friend finished his story about Steinway, my ears perked up at his closing remark: "It's quite an amazing machine." A Steinway baby grand piano, a machine?

Leaving aside necessary distinctions between tool and machine, I was arrested at the thought that I had brought a mechanism into myself and made it of my own body an extension; I did not manipulate the keys so that the piano sang, but I sang in the piano. How queer that I could live, so to speak, in an assembly of wood and metal.

All the way home from that visit, I was keenly aware of how I drive my car. As I guided it in between the proper lines and around cars and corners, I realized that the car becomes an extension of my personal space. When someone crowds too close to the car, I feel it as crowding too close to me; similarly, I feel how close I am to the center line much as I would feel how close I am to the wall as I walk in a hallway. I not only control the car as it moves, but in the car I move.

Then I became aware that, as I drive, I look several hundred feet ahead and project myself, so to speak, into that space, imagining what I will do there, driving each segment in my imagination before I drive it on the road. I looked around at the fields on either side of the highway, at the road ahead and behind, and thought to myself:

I live in the space around me.

Let me try to say that more clearly. When I see the road ahead, I do not change or touch the road; the road has nothing real in it by which it is related to me. But because I see the road, I am changed and touched by the road; there is something real in me by which I am related to the road, and by knowledge I am present to the road. This happens because I sense and know the road. A rock does not dwell in the space around it as I do: if I were a machine, and if my eyes were video cameras, then I would be no different from the rock; but because I am an animal, and my eyes organs of sensation, I am a true inhabitant of all the area around me. As Saint Augustine says, Anima ubi videt, ibi sentit; et ubi sentit, ibi vivit; et ubi vivit, ibi est: "Where the soul sees, there it senses; where it senses, there it lives; and where it lives, there it is."

The Vitruvian Duck recently commented, in typically penetrating fashion, that a house relates to its owners as the body relates to the soul. On that drive home from my friend's house, it finally came home to me what that means: we really do live in our houses, and not just within the volume of our bodies. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that "Something is said to be by 'presence' in all the things that fall under its gaze, as all the things in a house are said to be 'present' to someone, who nonetheless does not exist by his substance in every part of the house" (ST 1.8.3 corp).

The vast size of the cosmos is often trotted out as evidence that man is insignificant. "See how small a territory is ours, one of the smaller planets circling one of the smaller stars in one of the smaller galaxies! So much for man as the center of the universe."

But this misses the point exactly: Because we are men and not machines, animals and not rocks, we truly live in the cosmos. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that, in a manner of speaking, when the soul sees the heavens, it lives and exists in the heavens (ST 1.8.4, ad 6). Man is the dweller universal.

Blog slog

Sorry to be so quiet recently, but I have been a bit under the weather. With any luck, the blog will be up and running again over the weekend.

Also, I have been slow to post because I just can't think of a good mnemonic image for the last figure of speech: Anapodoton, pronounced "anna-poh-DOH-ton", the omission of an element gramatically (but not always logically) implied by the sentence.

I only wrote two lines in my last post: "I don't" and "Do you?" Both were attempts at anapodoton, but once again the Vitriuvian Duck has been more attentive than I: he caught that the lines I imported from a news story were themselves shot through with figuration. I see more clearly now than ever that figures of speech cannot be tidily separated out from regular speech as though the figures constitute "poetry" and regular speech "prose". All speech is shaped, and to the extent that it is shaped well it takes on one of the recognized "figures."

So now I want to post about other things, but I may have to pass for the moment on a mnemonic picture. ("On a pod dot on"? What the heck would a "doton" be?)

Infinite Regress

Today's nugget from Moose News:

"The groom and cousin were arrested for allegedly resisting arrest."

Let's run that again:

"The groom and cousin were arrested for allegedly resisting arrest."

Do you?

I don't.

Meet my friend. Meet Anna Fora.

As the Vitruvian Duck caught, last post's figure of speech was the Anaphora: beginning a series of sentences or clauses with the same words. Once again, while I tried to use the figure more than once, it seemed to take over of its own accord and shape one paragraph through and through:

A home is first of all for human life. A home is a practical place of everyday living and an emotional place of comfort. A home is eventually the repository of a human history, a sacrament of memory. A home deserves sweat and late nights for its design.

A home is not about the architect--not unless the architect is designing his own home.

But the Duck pointed out something further in his comment:

That second paragraph: "A home is not about..." is an anaphora to the first paragraph (when viewed as a part of a greater whole). But as viewed as whole unto itself, it's not...It was the fact that 'home' was used at the beginning AND the end of the clause that was bugging me.

This is a good example of how an author writes and does not write. I was certainly trying to shape my prose, and I certainly felt that I had achieved a nice effect, but until the Duck pointed it out I had not even noticed that I began and ended that last line with the same word, or how the second paragraph acts as an anaphora to the first. Those effects are there and are certainly "intended" in some sense, but in what sense? I make my living by interpreting ancient texts, and so the Duck's point fascinates me: I cannot honestly say that beginning and ending that sentence with the same word was actually "on my mind," but I have to accept his observation as an accurate interpretation of how I achieved the effect. The author's "intention"--what the author would say about his own text--may not always be the gold standard.

