I'm not sure if it's a trend, but I went to my second baseball game in a decade. Last year, Tim Smith invited me to see the Giants take on the Cincinnati Reds, and yesterday evening I returned the favor to watch the Chicago Cubs beat the Giants. The seats were rather good: on the field club level, between home and third. Tickets were courtesy of Steve Sidener (he's the non-Nobel-Laureate-in-economics on the left), an old friend from Altimira Middle School in Sonoma Valley. He's now a lawyer, but we won't hold that against him.
Erling passed along this waggish take on the Sator Arepo acrostic square. In the first entr'acte of SPP (sc. 6.5), I used the Sator text along with some strange gnostic prayers. The rest of the blog deserves a turn or two in the browser.
Yesterday was Viki's birthday, and so we went up to Sonoma County to visit some friends, Cate and Sheryl, and traipse through the wine country, specifically the Dry Creek Appellation near Healdsburg. It was a Passport weekend, but we managed to get in and do some tasting in spite of the crowds. Good food, great wine, fantastic company! The weather was very European, sunny at noon, rainy in the early afternoon, and sunny again by the time we left the valley around 4 PM. We stopped at Willi's Wine Bar for some scrumptious food. And then homewards. Here's a list of the wineries we visited:
A little tasting, a little buying, and all in all a fun day.
A while back, the print version of California Monthly had an article, by Kevin Starr (the California State Historian), that revealed the solution to the mysterious origin of the faux Drakean brass plate found in the '30s near San Quentin. Seems that George Ezra Dane and some other members of E Clampus Vitus were playing a joke on Cal's eminent history professor and fellow ECV member, Herbert Eugene Bolton. The findings were published in the California History magazine after eleven years of research. Looking around the web disclosed some great sites about Drake, the possible locations of the bay in North America where he stayed for a couple of months, and the brass plate hoax:
I was googling for some information on pattern recognition, feature extraction, and linguistics, when I noticed a sponsored ad in the upper right-hand corner of my browser called Deep Chomsky. Turns out it's the blog of a retired programmer-mathematician, Steven H. Cullinane. Besides being a dyed in the wool opponent of Noam Chomsky, he's also the inventor defender of the Diamond Theory of Truth. He has multiple domains from which to spread his diamond gospel, while battling the demons of postmodernism and leftism. Funny thing is that I almost felt like defending Chomsky, even though I had studied linguistics at Cal where I had been nourished by staunch anti-Chomskians. I finally came to my senses, as Professor Chomsky is more than capable of defending himself. One has to wonder though if Cullinane pays for these ads himself or if he's being funded by somebody else.
Here's a snippet of his writing, under the title Plato's Beard versus Occam's Razor: "Richard J. Trudeau, in The Non-Euclidean Revolution (see above), opposes what he calls the Story Theory of truth [i.e., Quine, nominalism, postmodernism] to the traditional Diamond Theory of truth [i.e., Plato, realism, the Roman Catholic Church]. This opposition goes back to the medieval "problem of universals" debated by scholastic philosophers." These groupings of good against evil have made my day.
I propose a sequel to Augustus De Morgan's justly famous book, A Budget of Paradoxes, about the diverse attempts to square the circle, to create a perpetual motion machine, etc. This new volume could touch on various applications of mathematics to age-old epistemological and ontological problems, cutting as it were through all the bothersome verbiage of less adequately equipped philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, et al.
[Addendum 07/15/03: Mr Cullinane was kind enough to correct my error in this entry in attributing the invention of "diamond theory of truth" to him. Plato invented the concept and Richard J Trudeau coined the phrase.]
No situation in Iraq is going to keep Hollywood from attending the French movie industry's big bash on the Côte d'Azur. There's going to be all kinds of flicks there. Lars von Trier, one of the co-founders of Dogme 95 has a new flick, Dogville, shot entirely in the studio and starring Nicole Kidman. Wonder if they used makeup and lighting? It was an interesting marketing experiment while it lasted. And for a bit of the old ultra-violence, there's Tarrantino's new movie, Kill Bill.
The Second Gulf War is over, and now the Bush administration has asked the IMF and the World Bank to step in and marshallize post-Saddam Iraq. Bruce Bartlett doesn't think that that would be a good idea.
Ever since The Matrix hit screens back in 1999, most of us having been waiting for the other shoot to drop. Wired has a nice article on the virtual cinematography used in the soon-to-be-seen sequel. Like most commercial movies, the effect that came to be known as bullet time had been developed by a Frenchman, Arnauld Lamorlette, to fly through a virtual Parisian arispace looking for structural flaws in buildings. He was later hired by PDI which created Shrek. Later it surfaced in a SIGGRAPH short called The Campanile Movie.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that President Bush has let the UN know that the US-led Coalition doesn't need help searching for the number one reason for Gulf War 2, (AKA weapons of mass destruction). Hans Blix, on the other hand, argues that the UN weapons inspectors should be allowed back into Iraq to do their job. In another article, Dr Blix chastizes Bush, alleging faked evidence amongst other things.
