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Sunday: May 30, 2010

Give That Man an Em!

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:05 PM GMT-0500

According to Just One Minute, “The NY Times front page links to Charles Blow’s column exhorting Obama to be more visibly emotional and empathetic.” I don’t know about ’emotional’, but he’s already three-fourths or four-fifths of the way to ’empathetic’, depending on whether we count syllables or letters.

Saturday: May 29, 2010

Could Be Worse — Or Could It?

Filed under: — site admin @ 9:24 AM GMT-0500

According to Patterico, Hillary Clinton wishes the U.S. could be more like Brazil. At least she’s talking about the country. I mean, she is talking about the country, isn’t she? Her boss seems to want to make the U.S. more like Brazil.

Thursday: May 20, 2010

A Comforting Thought

Filed under: — site admin @ 8:40 PM GMT-0500

As of noon today, Eastern time, we are one-third of the way through Obama’s first and (almost certainly) only presidential term. He has done a lot of damage that will take years of effort by better men and women to repair, but nothing he has done so far is utterly irretrievable. It appears that his malevolence is balanced by his incompetence: he couldn’t even manage to impose a dictator on Honduras. Let’s hope the last two-thirds of his term is equally ineffectual.

Sunday: May 9, 2010

Pedantry Pedantically Denounced

Filed under: — site admin @ 3:41 PM GMT-0500

On a Latin play about Richard III by the master of Caius College, Cambridge (1579):

. . . Legge’s was a poverty-stricken mind; his Latin versification might crimson the cheek of a preparatory schoolboy, and but for the sad fact that by the time they have read sufficiently to write on English literature, scholars have only too often lost the gift, unhappily for their readers, of knowing what is boring and what is not, this fatuous production of a shallow pedant would have been treated with as little respect as it deserves.

(F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, 1922, page 97)

He adds a footnote on the last word:

It may be added that John Palmer of St John’s who took the part of Richard “had his head so possest with a prince-like humour” that he behaved like a potentate ever after, and died in prison as a result of his regal prodigalities.

Wednesday: May 5, 2010

Orwellian LOL

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:16 PM GMT-0500

I just read Animal Farm for the first time in 40+ years. I don’t often laugh out loud while reading books (as opposed to blogs), but half of one sentence made me LOL. In Chapter II, the victorious animals inspect the human house, and Orwell notes: “Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial, . . .”

Saturday: May 1, 2010

Ouch! (in More Ways than One)

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:03 PM GMT-0500

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

(Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort, tr. W. S. Merwin, San Francisco, 1969, p. 185)