Log24

Continued from previous post —

For what it's worth…

A birth and a death, each on the Feast of St. Patrick

"Donald Frederick Hornig was born on March 17, 1920, in Milwaukee
and attended Harvard, earning his undergraduate degree there
in 1940 and his Ph.D. in 1943, both in chemistry. His dissertation
was titled 'An Investigation of the Shock Wave Produced by an Explosion'…."

— "Donald Hornig, Last to See First A-Bomb, Dies at 92,"
New York Times  print version today (p. A20, New York edition)

A death elsewhere in Wisconsin 92 years later, on March 17, 2012—

more »

"Bridget, Patrick . . . Patrick, Bridget."

There were no Log24 posts on March 17 or March 19.

From a March 18  post, a flashback to February —

"In The Girl Before, the house is almost a shapeshifter as it fits
the needs of the story. Sometimes it feels like an art gallery,
with its inhabitants on display. It's a smart home (of course it is),
and its automated locks and lights and creepily intuitive A.I.
give it the feel of a high-tech prison. Sometimes it's a mausoleum
for Jane, who's dealing with the recent pain of a miscarriage.
Sometimes it's a fortress for Emma, who's dealing with the recent
trauma of a home invasion." —  Joe Reid at Primetimer.com.

Related story elements — Two deaths, from March 17 and 19.

"No there  there?"

From this journal on November 19, 2018 —

An art-related game for The Man with Red Eyes  —

“X marks the spot” — Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones’s love interest in “The Last Crusade” was Alison Doody.

See as well . . .

  Howdy, Doody.

A death last Sunday —

Meanwhile . . .

Amy Adams attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party 
at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on
Sunday, February 24, 2019, in Beverly Hills, California.

"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" 

             — Under the Volcano

See also "Ready Player One" in this journal.

Peter Woit in his weblog today —

This  weblog on that date, St. Patrick's Day 2014 — 

The New York Times  front page story linked to above —

It Takes a Village 

Cutting-Edge Research

See as well The Prisoner of the Village —

"Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners,
inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile,
facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind
the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their
shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and
these shadows of the activity being played out
behind the prisoner become the only version of
reality that the prisoner knows."

— From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland

See also the number 6 in yesterday's posts,
Perfect Number and Perfect Universe.

"Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all."
— "Easter, 1916"

A Philosophers' Stone
— St. Patrick's Day, 2016

See Burning Patrick.

See as well Night of Lunacy.

(Continued)

The front page of The New York Times Book Review 
for next Sunday (March 30, 2014) is devoted to a
review of Siri Hustvedt’s new novel  The Blazing World .
See two posts from St. Patrick’s day:  Her and Narratives.

The review’s author is Fernanda Eberstadt.

The review is titled “Outsider Art.”
See also that phrase in this journal.

Music Box … Continues.

Today's print New York Times  has articles on experimental and
New Age music —

In the Church of Difficult Music and
For New Age, the Next Generation.

I prefer Old Age music… for instance, that of Tony Rice —
also the subject of an article in today's print Times .

The Times  image at right above is of Croagh Patrick.

Also known as Virgil the Geometer.

" Art, in other words, can speak to social conflicts,
and not always how you might think. Yvonne Scott,
a professor here at Trinity College, remarked
before the wake that in 1972 the invention of
Patrick Ireland was 'hard for people to grasp
because for a long while conceptual art wasn’t
understood here.' She added, 'Times have changed.' "

— Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times ,
     May 22, 2008

Related art:

The "Square Round" link at the end of the previous post.

A story dated December 16, 2008, from the parish of Shannon.

A post dated December 16, 2008, from this journal.

University Diaries  today has a meditation on
nothingness and the University of North Carolina.

She includes a picture by John Picacio that was done as a
cover illustration for the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz .

Related material:

A June 10 obituary for Msgr. Tim O'Connor, former rector
of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh, NC.

