“I Don’t Do Divorce Cases”

Nestling unnoticed among the Sn*wden leaks, is a supersecret document revealing the hidden plans of the polybrachiate international cephalopod known as the World of Dr Justice (headquarters: Geneva).  It reads, in part, as follows:

2.  Sell hundreds of books.

3.  Sell thousands of books.

4. Sell millions of books.

5. Sell billions of books.

6. World Domination.

Pretty nefarious, you may say.  However, missing from this sinister list  is the very first step of the plot, which we reveal for the first time here:

1.  Sell dozens of books.

And that, alas, is the stage at which our scheme for world domination (don’t worry, it will be a very benevolent regime, with lots of hamsters) has stalled.

And so, to set the relentless marketing juggernaut rolling again, here is an irresistable video (you must be 18 years of age to watch):

This fine product can be purchased here -- for a song:

[Premium paperback] [Kindle][Nook]

If you still harbor doubts, see the free excerpt here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

~

Murphy, pre-deceased by his partner brother, has himself now passed to Judgment -- justus et peccator, miserere eum Domine.   You may read his obituary here:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2013/01/murphy-in-memoriam.html

So Canada has crazies too…

Since I try to keep clear of current popular culture to the extent possible, it is sometimes by a roundabout route that I learn of some stateside trend. 

This evening, sampling the excellent offerings of that fine site Medi1 (a joint Franco-Moroccan venture) I was listening to the following audio essay:

Les réptiliens: crise, complot et dinosaures

Bemused at this report of a mass movement centered in the United States, of which I had been unaware, I clicked around a bit, and learned that as many as one out of twenty-five voters in these parts  believe in the conspiracy theory that many world leaders are actually extraterrestrial reptiles in disguise.  No no -- funny, of course;  but the point is, these people believe it.  And they are joining the Tea Party, which at the moment holds the health of the world economy in its Twinkie-stuffing-smeared fingers.

The point here, though, is not to lay yet another charge (coals to Newcastle) at the door of the Repo troglodytes, but to notice that (as one further click revealed) a similar psychosis is corroding Canada:

Eves attacked Dalton McGuinty for voting against a bill to protect taxpayers from increased taxes, when it turns out McGuinty in fact voted for that bill. Finally, on the Friday of the second week, the Eves campaign issued a bizarre press release calling Dalton McGuinty an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet". This moment would prove the defining moment of the campaign. First, it was so memorable and unusual that it served to attract the attention of all Ontarians, including those who do not pay attention to a campaign until its final days. Second, the over-the-top negativity brought to life a key critique of the Liberals, that the Harris-Eves Tories picked fights for no reason and went too far. Third, the hysteria around the comment put the Eves campaign on the defensive in the media at a critical point and prevented them from regaining their footing after a difficult week. Fourth, it polarized the election around the PCs and Liberals, and left the NDP on the sidelines. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Eves team was instantly at each other's throats over who would take the blame for approving the press release.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_reptilian_kitten-eater_from_another_planet

This meme of insidious shape-shifting  reptiles had its birth in science fiction.   But such fantasy worlds have a way of bleeding into the lives of hapless mother’s-basement-dwelling masturbators:  witness the Star Wars conventions.  The first canny marketer to realize that one could make big bucks out of such stuff, was sci-fi penman Ell R*n H*bb*r\d (name touched up a bit to escape the trolling of that litigious sect), who parlayed his tripe into a scam -- later promoted (for tax purposes) into a “religion”.   And now some humanoid named (appropriately) Icky (again, modified to thwart the crawling spiderbots) has turned the reptilian meme into a going and growing concern.

Weep, deeply weep, for the Republic.

Phrase of the Day: “sunk cost fallacy”

Today’s WaPo offers an instructive application of a notion we previously examined under the headline “fuite en avant”:  namely, the sunk cost fallacy:

The sunk cost fallacy can be disastrous. World War I and the Vietnam War were examples of nations falling for the error, with combatants doubling down on failed strategies, in part because they had already invested so much, making decisions based on what had happened in the past rather than solely on the costs and benefits for the future.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/15/house-republicans-are-falling-for-the-sunk-cost-fallacy/?hpid=z3

The author, Neil Irwin, draws the relevant analogy with the current behavior of the House Repo’s (as we shall dub them).