But I am too tired to unscrew the inscrutable. Tonight anyway.

Anaphora was a fun figure to play with. It was like each sentence was a path that began the same way but might or might not go to the same place; it might actually go in the opposite direction by the end. Mnemonically, I picture in my mind four paths of letters, each beginning with a large letter "A"; each "A" is on a fur rug, and the path stretches back behind it into a dense, mysterious wood. If "four A" does not phonetically cue me, "On a fur A" should recall the needed term.

The Houseownerbot

Yesterday my real estate agent sent me a floor plan of the house I am buying long distance. It is nearly double the size of what I rent now, features a big yard that doubles as a ski slope in the winter, and sports a nifty office room set up to look like a log cabin on the inside. All in all, I am excited about it.

But I did notice in the diagram that the bedrooms, which take up the entire southern side of the building, have no windows facing south. The main living area, comprising the upstairs living room, dining room, and kitchen, is split down the middle by the staircase and its protective walls; besides chopping up what could have been a charming family space, it cuts off most of the light from the living room. Why would anyone do that?

The history of architecture is not really my forte, but two possibilities come to mind. First, the designer may have thought it looked neat to have a staircase in the middle of his blue print, and so in his mind it was actually an artistic flair; he was expressing himself as an artist. Second, the designer may have found that, due to constraints of structure and manufacture--for example, that it is a modular home--it took a minimum of thought and effort to put the stairs in the middle. Either way, it is about the architect, whether it be his self-expression or his ease.

The owner of the house is not exactly forgotten, but he has become an abstraction. He is not Joe or Jane or even Man, but something still more abstract: a functionary, a device created to occupy houses, a mere occasion for the architect's endeavor--a houseownerbot, if you will.

I object. A home is first of all for human life. A home is a practical place of everyday living and an emotional place of comfort. A home is eventually the repository of a human history, a sacrament of memory. A home deserves sweat and late nights for its design.

A home is not about the architect--not unless the architect is designing his own home.

The sanest approach to home--and towns and offices, for that matter--is the Pattern Language. Although parts of the book are available online, I just ordered my own copy at last. I just recently discovered the works of Sarah Susanka, inspired by the same ideas, but I haven't had time to read much yet. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said; and the unexamined living space is not worth living in.

So, I wonder how I can turn that staircase into an asset? The Pattern for stairs assumes that the main living area is at the bottom of the stairs, so I have not seen any ideas for how to handle a staircase leading down from a main area.

Find that Figure

Just to remind you all (an exceedingly hopeful way to describe the readership of this blog): your task, should you choose to accept it, is to locate in each day's post the sentence containing that day's figure of speech. After an appropriate delay, I will post the answer along with a definition of the figure and the picture I use to remember it.

When the figure was Accumulatio, the task proved almost impossible because I use that figure all the time anyway. Who was to guess that it was anything unusual in these pages? So last time I made a special effort to use the figure again and again, to make it more conspicuous.

The figure? "Anadiplosis", pronounced "AHN-ah-dip-PLOH-sis": ending one sentence or clause and beginning the next sentence or clause with the same thing.

I used the figure a number of times, but one paragraph in particular was almost wholly shaped by it:

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

This was a hard one to find a picture for, but here goes. I spy in my mind's eye two hills with a valley in between them. There is a house on top of each hill, and two houses side by side in the valley. Each of the houses on the hill tops has an enormous blue ribbon on it, but neither house in the valley has a ribbon. Why does on a hill win? Because "On a dip loses."

Oh, that hurt. Wow. But it's a good hurt.

Notice in this picture that the sequence ribbon-dip is followed by dip-ribbon, so that the end of the first is the same as the beginning of the second. Not tidy, but it's the best I can do!

For clarity, let me note that this post does not contain the figure of today. The "figure of today" post will come this evening. I hope.

Improving my figure

My brain is so tired that grammar is a strain, much less rhetoric. To make matters worse, I spent the entire day away from my computer and the Internet, so I do not know what Ray has been up to out there.

But I have set myself an exercise regiment, so I had to find some way to write a blog entry.

I revved up the computer in the evening and turned on the Internet to find some foolishness. Foolishness is most of what I found, in fact. Why Brad Pitt must be in the headlines every day this year escapes me, but the rest of the "news" was so predictable as to defy its name: Obama is trying win over Clinton supporters (you don't say), while Clinton is portraying herself as better than Obama (the gall!); Jay Leno has said something offensive (so turn off the TV already), and the speaker of the house thinks that we should go ahead and have the presidential primaries (yawn).

The one headline that caught my attention: "Home defibrillators do not increase survival." I was shocked at the mere thought of a defibrillator in my home; my home is a monkey farm, and some of the monkeys who can operate machinery would not know if I were fibrillated or not. But on second thought, this bit was already "olds" before it was "news": essentially, it said, what could have been news did not in fact happen. You might have thought you needed a defibrillator--the thought had never occurred to me--but relax, because you don't.

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

Perhaps the most sensible definition of "news" would be information that might cause me to change my plans for the near or distant future. The rest is titillation.