Musings

…from the mountains last weekend…

This morning I noticed it’s getting light earlier—for the first time in this winter-ending portion of the annual seasonal cycle.

Today’s vocabulary: part/fragment/segment…

The whole is equal to the sum of its parts—part being a general term for any of the components of a whole. But how did the whole come apart? Fragment suggests that breakage has occurred (fragments of pottery) and often refers to a brittle substance such as glass or pottery. Segment suggests that the whole has been separated along natural or pre-existing lines of division (a segment of an orange), and section suggests a substantial and clearly separate part that fits closely with other parts to form the whole (a section of a bookcase). Fraction usually suggests a less substantial but still clearly delineated part (a fraction of her income), and a portion is a part that has been allotted or assigned to someone (her portion of the program). Finally, the very frequently used piece is any part that is separate from the whole.

…definition from the Apple Dictionary, of course….

Posted at 6:17 PM | 1 Comment »

We saw at least five semis pulled over by cops on our way north on I-75 (spanning Tennessee to Ohio—not clustered), and I wondered if there were reports of contraband.

Today’s vocabulary: contraband

Mac’s dictionary says origin late 16th century: from Spanish contrabanda, from Italian contrabando, from contra- ‘against’ + bando ‘proclamation, ban.’

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Contraband?

This year’s tree’s last night all gussied up….

Commit. That’s an interesting word. It can be that feeling dedication angle (adjective), or range across perpetuate, pledge and entrust/consign (as a verb).

Tonight I stayed up late to see what came down in New Hampshire, and got to thinking about committed and its cousins overcommitted and uncommitted.

But it’s too late for me to compose more than this….

Posted at 11:38 PM | Comments Off on Committed

From the Chihuly exhibit at the ATL Bot Garden several years ago…glass, fragile, get it?

I have to agree with George McGovern (here, in the Washington Post) that Bush and Cheney (say Chee-nee not Chay-nee) have repeatedly lied to the American people. Whom they claim to protect. Whose best interests they say they have at heart.

From what I’ve read, it sure sounds like Bush and his staff “have transgressed national and international law” (is going beyond the bounds of the same as broken? seems like it; but maybe not to lawyers…).

Sure sounds impeachable. And more….

So why is most of the national media ignoring all this in a furor about elections in several states (not Wyoming, did you notice that?) that won’t turn out enough delegates to make any diffence at the conventions? Yes, momentum is a real thing, but the media portrays such a biased picture of these votes….

Have we, the American people, so lost track of what we expect of our elected officials (stewardship of the public good while maintaining the public trust) that we permit Bush to stay in the White House without a formal finger raised against him, and evaluate the next set of candidates for the office of President based not on their policies (mostly) and quality of their advisors and the people they make their immediate subordinates?

Today’s vocabulary: pluvious

(adjective) characterized by heavy rainfall; rainy

Posted at 10:22 PM | 4 Comments »

The cold’s slacked off. I swear I took this before I saw RMJ’s gorgeous pictures….

Today the gods and saints and dustmotes smiled upon me and, some lyrical writing by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes pointed me to the fine text-generation program Scrivener. [Download it here for a 30-day free trial. Sorry you poor PC people, this is a Mac-only program….]

For years I’ve sought to escape the tyranny of Word, just like Heffernan. JCB got me to try Pages, but two things sent me back to The Evil Microsoft Product:

• 1) I love being able to type in something simple like “sp” and have the autocorrect function do the heavy lifting of making those two simple letters into a Big Word I type perhaps too often: “sociopolitical” (and a long list of other examples—“nv” becomes Nochixtlán Valley complete with accent, and “bofm” becomes Basin of Mexico—it’s particularly useful for place names!), and
• 2) Endnote. I use this program to keep track of references and store all my notes; it easily links to PDFs, too. From special entries you make in the [Word] text, it makes a bibliography that needs highly irritating but relatively minor editing (it is annoying, but still better than other software I’ve tried) to standardize into the proper format.

Then JCB figured out some way to make Pages do the autocorrect thing and I had to rethink (again) my Endnote addiction. But I still found myself in its grip.

Now in one simple sunny Sunday I’m a Scrivener convert. It’s superior for generating text while keeping assorted supporting materials in my visual field—if I want them! After the text is generated (late this spring, I hope; keep your fingers crossed!) I anticipate returning to Word to flex Endnote’s power, and then using Word or using Pages for the final layout, but I think Scrivener helps significantly with generating the kind of document I’m working on. I love Scrivener’s interactive outline & superoutline functions, which the program calls Outliner and Corkboard. In short, the program effectively uses the power of Cocoa to display multiple editable views simultaneously.

For now, I’m going to use Scrivener on this chapter that’s been confounding me, inserting Endnote-renderable asides when necessary, and utilizing the creative support of my New Friend to avoid the straight jacket effects of the other W.

BTW…

…wasn’t that a supremely special moment last night when all the Presidential candidates were on the stage together at Saint Anselm College between the two debates, mixing and chatting (picture or NYT story); I even saw a few hugs!

Posted at 2:26 PM | Comments Off on Scrivener! Hallelujah!

Mexican field turned over with moldboard plow (rather 16th C in design), probably pulled by an ox.