Another pertinent comparison would be with the currently crucial phrase raising the debt ceiling.   The general public may be excused for imagining that this means “increasing future deficit-spending”, whereas all that is legally driving it is the obligation to service debts already incurred by past action;  it would spare us much ire and confusion  were we to denominate the process, not “raising the debt ceiling”, but “honoring our debts”.

Herewith our original post on the concept in general and its vocabulary.

Phrase of the Day:  “fuite en avant”

[original postdate 24 VI 2012]

A trenchant phrase of subtle use.  (Pronounced, roughly:  FWEET on ah-VAHN.)   Literally, “fleeing forwards”, which of course we never say.

The usually excellent Oxford-Hachette dictionary  rather muffs this one, defining it only as “headlong rush” (Note to the unsuspecting public:  the phrase is never applied to Pamplona bulls, nor a bottom-of-the-ninth audience rushing for the exits).  The large Collins-Robert is somewhat better in giving a concrete use: “la fuite en avant du gouvernement dans le domaine économique: the government’s relentless [dbj: “dogged” would have been better] pursuit of the same economic policy  in spite of all the evidence.”  Google it on the internet, and you get (from a source that is not quite clear) “course effrénée vers l'inconnu, même au risque d'erreurs importantes”, which ably covers part of it.

The most recent use of the phrase I have heard, came half an hour ago, in a Medi1 broadcast concerning Syria’s downing of a Turkish jet.   Turkey had indignantly called upon the NATO military alliance (hey cool!  yet another Mideast war!!):  yet neither side, said the newscast,  in their heart of hearts  desired a fuite en avant:  which in this context could be translated “(pointless/knee-jerk) escalation”.

The phrase is important because, concise and stereotyped, it denotes a certain psychopolitical pathology, and thus -- lying ready-to-hand in our Wortschatz -- actually helps us recognize cases thereof  when they arise.   (This notion is explored at greater length in the chaper “The Stokes Conjecture”, in The Semantics of Form in Arabic.) The basic idea is:  “Well okay, that didn’t work;  but maybe if we do the same thing again only more of it/faster/harder, it’ll work this time.”  (This cantilevered emotion, common among politicians, is believed to be controlled by the pineal gland.)

In its strictest use -- literally ‘flight forward’, and not merely ‘soldiering on’ -- the term tightens the stakes a notch, over mere pointless perseverence, mere more-of-the-same -- the sunk funds fallacy, a.k.a. “throwing good money after bad”.  For in the French phrase, you actually up the ante, hoping  not only to win this hand, but to make up for previous losses.

Fuite en avant has long been one of my favorite phrases, in large part because of its complex meaning, and its lack of an equivalent in English.  But later a new term spread generally throughout our American tongue, one which, while not an exact equivalent, still covers important shared territory:  doubling-down.

The metaphor comes from the world of gambling;  and accordingly, in a country which reverenced Maverick, and which could seriously consider a casino magnate (whose name shall not stain this page, but which rhymes with dump and rump and frump) as a candidate for President, retains a certain roguish allure.  Doubling-down may not be a winning formula, but it leaves open the possibility that the cards are hot tonight;  whereas fuite en avant always designates an unwise and even foolhardy move.

Note:  Doubling one’s wager, when raised from a nonce impulse into a betting strategy, is known (in French, and thence in English) as the martingale.   This bright idea is probably rediscovered by every boy in each generation;  he is chagrined, later to learn, that the policy is statistically unsound.
In French, this term is again used figuratively, as:

La martingale à haut risque de Mitt Romney

En choisissant le moine-soldat Paul Ryan comme colistier, le candidat républicain a l'élection présidentielle américaine vient de faire un sacré pari.

http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2012/08/14/la-martingale-a-haut-risque-de-mitt-romney_1745954_3232.html

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

 *

A related and subtle word, also with its origins in the world of wager, is surenchère.  As:

Mariage homo: la surenchère du PS

Les députés socialistes veulent inclure la procréation médicalement assistée (PMA) dans le texte

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/10/12/01016-20121012ARTFIG00654-mariage-homo-la-surenchere-du-ps.php?m_i=0D30vhkKL2s73HatQR0UDIYw_d3jBzZZPNuCSyAYwgZ%2B7Ad0i

Here the French Parti socialiste (which in reality is not so much socialist as bobo -- bourgeois-bohemian) ups the ante:  Not only do they wish to join inverts in a parody of matrimony, but to insure that those whom Nature has expressly made, not to procreate, may yet  by artificial means  pass down their defective genes.  (An apter phrase might thus be fuite en pente,  fuite en enfer.)