According to E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post there are some pro-labor Republicans in DC.
"Time and tide wait for no man." Why the irreversible binomial time and tide? German has Zeit, we have Yuletide greetings, and the Greeks had kairos and khronos. For anglophones, time is fleeting, but the tide's flood ebbs. So, Pindar wrote: "For the right moment [kairos] has a brief measure in the eyes of men." [Pythian 4.286] But, shortly thereafter: "and in time [khronoi], when the wind ceases, there are changes." [Pythian 4.294] Why? I peeked into Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now which Viki is reading. And one thing lead to another: the Long Now Foundation.
How had I gotten from the Austrian author Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando to navel-gazing in a couple of hops on the web? We've been entertaining a guest from Europe, Ches Themann, for the past week here at the Villa Byssina. He was the director of the Austrian version of Sub Pontio Pilato. More than once our discussion has turned to Austrian literature, a subject about which I admittedly know little. Some of the authors we've talked about have great names like the above-mentioned HO. So, this morning, I opened my trusty Britannica, 11th edition, to look for Fritz, but instead fell upon the article on the Hesychasts, those navel-gazing monks on 14th century Mount Athos. Amongst their beliefs was that the soul was located in the belly button, and they turned their glance thither during prayer. As they were also called omphalopsykhoi or umbilicanimi, a quick google turned up the English word, omphalopsychite, on a great obscure word website, Forthright's Phrontistery.
Garance Franke-Ruta ponders the gender specifics of homeland security. All that talk about duct tape and plastic sheeting makes me think of victory gardens and aluminum drives during earlier wars. While I've read and like Deborah Tannen's socio-linguistic popular books, I never quite got into the whole Mars-Venus genre.
I was going over some reading on Heloise and Abelard over the weekend and was enjoying a translation of their love sonnets by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She was quite prolific and a good old-fashioned romantic poet. Her fansite has digitized most of her poetry, and you can judge for yourself.
Opening night of Sub Pontio Pilato was last night. It was nice to see old friends and meet some new ones, too. The opera's name on the marquee was worth the trip. We got a great pre-review article in the Bay Area Reporter by Mark Mardon. (Sadly, not available online, but I'll scan it for a link later.) The singers were all splendid and it was nice to see the whole thing through with just one break in the action for intermission. The stage crew were marvellous, too, and the look of SPP was fantastic.
I ran across Lying in Ponds while googling for Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post. Any website that takes its name from a Monty Python skit is OK with yours truly. Ken Waight has combined a blog with a partisan rating of columnists service. It's funny and sad, all rolled up into one. I don't think the results will surprise anybody, but it's fun reading.
It's just a couple of days until the opening night of Sub Pontio Pilato, and I ran across this great quotation:
The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing, rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man. One can imagine him agonising, seeing that Jesus had done nothing wrong, and wishing to release him. Just as easily, however, one can envisage Pilate's advisors telling him of the risks, warning him not to cause a riot or inflame Jewish opinion. It is a timeless parable of political life.It is possible to view Pilate as the archetypal politician, caught on the horns of an age-old political dilemma. We know he did wrong, yet his is the struggle between what is right and what is expedient that has occurred throughout history. The Munich Agreement of 1938 was a classic example of this, as were the debates surrounding the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Corn Laws. And it is not always clear, even in retrospect, what is in truth, right. Should we do what appears to be principled or what is politically expedient? Do you apply a utilitarian test or what is morally absolute?
[Tony Blair, interview, Sunday Telegraph, 7 April 1996]
Gedankenexperiment: imagine an American President speaking like this. What is his name?
This monograph by Michael Everson on different lingusitic problems created by the European Council's decree in 1997 that the spelling of the terms, Euro and cent, will be the same in all official EU languages, makes for fascinating reading. One problem is that Gaelic, one of the official languages of the Republic of Ireland, like other Celtic languages, has a phonological feature called lenition, where the pronunciation (and spelling) of a word sometimes changes depending on certain words which proceed it. For example, the translation into Gaelic of "in euro or in cent" as "san euro nó sa cent" in an official EU translation should actually be: "san euro nó sa chent." Another problem that Everson mentions is how the gender of the word Euro in official Gaelic EU translations flips between masculine (when referred to by the pronoun é) and feminine (when the definite article is used, an euro instead of an t-euro).
