G as in Good H as in Happy

Friendly Notice from a Nearby Zip Code

Well, we're breathless with gratitude for such kind words from our unmet friend Richard. We don't think we've ever been part of anyone's secret vice before.  Either not a vice, or not a secret...

Always intriguing to be introduced to a cat that might have been Whistler's; and any pork-loving Oscars-incurious on-all-cylinders guide to the absurd and risible, is welcome any time at our own crackling fire pit.

Some days we fear we will discover nothing to which Instapundit hasn't already said Heh, so most of all we relish being denominated too esoteric to be widely popular.

Click Good&Happy. Avoid the crowds.

And yes, we think Ann Althouse is generous, logical, charming, and yet, yet, in spite of her choice of candidate for 2004, does not strike a really conservative note. Like much less agreeable phenomena, we know it when we see it.

Can we get by with just enjoying Richard's musings on the passing scene (or the passing lane), and call that our foray into American liberal territory? We don't have his appetite for broad-mindedness. Though if anyone could teach us by example, it would be him he Richard.

Conyers Bird

A monk's photoblog from Flannery O'Connor country.

Diversity of Tongues

February 19, 2005

Our earlier questions about Hobson and Hobbesian are explored by leading linguists, not entirely to our credit (though we are granted Literate Reader status.) Extremely gratifying though: how often is someone of our obscurity quoted in conjunction with Justice Scalia?  Or, in general, dinosaurs in conversation with judges?

Thank you, [Scholars and] Gentlemenfolk.

Update:

We continue here in our intuitive bones to believe that the generation of "Hobbesian choice" dates back to someone's misspeech which was then rationalized.  If this is the determination, the phrase would be what Mark Lieberman calls a "citational eggcorn."  However, for this to be the case would require two levels of error, the malapropism, and the confusion of hard choices with no choice at all. Such duplication of error is in practice not unlikely, but proposing it as a solution may dull Occam's cutlery.

Also citing Arnold Zwicky, who flirts with my suspicions, Chris Waigl weighs in with a Francophone alternative:

this is precisely the type of situation that modern-day French calls choix cornélien, a choice between alternatives that mutually obliterate each other. A Cornelian choice (or dilemma) is named after the playwright (and contemporary of Hobbes) Pierre Corneille (1606 - 1684).

In the end, however, aspirations to introduce this into the fabric of our speech are modest. "I am unsure whether the reference to Corneille is familiar enough for educated English-speakers, and whether English, or any other language, is sufficiently open to such cultural imports."

Gentlemenfolk, is there a paper here? 
--" 'A,'  'non-A,' or Neither: Tongues Stumble at Constricted Choices"--

Update:  The Wall Street Journal has an explanation that encompasses both alternatives:

Incidentally, several readers inquired about the meaning of the term "Hobbesian choice," which was Andersen's. A Hobbesian choice is what you have when there is a solitary horse that is poor, nasty, brutish and short. 

"with the bird voices we three lived"

February 4, 2005

...in the early morning, a small sparrow came to a small tree in front of our window. He made a small sound...

Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prizewinner for Literature, talks about the the music of his son.

Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935, in a village hemmed in by the forests of Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. His family had lived in the village tradition for several hundred years, and no one in the Oe clan had ever left the village in the valley. Even after Japan embarked on modernization soon after the Meiji Restoration, and it became customary for young people in the provinces to leave their native place for Tokyo or the other large cities, the Oes remained in Ose-mura. Maps no longer show the small hamlet by name because it was annexed by a neighbouring town. The women of the Oe clan had long assumed the role of storytellers and had related the historical events of the region, including the two uprisings that occurred there before and after the Meiji Restoration. They also told of events closer in nature to legend than to history. These stories, of a unique cosmology and of the human condition therein, which Oe heard told since his infancy, left him with an indelible mark.

wood s lot sent us there.

Smart Is..., Cont'd

January 19, 2005

What is all this human to-do about different brains?

Dilys and her pals would trade one or both of theirs for either version. 

Use the tools you wuz issued, she sez.

Via The Corner

Update:
Hunting vs. gathering?
Via Michele.

Thank You

More consideration of the place and importance of words in demanding  situations.

From Powerline: Memo to those who criticized American officials    

for being too slow to "respond" to the humanitarian crisis by giving a press conference: a press conference is not a "response;" what the USS Abraham Lincoln and the Bonhomme Richard were ordered to do--that's a response.

Integrity Update: the Australian branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres has asked donors to stop sending money after reaching its $1 million target in just three days. Generosity flourishes with such ethics. From Tim Blair.

Update:  $301,861,788 has been donated by Americans for tsunami relief (1/4/05). $12.5 million in private donations via Amazon (1/2/05) is part of over two billion dollars of aid (1/1/05) already pledged and available, logistics and time pressuring the thousands of helpers.

Officers said information was being gathered on how best American resources could be used including the skills of machinists, masons, carpenters, divers and general laborers among the more than 6,000 crew members on [the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln].

