1783 American Revolution

Then, instead of ‘The British are coming, the British are coming!’ it was ‘The British are leaving, the British are leaving!’

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For more than a century, November 25, 1783, was commemorated in New York City as Evacuation Day, the blessed end to seven years of British rule and martial law. [...] America had been purged of the last vestiges of British rule. It had been a long and grueling experience - the eight years of fighting had counted as the country’s longest conflict until Vietnam - and the cost had been exceedingly steep in blood and treasure. Gordon Wood has noted that the twenty-five thousand American military deaths amounted to nearly 1 percent of the entire population, a percentage exceeded only by the Civil War.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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should get around to doing the floors

I should get around to doing the floors; these are carpeted in filth. Take advantage of Pop's weekend getaway. But, hell, it is all I can do to take care of my dishes when I am alone like this. Maybe if I had a whole week to myself, I could get around to such chores, but I hate to blow a precious hour of my very limited quality time.

Ian McEwan on the Ups and Down of Reading Fiction

Ian McEwan has a nice piece that I imagine all readers can identify with: those times when fiction loses its magic for us. I have written of times when all books lose their hold on me, but I also know about this intermediate stage of disenchantment, when just fiction can seems like a pointless, childish use of time, reading airy stories about nothing, and isn't like too short for this? If one is going to read, shouldn't it at least be a good work of history, or anything with some slender basis in solid reality? Shouldn't you at least learn something for your trouble and make yourself a little smarter?

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Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin, one of our great legal philosophers, has died at the age of 81. It brings me back to my student days of taking seminars in jurisprudence and being all interested in the law. Speaking of those seminars, the article even mentions the great positivist, our old friend Mr. Hart:

Professor Dworkin’s academic work was in many ways a reaction to that of H. L. A. Hart, the British legal philosopher whose 1961 masterwork “The Concept of Law” set out his theory of positivism, which held that law is a system of rules similar in structure to those of games like chess. Legal reasoning, positivism says, is merely descriptive and need not take account of morality.

It is said that Dworkin's work was in reaction to Hart's perspective, placing more weight on egalitarian justice. The article even brings out the criticism of Dworkin from the right-wing jurisprudes, such as our old friend Bork:

His critics said Professor Dworkin’s approach was a smoke screen. “Dworkin writes with great complexity but, in the end, always discovers that the moral philosophy appropriate to the Constitution produces the results that a liberal moral relativist prefers,” Robert H. Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee, who died in December, wrote in 1997 in “The Tempting of America.”

All of this means very little to me now, though, save as a dream of youth, recalling a time when I was actually a bit of an over-achiever and very ambitious. Funny, but there you go.

(Source: Adam Liptak at The New York Times)

Tiniest Cat Ever

The tiniest cat in the world was a Himalayan cat, Tinker Toy, from Illinois. He was 7.5 inches long and 2.75 inches high according to the Guinness-world-record-of-cats where he is listed as the lightest cat.!

-- Magical Nature Tour