 ~

~ Recommendation posthume ~

“Si j’étais encore en vie, et que je  désirais un bon whodunnit,

que lirais-je?"

Micmacs divorce --Pouah!

Murphy sur la montagne

(Je suis Charles de Gaulle, et j’ai approuvé ce message)

~

A milder counterpart of doubling-down is soldiering on;  its slogan, “Hope springs eternal”.  As, Christopher Robin’s toy train with its “string sort of thing”:

            It’s a good sort of brake

            but it hasn’t worked yet.

Also distantly related:  a Hail Mary (in football).  Related, because desperate and flashy; but, distantly, because, unlike the case of fuite en avant or doubling down, losing a Hail Mary play is no worse (does not impact your score) than losing a more conservative final play.   Given the rules of football, a swansong hail-Mary is entirely rational.

And:  bet your bottom dollar; go for broke.

~

A classic example of an unstable and self-defeating fuite  is the song about the “Little Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly”, for reasons left unspecified.  To get at the fly, she then deliberately swallowed a spider, which “wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her”; so to get rid of that, she swallowed a bird;  then a cat; then a dog; then a cow;  and finally a horse:  whereupon the song abruptly ends (on a rhyme:  “she died, of course”).

 

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

In his brilliantly-written book, Liar’s Poker (1989), Michael Lewis describes (p. 218)  the S&L crisis as of 1981, and the decision to go for broke:  “The U.S. Congress decided to let the savings and loans try to speculate their way out of trouble.”  (Speculation, of course, having been the way they got into this pickle in the first place.)

The Deeper Meaning of Columbus Day (2013)

As we do each year at this time, while the wheels of governance lie briefly idle, and ochre and russet creep into the leaf,

the lawnmowers having fallen silent,  the rakes not yet out of the shed,

we offer this classic essay on the discovery of America.

Certain people -- cranks, for the most part, after the fashion of Baconists -- strenuously maintain that the American continents were discovered well before Columbus.   And after extensive researches into ancient evidence, abetted by the most advanced techniques of modern science, we must concur to this extent:  The discovery happened a very very long time ago;  and it was made by none other than penguins.

Thoughts for Columbus Day

[Originally posted Monday, October 10, 2011]

Scene: The Earth.  Time: The last glaciation.

It was cold. -- How cold?

Cold enough for the seas to descend, or to freeze to solidity; so that feet might  dry-shod  pass the Bering Strait, leaving the tired old world  for the undiscovered new.

And such was the route (so historians tell it) by which the New World was first peopled. 

And yet these scholars neglect one simple fact:  It was so d*mned cold, so effing cold, that, any normal person, it’d freeze his f***ing b*lls off.

Which leads, by simple syllogism, to the novel yet suddenly irrefragable fact:  Who passed the Strait on that fateful day, were no men as we now know them, but such Beings as scoff, as laugh at ice -- their laughter bell-like in the frigid air.  And so we are forced to this startling, yet eminently logical conclusion: (I anticipate a Nobel, or at least a MacArthur, for noticing this): Native Americans are the lineal descendents of penguins.

            The contentious might object, that the migration route of the Amerindians went via the northern polar regions, whereas the penguins of today inhabit Antarctica, somewhat to the south. The objection may, however, be overcome, via – mm – symmetry considerations.

            To be sure, a people which could eventually settle in MesoAmerica and the Caribbean  must have lost, over time, their original solid penguinity, much as salamanders, long confined to subterranean caves, in time may lose their eyes; thus leading to the present-day American anthropoid fauna's sadly decayed state.  And this, no doubt, by the same Mendelian-chromosomal processes which originally led to their distant ancestors, beginning from humble vertebrate beginnings, to attain that exalted, richly feathered, impeccably streamlined  pinguinal state. (I invite the lab lackeys to iron out the details.)

Q.E.D.

~

For further, remarkably truth-like funfacts about prehistoric penguins,

simply grasp the mouse firmly in your right hand

(respectively the left, if a southpaw),

carefully place the cursor atop the highlighted text,

and …. CLICK !

=> When Penguins Ruled the Earth <=

(There!  Wasn’t that easy?)