..."[The homeless Sumatrans] came from all directions, crawling under the craft, knocking on the pilot's door, pushing to get into the cabin," said Petty Officer First Class Brennan Zwack. "But when they saw we had no more food inside, they backed away, saying `Thank you, thank you.'"

Could we all just take a breath, back away, and learn something?  These desperate people swarmed, yet even when that shipment came up empty, said, "Thank you, thank you." Surely a next shipment must arrive quickly, because such grace of the hungry and valor of those who help would touch the hardest heart, among humans or the gods.

All together now, approaching the highest and best use of language:
Thank you, thank you.

Link via Instapundit.

Christmas and The Teddy Bear

December 25, 2004

We've resisted for more than a week. Finally posting this is a Christmas gift to ourselves, this story about the widening ripples and accellerating power of love, care, true charity.

Via The Paragraph Farmer, and others.

Merry Christmas.

The Gift to be Simple, Eventually, After Pretense and Confusion

From Cover Story, by George Sim Johnston
December 10, 2004; Page W17, The Wall Street Journal

As for the Magi, who arrive on the scene a few days late: I rather like the prayer that Evelyn Waugh writes about them for the heroine of his novel "Helena":

You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation... For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

May we not include among the learned and oblique a few biblical scholars?

And ourselves?

A Blessed Holiday, everyone!

Angel on a truck

November 27, 2004

People enjoy color and design, will have beauty in our ordinary lives. We like to make our mark on our possessions, our surroundings, our inanimate companions. To treat them as beautiful, humorous, dignified, unique. At <brian'scultureblog> and his links, an art display sponsored by the French in Lahore: decorated Pakistani trucks.

One of our Good&Happy team is designing her own chrome auto-fish as gentle conversation with the battling fishies out there.

Buddhists (I remember noticing at a sacred art exhibition in San Francisco's de Young Museum) speak of "washing the elephant" to stand for maintenance of one's material surroundings. Today I cleaned out my car. It felt like an act not only of basic respectability, but of kindness.

Scrub it, paint it, decorate it, cherish it.  None of it is permanent, and it deserves our thanks and respect.

Thanks to <marginalrevolution> for the link.

Update:  A reader catalogues her own cohort of long-lived possessions. A wine carafe from Tiffany. Modigliani's print of a red lady. Dark faces drawn by her daughter, long ago, in a dark time.  Stacks of books.  Home.

US Thanksgiving, 2004

November 25, 2004

      A potpourri of phenomena that remind us of where we have been, and why gratitude today is not so much a moral response as simply an  accurate one:

      Today's review in the Wall Street Journal of The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin.   

Once, back on Jan. 12, 1888, the wind made good its angry promise, and 100 children died. Hundreds of adults as well, and thousands of horses and cows. First came the blasts of frigid air, followed quickly by the haze of ice dust that sliced the skin from the farmers caught outside. Then came the snow, and then the killing cold....Following the journals of the Norwegian and German immigrants who rushed to fill the Dakota plains in the early 1880s -- the Rolvaags, Albrechts and all their like -- The Children's Blizzard tells story after story of that grim day. Some of the children trapped at school tried to make it home. A few survived, burrowing into haystacks or forming rings in which the outer children froze to death while keeping the littlest children alive...

      And Donald Sensing's reminder of the men, especially women, and children who settled the mid-continent, inches and miles in ox wagons, 40 below in January and 105 in the summer. Boiled clothes and respectability.  Sometimes madness. Sod houses. No AC. Grit.

      Every year, the Journal publishes Nathaniel Morton's and Governor William Bradford's description of the desolate winter wilderness that met the Puritan settlers in 1620.  There could be no retreat.   

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

      And the songs from Protestant hymnody with an uncanny memory-hook like the fragrance of turkey and the crinkle of paper pilgrim hats. Patrick O'Hannigan points to a 1644 hymn by a bereaved German pastor near-buried by pestilence in the Thirty Years War.

      Now that we are in the MIDI files, wandering and browsing, pausing at a Dutch hymn from 1597, likewise the relief of battle's end.

      And an 1844 verse from an English scholar who, contemplating his death, declared himself "a pilgrim traveling to Jerusalem." 

      Sometimes I hear these melodies on church bells in a city on a Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, and think, in line with my mongrel and ecstatic Welsh heritage, Yes, we have come this far.

Ebenezer.

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

Update: It is awe-inspiring to recognize that by December of 1621, expressing the impulse to share, if it were possible, a servant was writing back to England about the bounty and relative comfort enjoyed by the settlers in the colony:

by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Marginal Revolution offers an economic footnote about the course of Gov. Bradford's great experiment. The incentive structure for activity proved to be important. Goods-in-common did not succeed, even in this small group.  So the question is, what is the size of the group, the degree of affectional affiliation, and the level of objective or subjective stress, that marks the limit of such arrangements?