Musings

Bot Garden conservatory, some years ago.

Although Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) is a slim volume (as the phrase goes), I have not yet finished it. Already, I have encountered some lovely imagery.

I am particularly taken, at this moment, with the phrase “self-dramatizing rhetoric” (p. 58). McEwan uses it to describe the tenor of activist meetings in Britain in the late 1950s, pairing it with “mournful rectitude” to describe the span of interaction modes. Still, I’m taken with the first characterization, and can say that I find distasteful the overwhelming trend toward self-dramatizing rhetoric that pervade many discussions regarding issues surrounding our upcoming presidential election.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Reining in rhetoric

An AIG ad that’s less than two weeks old….

Eee-yah.

I have little confidence in fiscal decision-making at the top of our elected national management team*. If I ran my household finances the way the gov’t has run our national checkbook lately, well, I’m afraid I’d be living under a bridge and eating at a soup kitchen….

* And Barton Gellman’s new book reveals The Angler to be even more terrifying than we had previously thought (shot a friend in the face—we knew that; lied to the Pres and worked against him behind his back—like I say, terrifying…).

Posted at 4:55 PM | Comments Off on AIG: “Put your mind at ease.”

Yeah, this is a regular 4-way corner, but there is a roundabout not far away.

Aha. Traffic circles have stop lights controlling entering traffic. Roundabouts do not.**

I have heard multiple times that both save petrol and are safer; however, I was sure annoyed to discover the fancy ones in the neighborhood above are too narrow for delivery trucks and other long vehicles to negotiate without bumping over the curb and crushing the herbage.

* Word invented for this headline….

** Clarification from Time mag, discussing the trend toward adding roundabouts to our roadways.

Posted at 11:11 AM | 2 Comments »

This is Carol’s picture from several weeks back; The Botanist reports eating perhaps this very melon earlier this week….

You may have heard that the term “maverick” originated with the practice of a Texas rancher named Samuel Maverick, who wouldn’t brand his cattle, saying that it hurt them too much. This meant he exercised dibs on any unbranded cattle in his area. So, now we use maverick for unbranded range cattle, and for someone who’s independent-minded and refuses to conform to group mores.

What you may not have heard is that his grandson, Maury Maverick, originated the term “gobbledygook” to refer to nonsense language or deliberately obscure wording.

I heard about Maury from The Botanist, who heard Maury speak in the late 1930s, when he was a US House member from Texas; I got the etymological detail from, where else, Wikipedia….

Posted at 4:44 PM | Comments Off on Avoiding gobbledygook?

Let’s start with new vocabulary: zanco. That’s Spanish for stilt. Guess why I learned that today? Yes, another Hispanic master craftsman did his magic to help return our house to complete housedom.

I understand that a new kind of sheet-rocker-stilts use technology developed for people with missing feet and legs, those springy, curved appendages. Seems to me they’d be much easier on the knees and hips.

Other vocabulary…that piece of equipment that’s lying on the bucket? It’s a violin in English and banjo in Spanish. It has a spool of tape that runs through a bath of the sheet-rock mud (formally: joint or drywall compound), much like a tape dispenser with a pistol grip. I understand there’s a similar instrument with a longer handle so that the business end is farther away from the workman (for really high ceilings, I assume), and that’s called a bazooka (in both Spanish and English).

If you feel like some serious reading, let me point you toward an article by James Fallows in The Atlantic analyzing the performances* of the candidates in the primary debates.

John McCain is not a good debater, not even by comparison with George W. Bush. Having been in Washington for decades, he knows many issues in detail. Having been in Washington for decades, he often overexplains those details, as Bob Dole did against Bill Clinton in 1996. The exception is the whole field of economics, where through most of the Republican debates, he skated by with allusions to the advisers he would consult.

Worse, he will look and sound old and weak next to Obama. …

McCain also runs the risk of being the first Republican since Dole to go into the debates trailing in the national polls. This would allow Obama to do what George W. Bush did four years ago: nurse a lead and simply try to avoid mistakes. He’s had more practice with debates than McCain, and more recently.

In these circumstances, McCain’s tactics against Obama are obvious. He will ask for as many debates as he can, starting with informal town halls before either he or Obama is officially nominated. The informal setting shows him off to his best advantage, with the affable bantering that has long made him a favorite with the press. Whoever is behind wants more debates.

