If they want to justify their places in the ‘About’ paragraph of About Last Night, OGIC (’Our Girl in Chicago’) and CAAF (Carrie Frye) really need to get off their butts* and write something. It seems like months since either of them has posted, and I for one miss them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*Or should that be “get on their butts”, since that’s the usual posture for bloggers?

Last Sunday, I inadvertently washed a SanDisc Cruzer USB drive with a load of laundry and plenty of soap. To my great surprise, it still worked after I found it rattling around in the bottom of the washing machine. I of course immediately copied everything on it to my PC, thinking that it would surely be susceptible to long-term damage, since the insides are not hermetically sealed and therefore (I thought) would be prone to rust or mildew when wet. However, it still works almost a week later. One more thing to like about modern technology: it’s a lot less fragile than a floppy disc.

Do what the grad students in Shakespeare Studies at Mary Baldwin did in the performance I saw tonight (directed by Zach Brown):

1. Leave out Fortinbras entirely.

2. Have Horatio ignore Hamlet’s plea at the end of the play, drink the poison, and die. His last words were, of course, “The rest is silence”.

The result: I believe Osric is the only member of the upper classes left alive to inherit the throne. The accession of King Osric I would be a truly tragic outcome.

If any of my readers are in the Shenandoah Valley, there is a second performance tomorrow night at 7:30. The theater’s website is here.

In a post at The Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker includes a picture of the statue that stands outside the Federal Trade Commission (he credits JoeInSouthernCA):

When I worked in D.C. 20+ years ago, I often walked past the statue. My friends and I liked to think of it as the allegorical depiction of Bureaucracy restraining Trade.

Dicaearchus, that great and prolific Peripatetic, wrote a work called On the Extinction of Human Life. Having assembled the other causes - floods, epidemics, ravages of nature, sudden invasions by hordes of wild beasts, the onset of which he demonstrates has caused the exstirpation of certain races - he then shows how many more men by contrast have been wiped out by attacks made by other men in wars or civil commotions, than by all other disasters.

(Cicero, De Officiis 2.16, tr. P. G. Walsh, Oxford, 2000)

The Latin:

Est Dicaearchi liber de interitu hominum, Peripatetici magni et copiosi, qui collectis ceteris causis eluvionis, pestilentiae, vastitatis, beluarum etiam repentinae multitudinis, quarum impetu docet quaedam hominum genera esse consumpta, deinde comparat, quanto plures deleti sint homines hominum impetu, id est bellis aut seditionibus, quam omni reliqua calamitate.

Two more author anniversaries today, and again authors best known for their short stories. It is the 75th anniversary of the death of G. K. Chesterton, and the 25th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges. Here’s a bit from Chesterton’s ‘lost’ Father Brown story (collected here), “Father Brown and the Donnington Affair” (1914):

“Human troubles are mostly of two kinds. There is an accidental kind, that you can’t see because they are so close you fall over as you do over a hassock. And there is the other kind of evil, the real kind. And that a man will go to seek however far off it is - down, down, into the lost abyss.”

Today is the 75th anniversary of the death of M. R. James, author of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and three other collections. There is a very readable webtext here. Here is a classical bit from “Count Magnus”:

“Like many solitary men, I have a habit of talking to myself aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expect an answer.”

The subject’s habit of talking to himself aloud turns out to be very bad for his health.

My local movie theater has been serving delicious hors d’oeuvres (from this restaurant) at their showings of the Metropolitan Opera HD simulcasts. What should they have served for Richard Strauss’ last opera on April 23rd? Carpaccio, of course.

The professor is nothing if not a maker of card-indexes; he must classify or be damned.

(H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series [1919], XVII. “George Jean Nathan”)

Call me a pedant, but I thought the most interesting thing about Terry Teachout’s Youtubed clip from a BBC film of The Cherry Orchard is that it seems to be subtitled in Catalan.

I wish I’d had my camera with me a week or two ago. A local grocery store had this special offer:

SHRIMP
BUY 1, GET 2
Limit 2

This was left as a comment - unapproved, of course. I have also redirected the link:

It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website download youtube videos I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!

I suppose the only one more pathetic than this spammer would be a blogger who fell for the plea and approved the comment out of pity.

Ada Spelvexit was one of those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in what are called “movements”. “Most of the really great lessons I have learned have been taught me by the Poor”, was one of her favourite statements. The one great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have taught her, that their kitchens and sickrooms were not unreservedly at her disposal as private lecture halls, she had never been able to assimilate. She was ready to give them unlimited advice as to how they should keep the wolf from their doors, but in return she claimed and enforced for herself the penetrating powers of an east wind or a dust storm. Her visits among her wealthier acquaintances were equally extensive and enterprising, and hardly more welcome; in country-house parties, while partaking to the fullest extent of the hospitality offered her, she made a practice of unburdening herself of homilies on the evils of leisure and luxury, which did not particularly endear her to her fellow guests. Hostesses regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which everyone had to have once.