"To those who knew him, O’Connor’s aesthetic sense
was a defining quality. As rector at Sacred Heart Cathedral—
the seat of the bishop of Raleigh— he led a $500,000
renovation project in the late ’90s that refurbished the floors
and pews and installed art, such as painting the ceiling blue
with 14-karat gold leaf stars."

— Julian Spector — jspector@newsobserver.com

Some context:

Sermon in this journal last Sunday, June 9, which
was the reported date of Msgr. O'Connor's death.

Mary Chapin Carpenter in this journal on July 6, 2008:

Related art:

Ceiling of Raleigh's Sacred Heart Cathedral—

Some context for this  art:

• Mary Chapin Carpenter's song "Grand Central Station,"
• a Log24 post, Instantia Crucis (Aug. 19, 2004), and
• the following introduction to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon :

From "Spider Robinson: The SF Writer as Empath"
by Ben Bova — 

When Analog magazine was housed over at Graybar Building
on Lexington Avenue, our offices were far from plush. In fact,
they were grimy. Years worth of Manhattan soot clung to the
walls. The windows were opaque with grime. (What has this
to do with Spider Robinson? Patience, friend.)

Many times young science fiction fans would come to Manhattan
and phone me from Grand Central Station, which connected
underground with the good old Graybar. "I've just come to New 
York and I read every issue of Analog and I'd like to come up and
see what a science fiction magazine office looks like," they would
invariably say.

I'd tell them to come on up, but not to expect too much. My advice
was always ignored. The poor kid would come in and gape at the
piles of manuscripts, the battered old metal desks, and mountains
of magazines and stacks of artwork, the ramshackle filing cabinets 
and bookshelves. His eyes would fill with tears. His mouth would
sag open.

He had, of course, expected whirring computers, telephones with
TV attachments, smoothly efficient robots humming away, 
ultramodern furniture, and a general appearance reminiscent of a 
NASA clean room. (Our present offices, in the spanking new Condé
Nast Building on Madison Avenue, are a little closer to that dream.)

The kid would shamble away, heartsick, the beautiful rainbow-hued
bubble of his imagination burst by the sharp prick of reality.

"Funny how annoying a little prick can be." — Garry Shandling as Senator Stern

This morning's print edition of The New York Times 
on the American Folk Art Museum:

"The museum’s executive director, Anne-Imelda Radice,
six months into the job, says her strategy is not to compete
with the Mets and MoMAs of the world, but to make
the institution a niche destination with a clear specialty.

'In a way, you become the mother ship of that particular
subject,' she said. 'We can be the leader. We’re the place
you check out first.' "

Presumably her lapel button, too small to read, does not say "6."

Today's sermon is for Martha B. Helfer, author of
the treatise on Darstellung  in today's previous post
and of the following—

(Click for clearer image.)

Helfer's The Word Unheard  was published by Northwestern University Press
on St. Andrew's Day, 2011. Log24 posts on that day—

Lines, Grids, and Fatuity for St. Andrew's Day.

The last of these warned of an upcoming Jewish Book Week event
on February 22, 2012.

That date turned out to be Ash Wednesday. See a Log24 post on that topic
that quotes a poet, T.S. Eliot, with anti-Semitic proclivities—

"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

This is perhaps not entirely irrelevant to Helfer's title, The Word Unheard .

* A concept of Schopenhauer and Hitler, and the first name of
   a fictional Boston mathematician.

A remark from the prepared text of Salman Khan,
who spoke at the MIT commencement today—

"I always tell people that MIT is the closest
thing to being Hogwarts— Harry Potter’s
wizarding school— in real life."

A detail from one computer's view of
the webcast of the commencement—

Time elapsed (from the start
of the browser's window, not  
from the start of the webcast) 

This suggests a look at the date  11/27—

Click on St. Patrick's for further details.

* See June 6, 2007.

Tony Award Nominations

"The losers? 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,'
the $75 million blockbuster that received just
two nominations. 'Seminar' and 'Godspell,'
which have some strong fans but were
shut out of the nominations." 