There’s lots more—fascinating—and on many other candidates. In not too long, we shall see if Fallows got it right.

* Give me points for not making any reference to the potential for stilted delivery here.

Posted at 5:49 PM | Comments Off on Stilt-work

When I was a kid I thought a teasel* was probably a kind of thistle**, because they were both prickly, which is a good defense against wandering herbivores. It turns out that botanically they’re in the same class (Magnoliopsida—more or less), but that’s the closest they’re related.

I snapped this at the Bot Garden the other month, so this is probably a non-native and it may not even be a thistle, although it resembles one (sorry, I neglected to take notes while I was photographing). Love the bumbler….

* Apparently teasels are favored by some weavers for brushing new fabric to raise the nap, and they were cultivated to assure a proper supply. Who knew?

** In Celtic symbolism, thistles and burrs apparently refer to nobility of character and of birth, a lovely thought for what I think of as annoying weeds that typically grow in poor soils.

Posted at 5:07 PM | 1 Comment »

We have to replace a dogwood down by the street (in the verge? right?), but it will be paired with a variant that survived and has maroonish rather than bright green leaves like this one that’s a volunteer from our uphill neighbors’ tree. Actually the stump that remains has sprouts, so maybe I can train one or two of them to become the replacement tree…. Hmm….

There’s a description you do not want to be tagged with.

A friend and I have discussed a continuum between dolt and dork, and I have to confess I’m not sure where I’d put “intellectual tourist” in that sequence.

Ideas?

BTW, I keep hearing extremely fine things about Brunonia Barry’s first novel “The Lace Reader,” which she daringly self-published (and is now being sold by William Morrow). (Here are links to the NYTimes review and, for the adventurous, the first two chapters; Barry’s book-page is a design extravaganza that I refuse to link to because there’s so much pretty before you get to content. Sorry; I’m cranky that way.) I have put a hold on a copy through the county library, so I can check the story out for myself….

* I got this phrase from Brian Leiter, John P. Wilson Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago, in an open letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, reacting to an article by Russell Jacoby entitled “Gone, and Being Forgotten,” which you need a subscription to read. I don’t and I haven’t. Leiter says the Jacoby article begins with:

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.

In short, Jacoby contends that these classics aren’t being taught, and Leiter rebuts this contention thoroughly. And in the process calls Jacoby an intellectual tourist….

I don’t know if the phrase is original to Leiter, or if I’m just so outside the flow of knowledge and information and lingo that I’ve missed it….

Posted at 3:23 PM | 3 Comments »

Electricians here today…. Sorry about the keystoning….

When I encountered the phrase “snipe hunt,” even though I was perhaps only a decade old, I knew what a snipe was, so I was confused when I was told that it referred to a wild goose chase. After all, a snipe is not a goose, and snipes are huntable (preferably with a camera). It doesn’t make any more sense that it could also be described as a fool’s errand.

Now, the DARE* says the Pennslyvania Dutch might send you searching for elbedritsches (scroll down). Hey, say that three times fast!

BTW, there’s a tenuous connection between the theme of the text and the picture; the electricians had a heck of a time figuring out the wiring for one outlet, and in the process checked above the ceiling, in the basement, outside, and in every room. Eventually: problem solved. I guess that’s about the same as at long last catching the snipe….

* Dictionary of Regional English.

Posted at 4:38 PM | Comments Off on Snipe hunting

This stuff covers our floor in strategic places.

We got a quick rain shower right after we ducked into the groc store, so we made a run for the car upon exiting. What fun!

I finished the first editing run-through of the China diss* (not mine). Finally!

Ergo, the liquor cabinet beckons! 😉

* Among other things, this means I have a slightly less hazy idea of the Yangshao and the Longshan periods of the Neolithic, detailed in this cool table. I also learned that the Chinese language doesn’t have plurals. If I have it right….

Posted at 4:59 PM | 2 Comments »

Found this almost-drowned butterfly in the lake last week; I don’t think our rescue was enough for him/her to survive.

Under a grey sky, I might consider loon calls plangent, but probably not if it’s sunny.

Plangent

A loud, reverberating sound considered melancholy. (From the Latin word for lamenting.)

Posted at 9:01 AM | 1 Comment »