in other words

Moving this blog off of Tribe. Whither? Thither: www.bisso.com/epea/

mandate from the people

Ah, now the rhetoric oozing out from the Washingtonian mud is all about bipartisan cooperation and such like. I remember when the R-Partei took over from the D-Partei way back when before most of Foley's pages were born. It's immaterial to me whether we impeach the lame chimp or send his ass to The Hague to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity. But seriously, you have to love Saint Paco's electorate voting to impeach Kaiser Wilhelm Busch. I don't think it's binding, but it was a goodly use of the taxpayers money. But, of course, the best thing about the gantse megile being over is no more unsolicited political phone calls.

in such extremis

Somebody was whining the other day about how the brats aren't being taught grammar or history anymore. Yeah, right, that's our big problem. (Somehow, they forgot the intelligent designer classes.) I've got a simple, neo-con solution for them. Cut all schools (primary, secondary, and tertiary) by 75%, and let the remaining ones compete for the best students. (Make all the out of work teachers traffic cops and prison guards.) The rest of the kids can be drafted staright into the miltary and sent on democracy-building exercises in New Jesusland (formerly known as Whattheheckistan). When their tours of duty are over, they can come back home and get automatic jobs in Starbucks or Walmarts. ("What!? No parade?") As for the meritocratic, libertarian ones in school, all they need is a Bible, the Left Behind series, Strunk and White's angry little book, and Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade (to remind them of where they could be if they don't stop whining). When they graduate they can get jobs in faith-based family clinics and such. If they're legacies or twigs, they can go directly to congress to bother pages and gerrymander districts from blue to red. Is that a New Jerusalem I see shining up there on the Hill?

were the founding fathers "unlawful enemy combatants"?

Section 948a of title 10 of the United States Code, as added by the Miltary Commissions Act of 2006, defines an "unlawful enemy combatant" as:

(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or associated forces); or

(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.

What with the erosion of constitutional rights, perhaps it's time to consider emigration. Will the last free person to leave the country please turn off the lights, if we haven't run out of electricity by then. It's a pity we didn't option the Berlin Wall from the DDR before the BRD tore it down. We could've used it at the edge of our southern extremities to curb the soon-to-be-disenfranchised citizens from entering to raise our children and pick our crops. So, all the neo-cons have to do is pray that the furriners don't stop buying our bonds and saving our dollars.

tscharck vollem

Kim Jong Il and George W. Bush have much in common: they're both petty, viscious, stubborn, little thugs. Watched Barack Obama being interviewed by Charlie Rose the other day, and saw something you just don't see much anymore on the Media: a reasonable man. Quiet, thoughtful, lucid, articulate.

jeans from genova

Denim, indigo, and cochineal. Wursted in Delhi by none over than nuns. Today begins JavaONE, and yours truly has pod duty, but today is registration and free NetBeans day. Drop by the Creator booth and ask for Jheem or Uncle Jazzbeau, whichever caught yer fancy fantasy. I'll have that with fries, please.

exsemioticarts

Object, concept, sign, symbol. When I hear the word semiotics I reach for my dictionary. No, really. I see signs, and I think language, but then there's those pesky arts: painting, sculpture, dance, music. You know, the 7 deadly arts ... Moore arguing about apples, or was that Cook? Beckett waiting for some Maigret to re-arrive. Or was that Magritte painting apple-cheeked guys in a bowler hats. This is not a blog. This is not your father's Internet. Ran across the intertranslatability postulate the other day.

www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/eln26.html

Followed to its logical and absurd conclusion, no communication is possible. So, don't bother reading it. Just squiggles. Or the drawings of V. Adami. Paintings of words. Sketches of parts of words. Not morphemes, but forms nonetheless.

the king died, then the queen died of grief

How do I say that in music? Music might connote, but it rarely denotes. How does the Fifth Symphony mean fate knocking at the door without Beethoven or some critic asserting it in language first? Did a capella song come before lyricless music? Some birdsong is genetically determined in a species, but other birds sing songs that change over time. Is a bee's dance really a dance without music or language? Or, for that matter, human interpreters? Is language pure behavior, or is there something else to it? Does music have a syntax? Can one lie with music? Can a note be ambiguous? Can a musical phrase be paraphrased? Does a melody mean the same thing if it's put in a different key?

marking the boundaries

Hermai, margraves, Markgrafen, mangroves, mango groves, Grenzen, ukrajn, Spuren, traces. Marking one's territory. Building, dwelling, thinging. Subliminal, trans, Treppenwitz, meta, over the wall, across the transom, Querbalken.

defending the indefensible

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary."

[James D. Nicoll]