— Patrick Healy in this morning's New York Times

A thought for Max Bialystock—

The Spider-Man Godspell Seminar!

Jeff Goldblum in "Seminar"

Update of 12:25 PM —

The reviews are in!

"A version of this article appeared in print on May 1, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition…."

(Continued)

An interpretation—

Posts 953 and 2341 in this journal.

Backstory— St. Patrick's Day, 2010.

… of background for yesterday's Log24 posts—

"Now that philosophy has become a scientific pursuit…."
 leads to the following article from St. Patrick's Day—

See also this  journal on St. Patrick's Day—

Doodle Dandy and The Purloined Diamond (scroll down).

"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

This suggested a search for commentary on
Conrad Aiken's phrase "where whirled and well."

Of the nine (Google) search results, one is not  from
my own journal entries—

[PDF] TIME! TIME! TIME!
https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/131009/UBC_1968_A8%20C33.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
by G Cameron – 1968 – Related articles
well where whirled and well where whirled and well—
-3. The stress on words such as "wing" is expanded for use
in Aiken's musical paragraph as follows: … 

This post was suggested by this morning's New York Times  story on the missing cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral and by the recent design for an official T-shirt celebrating Harvard's 375th anniversary—

In Harvard's case, the missing piece beneath the cathedral-like spire* is the VERITAS on the college shield.

Possible sources for a shield image representing VERITAS—

1. "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal, which might be combined with

2. Reflections on Kurt Gödel ** by Hao Wang, Chapter 9, "To Fit All the Parts Together"—

"The metaphor of fitting parts together readily suggests
  the concrete image of solving a picture puzzle…." (p. 243)

Or the image of a Wang tiles puzzle.

A graphic image, colorful but garish, that summarizes these two sources—

  Shield with matching Wang tiles

* The Lowell House bell tower
** MIT Press, first published in 1987

For Fischer's fellow database enthusiast Codd, see Cross-Referenced (April 24, 2003).

For Birtel's fellow pseudoscience enthusiast Frank Tipler, see the artist's comment linked to in Romancing the Omega (April 19, 2011)—

"Omega Point" is a term used by mathematical physicist Frank Tipler for what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics."

— Josefine Lyche, 2009

Related material: Kate and Thor in The Turning  and A Bridge Too Far.

From a scholar quoted in this morning's post —

"Both Vico and Joyce, each in his own way, practice what Vico calls a nuov'arte critica , a 'new critical art'…"

From Hugh Grant's birthday, 2003 (found in a search for whiteness  in this morning's post) —

The cover of yesterday's Sunday New York Times Book Review
features stylized letters by artist Leonardo Sonnoli that include black
circles and triangles —

The stylized Sonnoli letters spell out "WORDS ABOUT WORDS ABOUT WORDS."
This phrase is used to introduce essays on criticism by "six accomplished critics."

A less accomplished critic might note that in the picture above, Tara is modeling
a new fashion by Sonnoli — namely, the word OOV.  A search for this word yields…

"OOV in text processing stands for 'out-of-vocabulary,' i.e., a word
 that is not known in the computer's online dictionary."

It should be.

Addendum (from a link in the same search for whiteness ) in memory of a great beauty who died on Sunday —
     

"I know no writing— except perhaps Henry James's introductory essays— which conveys so clearly and with such an absence of fuss the excitement of the creative artist."

— Graham Greene on A Mathematician's Apology , review in The Spectator , 20 December 1940

"The mere quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he has most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised— some effectual glimpse of that might, by itself, for instance, reward one's experiment."

— Henry James, "Prefaces to the New York Edition," in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986, with introduction and notes by Frank Kermode

"What? You've found a pattern?"

— Greg Egan, "Wang's Carpets"

See also Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, with its discussion of the tiles of the creative artist Patrick Blackburn in the recent (August 2010) Pythagorean novel The Thousand  and the discussion of Wang tiles in Modal Logic,  a  book from November 2002 whose author also happens to be named Patrick Blackburn.