The Byzantine plow was, technically, not a plow at all, but a sole ard.

Boy, there’s a term you don’t see every day. “Sole ard.” Kinda makes your knees weak, doesn’t it?

FYI, apparently a sole ard scratches the surface rather than turning it over like the plows we see today. The tool is suitable for shallow tilling, as in arid areas, and requires less effort to use than moldboard plows (less force is needed than to overturn the soil).

Bryer, Anthony. 2002. “The Means of Agricultural Production: Muscle and Tools,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, Studies, vol. 39. Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, pp. 101–13. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Page 107.

Posted at 6:13 PM | 2 Comments »

The Botanist keeps up with the modern world mostly through reading the NYT daily. So he guesses at pronunciation. Example: C D roam (for CD-ROM). And: blodging (for blogging, commonly recorded as blahging here, which adds to the confusion, I guess).

The WashPost reports that the Japanese make more blog entries than any other nationality, at least according to Technorati data (and how accurate is that, the Scientist in me asks). They apparently do it via texting on their mobile phones.

Pfffffffft. If I had to do it that way, well, you’d be reading something else every day! Like about some lady’s weekday lunch, or other “chatty postings”….

Posted at 12:08 PM | 3 Comments »

Even when the library’s computer tells me I’m at the top of the list of people requesting a book, it can take as much as two months for the volume to arrive at my branch, for me to pick up. This adds an additional layer of mystery to what books I will have to read simultaneously.

I just finished Ha Jin’s new book, A Free Life, about a Chinese man and his family who emigrated to the US before the Tiananmen Square massacre. Circumstance then led them to a northern Atlanta suburb, where they owned and operated a restaurant (the author taught here at Emory for a time), and the years passed. Ha Jin crafted a good tale, but the epilogue and appended poems (authored by the hero at the end of the tale) make the volume truly special.

The other book I’m reading is non-fiction and a couple of years old, but still pretty recent. It is River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler, about Hessler and a pal who teach English in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze near the Three Gorges Dam. I haven’t gotten far in this volume, so I don’t know where Hessler gets with it….

Together, the two provide interesting insights into modern China, and the concerns of individual citizens. I still can’t imagine living in modern Chinese mega-cities, with those high population densities and pollution levels….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 4 Comments »

On our most recent treks (to the West and Midwest) we stayed several times at Hampton Inns, in part because they have b’fast, wifi, great beds and bedding, and discounts at some out-of-the-way locations that fit with our itinerary. Feeling like the good consumer he is, when we returned home, The Guru wrote an email To-Whom-It-May-Concern about the pros and cons of what we saw/experienced at so many of their locations in a narrow time frame. And received a responsive non-form-email in reply.

AND, in today’s mail, two (count ’em, two!) coupons for overnight stays at any Hampton Inn location!!!!!! Expiring at the end of 2008!

Score!

Today’s vocabulary:

edentulous

toothless

Use in a sentence: The Guru is not an edentulous consumer! (Or maybe you’d best come up with your own example….)

Posted at 6:16 PM | 2 Comments »

Multiple realities seem to be easier to contemplate if they are not personal and are part of the world at large. The other day I recorded a quote from the Dalai Lama about two realities—the deep-thinking Buddhist one of the DL and a few others, and that of the rest of us. Today I’ll note a comment from Pierre Bayard’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (1998; English translation 2000). Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926, and caused a bit of a flurry when the (il?)literati realized that the narrator of the mystery story was the guy who-dun-it (this is widely known, so this can hardly be considered a spoiler).

Most lit-crit types go on about how unheard of this was, and are both pro and con on the merits of this twist. Of course, in conventional Chinese “detective” stories, the evil-doer is known from almost the beginning, and the accent in the stories is on how s/he is trapped and what the punishment is (e.g., Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series, translations), so how innovative Christie was is questionable.

Back to Bayard. He writes about what he calls the delusion of interpretation, that Christie’s Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, was delusional when he pronounced his conclusions about the story’s murder to those involved, at a typical Christie gathering of involved characters. Bayard notes:

Constructing a delusion at least offers one advantage: It allows us an alternative way of reflecting on a true reading. Often one poses the question in the most traditional manner, by wondering how to approach the true. It may be of interest, however, to post the question from another angle and to wonder, rather, how to approach the false by exploring it from within, thus rendering it familiar.

One assumes that honest exam questions where the testee is asked to answer either true or false includes only statements that are unequivocally true or false. In the real world, what we far more frequently encounter is something in the middle, perhaps either mostly true or mostly false*. Or, sometimes, situationally true or situationally false.

Certainly, Bayard’s point that you can understand the nuances of any situation better by teasing out the fine points of both the apparent truths and apparent falsehoods, and multiple realities in general, is, I think, fine advice.

* One of the most memorable uses of the qualifier “mostly” must be in the movie The Princess Bride (1987), when Miracle Max (Billy Crystal), a sort of healer, pronounces the hero, Westley (Carey Elwes) to be “mostly dead” when he is apparently dead, and after treatment becomes mostly paralyzed. This is a truly fine movie, even without considering some of the monsters the hero and heroine must overcome are ROUS (Rodents Of Unusual Size).

Posted at 8:06 PM | Comments Off on Reality is…?