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Io sono Cristoforo Colombo, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

[Update, midafternoon, Columbus Day 2013]  As my handy spying-on-American blogstats inform me, many of you now viewing this page are arriving from the NPR site.  Which means that most of you are probably federal employees, lounging and lolling about on the taxpayer’s dime on this federal holiday.  Whereas, me, I’m diligently blogging on the taxpayer’s dime.

So, to help fill your empty hours on this seemingly endless three-day weekend,

herewith some posts inspired by stories on or about NPR:

Visit beautiful People’s Korea

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-devil-wore-elevator-shoes-updated.html

NPR “scandal”

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/press-excess.html

Secret slush-fund

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-dark-side-of-world-of-dr-justice.html

Obama vs. LBJ

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/11/making-best-of-bad-bargain.html

On the weasel-words “Well, again …”

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/lets-nip-this-one-in-bud.html

And, for those of you fleeing the rigors of the ongoing NPR fund drive:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/02/winter-fund-drive.html

Essays specially for furloughed federal employees:

Reflections on the furlough (with bonus hamster):

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-furlough.html

Some improving reading-matter while you suffer heroically through the furlough:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/10/furlough-reading.html

In which we take back everything we ever said about the furlough:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/10/this-puts-matters-in-entirely-new-light.html

Furlough reading restricted to non-furloughed (essential) personnel:

“V/R”

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/acronym-of-day-vr.html

“They also serve, who only stand and analyze sphincter pads”

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/phrase-of-day-sphincter-pad.html

“Scenes from Elevator Life” (close-hold)

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/users-guide.html

(Hey there, you SBA no-load -- Hands off that mouse!)

.

Managing an Orderly Succession

The Constitution foresees the possibility of a President’s being unable to fulfil his duties (whether because ill, or dead, or sitting in Sing-Sing), and specifies his successor; and further deals with the case in which the Vice President should be similarly indisposed.  And a good thing, too, since much this scenario did in fact eventuate during the unsavory Nixon administration (before the shaming memory of which, Clio averts her gaze).   And although that foresightful document does not explicitly provide for the case that now confronts us, something analogous is afoot:  the Republicans in the House of Representatives have lost their reason.

As we argued earlier, it is time for that body to be declared legally incompetent.  And, as of yesterday, moves in this direction are afoot (Senate Leaders Take Reins on Shutdown Talks), with the (mostly) grown-ups in the Senate finally (belatedly) moving in to clean up the mess of spilled milk and broken crayons left in the soiled sandbox of the House.  Indignantly, some from the junior, or lower, body, have demanded that their betters and seniors should condescend to stand alongside the nursery miscreants, and (in their phrase)

“Grow a Backbone”

Now, to anyone who lived through the Nixon shambles, this phrase immediately calls to mind another, famous at the time:

“Grow a Penis”

which referred anagrammatically to Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s crude and nescient Veep, who was removed in tandem -- ostensibly for his sordid misdemeanors (which were real enough) but in actuality for his manifest unfitness to be President (a fact reportedly not lost on Nixon himself when he selected that portly nonentity as his back-up -- “Nixon’s insurance plan” against impeachment).

Ideally, the Congressmen would simply be dismissed, their offices left untenanted for a time, like the seats on the NLRB  kept vacant by the mulishness of Senate Republicans.  But out of charity (even to the least of God’s creatures) we might rather remove them to a sunny and brightly-painted Sheltered Workshop somewhere up in the western mountain meadows, where they can happily potter about and, I dunno, debate stuff, pass “laws” or something, and -- all passion spent -- docilely lie down on their blankies at nap-time.

~

The question of “Two-Tier Voting”

 The question then arises, how ever we came to such a pass.  And the first thing to realize is, these ills are not of recent date.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America for just shy of a year, 1831-2, and who found much to admire in our republic, noted with surprise  the low quality of the Congressmen:

Lorsque vous entrez dans la salle des représentants … vous vous sentez frappé de l’aspect vulgaire de cette grande assemblée. … Ce sont, pour la plupart, des avocats de village, des commerçants, ou même des hommes apparentant aux dernières classes.

-- De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835)

The more surprising to him, then, was the contrast with the vastly superior quality of the Senators:

A deux pas de là s’ouvre la salle du sénat, dont l’étroite enceinte renferme une grande partie des célébrités de l’Amérique. … Toutes les paroles qui s’échappent de cette assemblée  feraient honneur aux plus grands débats parlementaires d’Europe.