(Credit for the Greene bibliographic information is due to Janelle Robyn Humphreys, whose doctoral thesis, Shadows of Another Dimension, was published in 2009 by the University of Wollongong.)

A film director's obituary in today's New York Times—

"Mr. Donner broke through as a director in 1963 with a low-budget black-and-white film of Harold Pinter’s play 'The Caretaker,' with Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Robert Shaw. Since he couldn’t find traditional backing for the film, a group of well-wishers that included Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Noël Coward financed it."

   A lower-budget version:

All work and no play 

makes Jack a dull boy.

See also "Patrick Blackburn, meet Gideon Summerfield" in Building a Mystery.

McGee Thanks the Academy:

“The ulterior motive behind this essay [“Reading Authority,” above], the purpose for which I seize this occasion, concerns the question or problem of authority. I stress at the outset my understanding of authority as the constructed repository of value or foundation of a system of values, the final effect of fetishism– in this case, literary fetishism. [Cf. Marx, Das Kapital] Reading– as in the phrase ‘reading authority’– should be grasped as the institutionally determined act of constructing authority….”

Wikipedia:

“[In Peter Pan] Smee is Captain Hook’s right-hand man… Barrie describes him as ‘Irish’ and ‘a man who stabbed without offence‘….”

Background: In yesterday’s morning entry, James Joyce as Jesuit, with “Dagger Definitions.”

A different Smee appears as an art critic in yesterday’s afternoon entry “Design Theory.”–

Smee Stabs Without Offence:

“Brock, who has a brisk mind, is a man on a mission. He read mathematical economics and political philosophy at Princeton (he has five degrees in all) and is the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions Inc., a think tank specializing in applying the economics of uncertainty to forecasting and risk assessment.

But phooey to all that; Brock has deeper things to think about. He believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”

A Jesuit in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?”

Beckett Bethicketted:

“Our entanglement in the wilderness of Finnegans Wake is exemplified by the neologism ‘Bethicket.’ This word condenses a range of possible meanings and reinforces a diversity of possible syntactic interpretations. Joyce seems to allude to Beckett, creating a portmanteau word that melds ‘Beckett’ with ‘thicket’ (continuing the undergrowth metaphor), ‘thick’ (adding mental density to floral density)…. As a single word ‘Bethicket’ contains the confusion that its context suggests. On the one hand, ‘Bethicket me for a stump of a beech’ has the sound of a proverbial expletive that might mean something like ‘I’ll be damned’ or ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.’….”

— Stephen Dilks

At the Oscars, 2009

Related material:

Frame Tales and Dickung

Yesterday’s entry, Absurdities, quoted Erich Heller:

“All relevant objective truths are born and die as absurdities. They come into being as the monstrous claim of an inspired rebel and pass away with the eccentricity of a superstitious crank.”

The context for this remarkable saying is Heller’s essay “The Hazard of Modern Poetry.” (See p. 270 in the links below.)

Discussing “the century of Pascal and Hobbes,” he says (see the link to p. 269 below) that

“… as for spiritual cunning, it was in the conceits of metaphysical poetry, in the self-conscious ambiguities of poetical language (there are, we are told, as many types of it as deadly sins), and in the paradoxes of Pascal’s religious thought. For ambiguity and paradox are the manner of speaking when reality and symbol, man’s mind and his soul, are at cross-purposes.”

Heller’s description of “relevant objective truths” as “absurdities” seems to be an instance of such ambiguity and paradox. For further details, see

The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (Harvest paperback, 1975)–

“The Hazard of Modern Poetry” (pp. 263-300), Section 1, pages

263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272.

For material related to Pascal, see the five Log24 entries ending on D-Day, 2008.

For material related to Hobbes, see the five Log24 entries ending on St. Patrick’s Day, 2007.

