next

One must come upon a chance, a wonderful chance, first as one who would catch a bird, unawares, but then, as Jacob who would wrest a blessing.

workplace

You play chieftan, and I'll be your priest.

zeppelin

A strong argument for maintaining a degree of ritual in society is that doing so acclimates - and in some measure desensitizes - people to ritual force. A society without ritual leaves people with a compelling yearning that becomes the more powerful, if suddenly engaged, for being unfamiliar. But of course a ritualized society also reinforces the power of ritual. There's a happy minimum of background ritual to be maintained.

lawyer

One way I am more persuasive is by picking up the personae strewn about in each institution. That I am, in saying and urging something, also being something. One reason lawyers occupy such a rich set of jokes is that it is so entirely and wonderfully a role.

beadle

Exception spotting is a weak and faulty form of policy reasoning, made strong by it intuitiveness.

words

Beautiful electronic words: transistor, diode, capacitor, fuse, resistor, rheostat, solenoid, transformer.

hire

Why Wikipedia works: that's a worthwhile subject of thought.

orlando

Evil, as the cliche suggests, really is usually banal. And even when it is not, it tends towards banality. Which is not to equate the two. Most banality is neither of nor from evil. But banality that is not from evil does have this danger: that it diminishes the difference of evil from good.

punctuation

I am drawn to the dash because I hear what I read and hear what I write.

All punctuation is, fundamentally, acoustic, not just at the moment of placement, but as a capitulation of the swell or ebb that preceded. But the dash is the most purely oral, most purely paratactic, of all standard contemporary punctuation -- the least syntactic, the least logic-plated: the least like a colon. (But lordy: I do like my colons!)

There used to be a rival to the dash for pure acoustic indication: that peculiarly poetic comma that grew from the King James translation's focus on church scripture readings. The comma of playwrights and politicians and preachers.

next

We are wired to react. Do you want to get something out of someone? Give them the occasion and path to react.

serve

We are all, to varying degrees, fitted out for devotion. And figuring out what to do about this is one of the personal projects that we each, with more or less awareness, must muddle through.

practice

I'm at an Orlando hotel split about evenly between tourists and convention goers (I'm a convention goer).

Stepping out of my room a moment ago, I saw a bit of good parenting.

An affluent father with a dear little 5-year-old in tow approaches the housekeeper wheeling her cart down the hall.

Father: "Excuse me, ma'am, did you clean the rooms down this hall?"

Housekeeper: "Yes."

Father to daughter: "Okay, Sheila, go ahead and ask her."

The girl hesitates, but then says, "Excuse me, ma'am, but I put a Disney bag in the trashcan in our room." (She's been practicing.)

The girl bites her lip, her father takes her little hand, and he finishes the thought: "If it's not to much trouble, could you look for it?"

The housekeeper reaches into her bin and finds it after a few seconds' rummaging. She hands it to the child.

The little girl catches her breath, takes the little plastic bag, and after a moment hugs the housekeeper's leg and cries out: "Oh, thank you, thank you."

And I slip past.

He's a good dad. His "Excuse me, ma'am" was a simple bit of modeling, and effective. He had had already led his daughter into taking responsibility. A good showing all around, with a sweet and easy happy ending, too.

chords

What in us is so easily moved by the rescue of distant miners? This correspondence of emotion is beautiful, but a sign of so much that is dangerous and weak in us, too.

bone carving

Strange to realize that cultures sometimes regress technologically. That seafarers, on reaching an island, may become a tribe, bound to the land. Or that the ability to make the tools that are buried with ancestors may become lost to those who follow.

Neither is common: both are possible. Even in the absense of calamity, technological advance does not always ratchet forward.

work aright

It is in some ways mere word play, but a profession is a sort of faith, an orientation to preserve in a swarm of small acts that all, like iron filings, must point to the poles. This is what makes a true lawyer or doctor unlike a non-professional who does the same work. A doctor or lawyer is freely and truly bound.

porphyry

War, even a good war, is mostly coarsening for the soldier and the populace. War, even a bad war, is mostly ennobling for the commanders and political leaders. And this is the great threat to a war-fighting democracy, as a democracy. Starting with its Revolution, America has become less democratic by each successive war. Fortunately, counteracting developments (expanding enfranchisement and popular education, diversity and wealth, mostly) have greatly mitigated (but also complicated) the end result.

America will find its Napoleon if it fights many more significant wars in close succession.