Timothy Burke, associate professor of history at Swathmore, writes one of the more lucid political blog entries I've read in a while. It's on the dangers of a "defective conception of how power actually works inside the Bush Administration." I love a good conspiratorial theory as well as the next person: it's really one of the better types of genre literature going these days. People just want to believe that higher powers (for good or evil) are in charge of their everyday lives. How else can one explain religion? The real injustice that most conspiracy theorists foist on the uncaring objects of their scorn is that of knowing too much. And this seems to be Professor Burke's point. You shouldn't call Bush stupid on the one hand, and assume he and his cohorts know what they're doing on the other. Well, most of the leftist rhetoric I've seen portrays Bush as an ignorant pawn of big business and definitely not the man in charge. But I may be wrong about that. As for the why of this Second Gulf War: I always assumed that because the US had helped Saddam gain power, and because he had subsequently turned around and spat in our collective faces, it was up to the US government to remove him: sort of like the Army terminating Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now with extreme prejudice.
On the lighter, linguistic side, Burke's use of the word agitprop in much the same way as I use the term regime in conversation when discussing Dubya's administration, sent me scurrying for a dictionary: a contraction from the Russian otdel agitatsii i propagandy 'department of agitation and propaganda.'
By not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, pulling out of the Anti-Ballastic Missle Treaty, and rejecting the Internationl Criminal Court, Dubya managed to piss off both domestic and foreign multilateralists. (That's okay, since it seems to be his mission in life.) But, listening to neo-conservative rhetoric, you'd think that this is the best thing to happen since Reagan was cast in last starring role. Even the sacred Geneva Convention of recent memory doesn't apply when it's inconvenient, and damn the rest of the world. Although, the Geneva Convention is still trotted out when paramilitary forces in Iraq pull the oldest trick in the book and pretend to surrender to US soldiers hopped up on homegrown propaganda. (This is not to say that civilians car-bombing soldiers or anybody torturing POWs is covered by the Geneva Convention: it's not.) Meanwhile, it doesn't look like Russia (our new ideological ally) is going to sign the Kyoto Protocol either. Hélas. Maybe John O'Farell is right, and we should just privatize war.
Well, Sub Pontio Pilato has made it into the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, and the blurb by Joshua Kosman is nice. The rehearsals have been going well, and the reality of having something I wrote performed is finally sinking in.
John Harden has gotten his film into a science fiction convention in the rainy state of Washington. So, if you're in Seattle on April, 20, 2003, you should check it out.
Also, in the news, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of using taxpayer money to fund religious halfway houses. Wonder if it would've passed if the religion is question were Islamic? Oh, rhetoric, thou art a harsh mistress. The Milwaukee Sentinal Journal has an article about how the plaintiff, the Freedom From Religion Foundation promises to continue fighting the case.
Brian Eno has written why America needs to open up to the rest of the world. Somehow, I can't see the cheermeisters Dubya and Rummy even smiling. Funny.
cc1071 is a small site with tiny pix but worth a look none-the-less. Got there contemplating the Shavian and 12480 alternative alphabets on the Omniglot site. The bridging site was IKEMI spotlights after a proper googling. Bradley Tetzlaff is the lad who invented 12480.
Seymour Hersch has a lucid article in the New Yorker on our Minister of War Donald Rumsfeld. My current favorite acronyme du jour TPFDL (time-phased forces-deployment list). Pronounced tipfiddle. Thanks to Allan Miller for passing it along. Here's another take by Wayne Madsen in CounterPunch. Ran across this link on a blog yclept Quotidian Doom via the Technorati überblog site. One thing that Technorati lets you see is how sites in the blogosphere are linking to one another. The CounterPunch site is run by Alexander Cockburn and Geoffrey St. Clair: names I had run across years ago while working in the belly of the great beast. Those were the heady pre-dot-com bust days of my slight flirtation with the Pynchon list. Years later, I ran into Ian Evans (Pynchon fan extraordinaire) at yet another KZ-lager in the software gulags, and we discussed the Tinasky letters. Ian is the only person I know of who actually subscribes to the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Itty-bitty world.
My friend Erling has been interviewed by usOperaweb online magazine. Sub Pontio Pilato and yours truly are mentioned.
The New York Times Magazine had an interesting interview with historian John Dower on how the occupation of Iraq will differ from the occupation of Japan. Elsewhere, he has said: "We live in a world of spin and euphemism and, increasingly, plain anti-intellectualism, where people seem to be losing whatever capacity they may once have had for sympathetic imagination." I wonder, rhetorically, where all the critics of political correctness are when folks start dusting off their jingoism.
Why rewrite songs which Elvis made famous in Sumerian? Why not? Well, to Dr. Jukka Ammondt, a classics professor in Finland, who had already issued a CD of Elvis songs in Latin, this seemed like the next logical step. Sumerian, the oldest recorded language, is beloved by linguistic cranks (or, les fous du langage) being related by them to Lithuanian or Chinese. As far as academic linguists know, Sumerian is an isolate. Here's an article on Sumerian beer brewing: did making beer precede breadmaking?