From Andrew Cusack’s weblog:

April 21, 2005

‘For Christ and Liberty’

Though [it is] a purely Protestant institution (literally), I am rather fond of Patrick Henry College. Indeed, it takes some courage in this day and age to only admit students willing to sign a ten-point profession of Protestant Reformed faith. They also happen to have an old-fashioned ball featuring ‘English country dancing, delicacies such as cream puffs and truffles and leisurely strolls about the scenic grounds of the historic Selma Plantation’.

Anyhow, the college, whose motto is ‘For Christ and Liberty’, was visited [by] Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine, who makes these comments:

Many of the points Esolen commends are things I hope will be found in the colleges of my university when I get around to starting it. I particularly admire that Patrick Henry College’s young men and women are just that, according to Esolen. This is all too often hard to achieve in modern American higher education, where students are quite often just elderly adolescents. (Though I suspect this has more to do with parents and family than education).

The absurdist drinking age that the Federal government underhandedly coerced each state into passing hinders maturity as well. Indeed, when I start the first college or colleges of the university I’m planning, each will have a private college bar which will serve anyone over the age of 16 or so. (Probably at the barman or barmaid’s discretion). Civil disobedience is the only solution.

Though the graduates Patrick Henry College provides will be Protestant (at least at the time of their graduation), I have no doubt that they will act as leaven to raise up the social and political life of our United States. I’m not particularly fond that they proudly advertise their commendation as “One of America’s Top Ten Conservative Colleges”. I’m not of the view that colleges ought to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ per se. They ought to be seen more as communities of inquisitive, curious, intelligent people united in the quest for truth. Labels like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are far too narrow and allow the simple-minded to pidgeon-hole things which are too complex for such monikers.

But anyhow, cheers for Patrick Henry College.

“My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel…. The date (discernible in the captured calendar) is February 27, 1929. The novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), deals with the defense invented by an insane chess player….”
— Vladimir Nabokov, note to photograph following page 256 in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vintage International paperback, August 1989

— Quoted in The Matthias Defense

From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century —

“Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called ‘Innovation in Physics,’ he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.’ To that Freeman added: ‘When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!’ “

— Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147

It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson.

— Log24.net, Feast of St. Mark, 2003

See also The Black Queen and The Eight.
 
In accordance with the theology of the previous entry, based on Zein’s list of the most common Chinese characters, here are some meanings of