-----:---:--:-.

It is just as well there is a convention against multiple colons in a sentence. In most workaday writing, however good, the colon is just a splice, although a pregnant one.

But in creative writing, a really strong writer with a delicate hand can create a galloping sentence that joins clause after clause with propulsive colons. This can be thrillingly effective. Wilde has a few of these in De Profundis and they have the effect of the best cinematic montages that compress a development of years of into a minute of breath-snatching sequence:

It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man from either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from you into the hands of loathsome companions: from him to a gang of blackmailers: copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager of a theater where my work is being performed: every construction but the right one is put upon it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumors that I have had to pay a huge sum of money for having written an infamous letter to you: this forms the basis of your father's worst attack: I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is: it is denounced by your father's counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge. The Crown takes it up: the Judge sums it up with a little learning and much morality: I go to prison for it at last.

more inertia

One objection is that the mind may fly from place to place in an instant - that thought is unbounded by inertia, indeed physicality. But to think of Rome, and then Beijing (or both at once), is not to travel in place or (usually) even in thought.

inertia

The preservation of momentum is consistently observable not only in obviously physical phenomena, but in mental, social and otherwise abstract human phenomena as well. So much so that to say so is barely even an insight. But what if this omnipresence of inertia is the signature of the covert physicality of all abstractions?

now what

Some people want to eat not because they are hungry, or for the taste of it, or the social aspects, but simply because they are bored. Some people want conflict because they are bored. Some think from boredom. Some work from boredom. Some save lives from boredom.

S

An earthworm dies on driveway concrete and leaves a mark - an iron stain that will not go.

mosaic

A moderate must have programs and a narrative, or else lose all advantage to the flanks.

tent

Truth, like oxygen, must be mixed or regulated.

aie

It's an beautiful, unnerving thought: that black holes glow with the widowed halves of nascent particle-antiparticle pairs, one half born(e) into the fateful horizon. That they dimly ululate with particular mourning.

Sally's Beauty Supply

Makers of electric hair clippers provide a particularly clear - almost pristine - exhibit of how to handle and mishandle race in a commercial context. Clippers may be generalist models that will cut any kind of hair reasonably well, or specialist models that will cut some kinds of hair especially well. So for the specialized models, there is the question of how to convey that this model is great for this hair type. And one way to do that is to associate the hair-type with a race for which the type is common. I say all this because I went to a beauty supply store to buy a pair (pair? Oh language, how I love thee) of hair clippers. And the shelves gave these examples:

• Total code: it turns out the "Five Star" line of Wahl clippers is the brand for thick, dense hair and thick beards prone to ingrown hairs. This isn't a bad approach since it doesn't imply that the line is solely for one hair type or one race. But it takes a while to catch on to. (And the other Wahl lines have completely different names - there isn't a Six Star or Four Star line, etc.)
• Total race: Oster has both an "Afro-American" line and an "ethnic" line. This approach is offensive in part because it is simply inaccurate. It's skittish and inaccurate enough that "black" would have been better by a tad. But only a tad: the trouble here is that hair type is being conflated with (rather than simply associated with) race. The only virtue of this approach is that it suggests what the better alternative would be.
• Total substance: Andis gives their clippers names, but prominent on the packages are what the clippers do: "Balding trimmer for thick, curly beards"; "All-day use clipper for any human hair"; "cut-down t-clipper for barber or veterinary use". This is clear, and it is focused on function: what do clippers deal with - various manipulations of hair of various types.

Good job, Andis. Second place to Wahl, since the total code approach does suggest that the specialized buyer (barbers, mostly) may know how a tool may be adapted to uses not anticipated by its maker. And Oster simply fails.

All in all, a really fine example of how especially accuracy, sometimes avoidance, but not obscurity, are the havens in which true respect of others is found.

youth; branding

The Starbucks near my office opens at 5:30, and when I don't carry my coffee from home, I stop in. It's really shelving and prep time - not many customers - and the kids who work there are punchy, and don't stop horsing around just because an early customer happens by.

This morning, much laughter - one kid is stocking the pastry case, and another is aiming coffee beans at her head. One at a time, about ten feet away, nice high arcs and pretty good aim. The third kid is impressed. Laughter all around.

Mock anger: "You're throwing beans at me!"
Sly answer: "No I'm not!"
Mock fury: "You are throwing beans at me!"
Arch reply: "It's Starbucks."

Happiness all around.