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Nov. 12th, 2014
We broke in the heater last night. I still prefer it a little chilly to waking up in sweaty-wet bedding in the middle of the night. Though, to be sure, a South Dakota winter is too much. I kind of wish I had something like San Diego weather in my comparisons. I think Japan was great, maybe perfect, maybe better than San Diego, with just enough snow in the winter to get the experience of the full seasons, having neither the San Antonio heat of summer nor the South Dakota cold of winter. Make no mistake, so long as we have air-conditioning, I am happy to take San Antonio over South Dakota, but one knows there is better.
1790s America
Nov. 12th, 2014 02:55 pmAs they say, there is no war but the class war. That was certainly true since the earliest days of United States history.
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Unconvinced that any group of uniquely virtuous natural leaders existed, these men beheld the Federalists’ claims to disinterested patriotism as camouflage for their pursuit of wealth and domination. The “lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly,” the farmer Singletary charged, would “get into Congress themselves” and place “all the power and all the money into their own hands.” Writing under the pseudonym “Aristocrotus,” the backcountry Pennsylvanian William Petriken mocked the wellborn and “the full blooded gentry” who believed they monopolized the “necessary qualifications of authority; such as the dictatorial air, the magisterial voice, the imperious tone, the haughty countenance” that were necessary to run the government “upon true despotic principles.”
-- Sean Wilentz, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”
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Unconvinced that any group of uniquely virtuous natural leaders existed, these men beheld the Federalists’ claims to disinterested patriotism as camouflage for their pursuit of wealth and domination. The “lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly,” the farmer Singletary charged, would “get into Congress themselves” and place “all the power and all the money into their own hands.” Writing under the pseudonym “Aristocrotus,” the backcountry Pennsylvanian William Petriken mocked the wellborn and “the full blooded gentry” who believed they monopolized the “necessary qualifications of authority; such as the dictatorial air, the magisterial voice, the imperious tone, the haughty countenance” that were necessary to run the government “upon true despotic principles.”
-- Sean Wilentz, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”
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Dreaming My Cats
Nov. 12th, 2014 04:20 pmI had a curious dream. You know I have been wondering what draws Coco and the other cats to the back neighbors. In my dream, I decided to find out. I trailed after them to see where they went and what they were up to. A family has a batch of puppies in their back yard. And my cats were nipping at them. I do not know if they were being particularly mean and trying to hurt any of them, but I wouldn't like to see any strange cats going after my puppies like that, and neither did this family, as they would, in their obvious annoyance, shoo the cats away.
Funny. You are tempted to wonder what it can mean, but I cannot make anything more out of it, except that it does make me more mindful that my babies are the predatory killers in the neighborhood, even if they are presumably limited to birds and rats. It is a little like having vampires for family.
Funny. You are tempted to wonder what it can mean, but I cannot make anything more out of it, except that it does make me more mindful that my babies are the predatory killers in the neighborhood, even if they are presumably limited to birds and rats. It is a little like having vampires for family.
The Book of Strange New Things
Nov. 12th, 2014 08:12 pmThe rain! The rain wasn’t falling in straight lines, it was … dancing! Could one say that about rainfall? Water had no intelligence. And yet, this rainfall swept from side to side, hundreds of thousands of silvery lines all describing the same elegant arcs. It was nothing like when rain back home was flung around erratically by gusts of wind. So, the air here seemed calm, and the rain’s motion was graceful, a leisurely sweeping from one side of the sky to the other - hence the rhythmic spattering against the window.
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This excerpt is from the opening pages of a new novel by Michel Faber, “The Book of Strange New Things”. He is a genre-bending author, and his novels tend to be literary with science-fiction themes. This rainfall is on another planet called Oasis, the setting for this novel. I loved it, but you probably need a high tolerance for Christian themes to stick with it. The Book of Strange New Things is actually what the natives call the Bible. The protagonist is a missionary bringing Jesus to the native population of Oasis, while his wife is back home on earth, which is a dying planet as climate change has become catastrophic and civilization crumbles.
~ ~ ~
This excerpt is from the opening pages of a new novel by Michel Faber, “The Book of Strange New Things”. He is a genre-bending author, and his novels tend to be literary with science-fiction themes. This rainfall is on another planet called Oasis, the setting for this novel. I loved it, but you probably need a high tolerance for Christian themes to stick with it. The Book of Strange New Things is actually what the natives call the Bible. The protagonist is a missionary bringing Jesus to the native population of Oasis, while his wife is back home on earth, which is a dying planet as climate change has become catastrophic and civilization crumbles.