[si4] {sì} /to watch/to wait/to examine/to spy/
[si4] {sì} /to seem/to appear/similar/like/to resemble/
[si4] {sì} /until/wait for/
[si4] {sì} /rhinoceros indicus/
[si4] {sì} /four/
[si4] {sì} /(surname)/wife of older brother/
[si4] {sì} /Buddhist temple/
[si4] {sì} /6th earthly branch/9-11 a.m./
[si4] {sì} /stream which returns after branching/
[si4] {sì} /place name/snivel/
[si4] {sì} /offer sacrifice to/
[si4] {sì} /hamper/trunk/
[si4] {sì} /plough/ploughshare/
[si4] {sì} /four (fraud-proof)/market/
[si4] {sì} /to feed/
[si4] {sì} /to raise/to rear/to feed/
[si4] {sì} /team of 4 horses/
[si4 bai3 wan4] {sì bǎi wàn} /four million/
[si4 bai3 yi4] {sì bǎi yì} /40 billion/
[si4 cao2] {sì cáo} /feeding trough/
[si4 cao3] {sì cǎo} /forage grass/
[si4 chu4] {sì chù} /all over the place/everywhere and all directions/
[si4 chuan1] {sì chuān} /Sichuan province, China/
[si4 chuan1 sheng3] {sì chuān shěng} /(N) Sichuan, a south west China province/
[si4 de5] {sì de} /seem as if/rather like/
[si4 fang1] {sì fāng} /four-way/four-sided/
[si4 fen1 zhi1 yi1] {sì fēn zhī yī} /one-quarter/
[si4 fu2] {sì fú} /servo/
[si4 fu2 qi4] {sì fú qì} /server (computer)/
[si4 ge4 xiao3 shi2] {sì gè xiǎo shí} /four hours/
[si4 hu5] {sì hu} /apparently/to seem/to appear/as if/seemingly/
[si4 hu5 hen3 an1 quan2] {sì hu hěn ān quán} /to appear (to be) very safe/
[si4 ji1] {sì jī} /to watch for one's chance/
[si4 ji4] {sì jì} /(n) the four seasons/
[si4 liao4] {sì liào} /feed/fodder/
[si4 lun2 ma3 che1] {sì lún mǎ chē} /chariot/
[si4 men2 jiao4 che1] {sì mén jiào chē} /sedan (motor car)/
[si4 mian4 ba1 fang1] {sì miàn bā fāng} /in all directions/all around/far and near/
[si4 mian4 ti3] {sì miàn tǐ} /tetrahedron/
[si4 miao4] {sì miào} /temple/monastery/shrine/
[si4 nian2] {sì nián} /four years/
[si4 nian2 qian2] {sì nián qián} /four years previously/
[si4 nian2 zhi4 de5 da4 xue2] {sì nián zhì de dà xué} /four-year university/
[si4 qian1] {sì qiān} /four thousand/4 000/
[si4 shi2] {sì shí} /forty/40/
[si4 shi2 duo1] {sì shí duō} /more than 40/
[si4 shi2 liu4] {sì shí liù} /forty six/46/
[si4 shi2 san1] {sì shí sān} /43/forty three/
[si4 shi4 er2 fei1] {sì shì ér fēi} /(saying) appeared right but actually was wrong/
[si4 tian1] {sì tiān} /four days/
[si4 xiao4 fei1 xiao4] {sì xiào fēi xiào} /(saying) resemble a smile yet not smile/
[si4 xue3] {sì xuě} /snowy/
[si4 yang3] {sì yǎng} /to raise/to rear/
[si4 yang3 zhe3] {sì yǎng zhě} /feeder/
[si4 yuan4] {sì yuàn} /cloister/
[si4 yue4] {sì yuè} /April/fourth month/
[si4 yue4 shi2 qi1 hao4] {sì yuè shí qī hào} /April 17/
[si4 zhi1] {sì zhī} /(n) the four limbs of the body/
[si4 zhou1] {sì zhōu} /all around/

— ktmatu.com Chinese-English dictionary

3/16 Continued

The New Yorker, issue dated March 7, 2005, on Hunter S. Thompson:

“… his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from ‘The Great Gatsby,’ just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called ‘The Death of the American Dream,’ a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck.”

— Louis Menand

“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I of The Great Gatsby

“Thanks for the tip, American Dream.”
— Spider-Girl, in Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001

Log24.net, Feb. 21, 2005:

Rainbow’s End

From the
Norma Ballistics Calculator:

See also
Readings for St. Patrick’s Day.

State of Grace

Saint Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for “All the King’s Men,” died on March 2, 2004.

From an entry for that date:

From today’s New York Times:

Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge was born on March 16, 1916, in Joliet, Ill. … She began giving her birth date, though, as St. Patrick’s Day 1918. In explaining the discrepancy, a spokeswoman said, “She’s an actress,” adding: “She was a little bit Irish. And she decided she wanted to be two years younger.”

What the hell, she’s younger now.

The Smoking Stovepipe

“What appears to have happened is this. Sometime soon after 9-11, the neocons persuaded the president that invading Iraq was the next crucial step in winning the war on terror and evil in which Divine Providence had chosen him to be the Churchill of his generation. And if the country and Congress were unconvinced of the need for war, it was his job to convince them.

And here is where the administration began to cross the line. To persuade us that Saddam was a mortal threat to which the only recourse was war, they needed evidence. But, apparently, there was little or no hard evidence to be had. No smoking guns….