(Saki, The Unbearable Bassington, VII)

. . . thinks a salmon-colored couch is nice, but a couch made entirely out of salmon would be nicer:

Please provide a ‘default’ or ‘override’ button on all copy machines. The machine is not smarter than the user, at least when I’m making copies. I’m sick and tired of using machines that won’t copy my stuff at normal size. Yes, I know the newspaper clipping on the platen only covers a small portion of the copy area for 8.5 x 11 originals. That doesn’t mean I want it done at 250% magnification, or 50% for that matter. Is is too much to ask to have it done without magnification or - what’s the opposite of that, parvification? If the machine had a ‘default’ button, it would speed things up enormously and avoid wasting paper on copies that are entirely the wrong size or cut off portions of the original. I also know that the workbook I’m copying a page of is slightly larger than 8.5 x 11. Just copy the part on the platen and don’t make me push four different buttons to tell the machine to do the copy at the default settings.

Please don’t send me an e-mail telling me my order is “on the way” at 11:18pm if the book was already on my porch when I got home from work roughly seven hours earlier. You do this a lot. It does help me illustrate the meaning of ‘otiose’. On the other hand, it does provide an opportunity to use the word ‘otiose’.

From the site of a bookseller whose name (and URL) I will kindly omit:

Cicero was a primate, and letters are no doubt symbols as well as collections of symbols, and Cicero’s letters are a “particularly highly-developed form of primate communication”, but I think the blurb is meant for the book pictured, not the bold-faced title.

I wonder which book you get if you click on the ‘buy’ link.

“The period of the winter solstice had been always a great festival with the northern nations, the commencement of the lengthening of the days being, indeed, of all points in the circle of the year, that in which the inhabitants of cold countries have most cause to rejoice. This great festival was anciently called Yule; whether derived from the Gothic Iola, to make merry; or from the Celtic Hiaul, the sun; or from the Danish and Swedish Hiul, signifying wheel or revolution, December being Hiul-month, or the month of return; or from the Cimbric word Ol, which has the important signification of ALE, is too knotty a controversy to be settled here: but Yule had been long a great festival, with both Celts and Saxons; and, with the change of religion, became the great festival of Christmas, retaining most of its ancient characteristics while England was Merry England; a phrase which must be a mirifical puzzle to any one who looks for the first time on its present most lugubrious inhabitants.

“The mistletoe of the oak was gathered by the Druids with great ceremonies, as a symbol of the season. The mistletoe continued to be so gathered, and to be suspended in halls and kitchens, if not in temples, implying an unlimited privilege of kissing; which circumstance, probably, led a learned antiquary to opine that it was the forbidden fruit.

“The Druids, at this festival, made, in a capacious cauldron, a mystical brewage of carefully-selected ingredients, full of occult virtues, which they kept from the profane, and which was typical of the new year and of the transmigration of the soul. The profane, in humble imitation, brewed a bowl of spiced ale, or wine, throwing therein roasted crabs; the hissing of which, as they plunged, piping hot, into the liquor, was heard with much unction at midwinter, as typical of the conjunct benignant influences of fire and strong drink. The Saxons called this the Wassail-bowl, and the brewage of it is reported to have been one of the charms with which Rowena fascinated Vortigern.”

(Thomas Love Peacock, The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chapter XII)

The “roasted crabs” of the third paragraph are surely crab-apples rather than crustaceans.

Laudator Temporis Acti quotes Basil L. Gildersleeve:

Platonic scholars, with rare exceptions, are roughly to be divided into two classes, those who can understand the thought but not the Greek and those who can read the Greek but cannot understand the thought . . .

According to Palladas (A.P. 11.305) there is, or was in his day, a third kind, who belongs to neither class but pretends to belong to both:

Child of shamelessness, most ignorant, foster-child of stupidity, tell me, why do you hold your head high, though you know nothing? Among the grammarians you are a Platonist, but if someone asks about Plato’s teachings, you are once again a grammarian. You flee from the one to the other, but neither do you know the grammatical art nor are you a Platonist.

Here is the Greek:

Τέκνον ἀναιδείης, ἀμαθέστατε, θρέμμα μορίης,
    εἰπέ, τί βρενθύηι μηδὲν ἐπιστάμενος;
ἐν μὲν γραμματικοῖς ὁ Πλατωνικός· ἂν δὲ Πλάτωνος
    δόγματά τις ζητῆι, γραμματικὸς σὺ πάλιν.
ἐξ ἑτέρου φεύγεις ἐπὶ θάτερον· οὔτε δὲ τέχνην
    οἶσθα γραμματικήν, οὔτε Πλατωνικὸς εἶ.

If the Greek text is unintelligible, try the PDF version at my long-abandoned Ioci Antiqui page: scroll down to Joke 43 on page 13 (December 13th, 2000).

I wonder if Gildersleeve was thinking of Palladas: he does write “roughly”.

Last week I drove down I-97 from Baltimore to Annapolis and found that part of it is named “Senator John A. Cade Memorial Highway” after a long-time state legislator. Having seen and enjoyed Henry VI, Part 2 at the Blackfriars Playhouse last spring, I wondered whether his friends called him ‘Jack’. Google suggests that they did (examples here and here [PDF]). Of course, Shakespeare’s Jack Cade was not a Republican, or not a Republican in the contemporary American sense, so the coincidence of names is not as appropriate as it might have been.