First, they decided on war. Then they sent everyone out on a global scavenger hunt to find the evidence to prove we had no alternative but war. And though the information that came back was suspicious and the sources suspect, at least it pointed, as desired, in the right direction.

And, so, the hawks fed it to their propagandists in the press and ‘stovepiped’ it to the White House, where it soon began to appear in the statements and speeches of the president and his War Cabinet.”

— Patrick J. Buchanan, Feb. 11, 2004

Happy birthday, Abie baby.

“Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people.”

— a column opposing the president at foreignpolicy.com.

George W. Bush,
Liberal!

Part I:

Part II:

A search on liberal “free trade” leads to the following quote:

“One of the central concepts of classical liberal economic thought is the superiority of free trade over protectionism.”

Therefore George W. Bush, by courageously advocating free trade despite its political unpopularity, is a classic liberal.

Part III:

Context for the above quote:

The Liberal Agenda for the 21st Century

George W. Bush’s free-trade policy
fits right in.

Part IV:

The Conservative Alternative…

Patrick J. Buchanan,

author of “The Death of Manufacturing“

and A Republic, Not an Empire.

“Let it be said: George Bush is beatable. He has no explanation and no cure for the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs at Depression rates, no plan to stop the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to Asia, no desire or will to stop the invasion from Mexico.

Yet, he remains a favorite against Kerry, because Kerry has no answers, either. Both are globalists. Both are free-traders. Both favor open borders. Again, it needs to be said:  There is no conservative party in America.”

— Patrick J. Buchanan, Feb. 2, 2004

Not yet, there isn’t.

Now for the grand finale…

Edward Teller Is Dead at 95;
Fierce Architect of H-Bomb

Two links…

Patrick’s Rune
             at Shane Ross’s Caltech site

Patrick’s Rune
             at S. H. Cullinane’s Harvard site

…and a quote from Ross’s home page:

The truth shall make you free.

— The Caltech motto and John 8:32

Story Theory

The conflict between the Euclidean, or “diamond” theory of truth, and the Trudeau, or “story” theory of truth, continues.

On this, Hugh Grant’s birthday, let us recall last year’s log24 entry for this date. On Roger Ebert’s review of the Hugh Grant film “Sirens” about the artist Norman Lindsay:

Ebert gets Pan wrong in this film; he says, “the bearded Lindsay is a Pan of sorts.” No. The “Pan of sorts” is in fact the girl who romps joyfully with the local boys and who later, with great amusement, uses her divine x-ray vision to view Tara Fitzgerald naked in church.

This year’s offering for Grant’s birthday is an illustrated prayer by a great defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, Madeleine L’Engle:

Purim Play “Comedy gold!” — Mel Brooks

BBC News, Tuesday, 21 March, 2000, 19:19 GMT Graveside party† celebrates Hebron massacre Celebrants dressed as Baruch Goldstein

Song of God The Jewish holiday Purim began at sundown on St. Patrick’s Day. “It’s Springtime for Esther and Israel!”

It is said that God is in the details.  The details: 

• The Purim of Baruch Goldstein
• The Good News: A New Tourist Attraction
• “We are all Goldstein!”

Purim is the holiday celebrating Esther.  For more on that name, see Three in One.

From The New Yorker, issue dated March 24, 2003:

“Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician — a ‘pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat‡ at the bottom,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it….”

Sounds familiar, somehow.

_____________________________

 See also the entry Homer that precedes it… in honor of 
    Saint Bernard Malamud, whose feast day is today.

† Added March 20:
    See also this year’s graveside Purim party.

‡ Added March 20:
    For more on the dead rat, see the entry of March 19.
    See also a relevant quotation from James Cagney.

Letter

On this date in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel
“The Scarlet Letter” was first published.

See also my note of two years ago,

“Random Thoughts for St. Patrick’s Eve.”

For more on Oppenheimer and the Bhagavad Gita, see

“Fat Man and Dancing Girl.”