What could explain the disparity?

A contemporary American, puzzling, might think of the six-year term, which insulates the Senatorial incumbent against the swift-shifting winds of idle fancy;  and the statewide suffrage, so that the peculiarities of District 13, where everyone is everybody’s spouse and “cousin” (a category including sister and daughter, mayhap), get washed-out some in the statistical accumulation of the state as a whole.   Neither of these, however, suffice to explain the gap that yawned before Tocqueville, and which he explained quite otherwise:

Je ne vois qu’un seul fait qui l’explique : l’élection qui produit la chambre des représentants est directe;  celle dont le sénat émane  est soumise à deux degrés.

For, when the Republic was born, Senators were not elected directly by the sons of the soil, but by their legislative representatives in each state. 

Tocqueville emphasized that there was nothing undemocratic about this:  said representatives were not appointed by the Federal government, or the Supreme Court, or the Pope or what have you:  They were the freely chosen legislators of the people.   Yet somehow, this intermediate layer of filtering -- of refinement -- produced better result than the arithmetic sum of popular knee-jerks.   After all, the average voter had to go slop the hogs;  he didn’t have time to go working his way through The Wealth of Nations, whereas it was the job of elected solons  to dwell upon such things.

Tocqueville drew the necessary lesson:

Il est facile d’apercevoir dans l’avenir, un moment où les républiques américaines  seront forcées de multiplier les deux degrés dans leur système électoral,  sous peine de se perdre misérablement  parmi les écueils de la démocratie.

Famous last words!  So far from generalizing this successful experiment, the nation abolished it, by the Seventeenth Amendment (1913).

~

It was recently reported that, in response to a cockeyed Supreme Court ruling that illegal aliens could vote in Federal elections (why not penguins?  why not let the penguins vote!), certain states have introduced what the journalists called “two-tier” balloting, with state and local elections requiring proof of voter identity, whereas Federal elections will remain open to fraud:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/2-states-plan-2-tier-system-for-balloting.html

This use of the term “two-tier”  is perhaps something of a misnomer,  however, as it principally refers to structured and generally sequentially ordered subdivisions of a unity:  apprenticeship vs. journeyman status;  primary vs. general-election balloting.  Here, rather, the reference is simply to independent non-intersecting areas of elections, which have always existed and whose separateness did not spring into being with the Supreme Court ruling or the local response thereto.   The two-tier or two-stage system of pre-1913 Senatorial elections is much more substantial.

~

The bicameral legislature is a highly non-obvious invention.   And it pains us to report, that the public schools I attended -- elementary, junior high, and senior high -- tasked  to educate us in the practices and logic of the democratic republic or republican democracy, here signally failed.   Having two different chambers was apparently just an oddity -- a bit of inexplicable Yankee tradition like Groundhog Day -- which led to duplication of effort and necessitated time-consuming Senate/House conferences to resolve the differences in their respective bills.   It seemed as arbitrary a dichotomy as the “shirts” and the “skins” as which we (just the lads, s’entend) were divided for scratch teams in sports.

One can only put forward, in the schools’ excuse, that the original sharp difference as conceived by the Founding Fathers, was blunted by the 17^th Amendment.

~

In the astonishingly clear-sighted vision of the Founders (and here I’m not being just traditionalist or pious -- they really did a darned good job) these ultralocally-elected Congressmen, changed as frequently as socks, were to serve, not only to represent the people -- to serve as their representatives -- but to be -- statistically, sociologically -- representative of the people, in all their parti-colored and manic variety.   They were to serve as a sort of locally-penned, scientific stool-sample of what-all was going on in the hearts and minds back in the hills and hollers of an expanding nation that at first was mostly frontier (and without fiber-optic Internet service to bring the distant news to the Capital;  the Founders had to make do with dial-up).   And the Founders fully anticipated that that chamber would be a bubbling cauldron of emotions, fantasies, factions, conspiracy theories, quack nostrums, and wacky (and sometimes brilliant) proposals.   The Senatorial party, having coolly faced-down the Redcoats, were prepared to face even this.   

In the reigning metaphor of the day the Senate was to serve as “the saucer in which to cool the hot tea” that the House could be expected to serve up.  That imagery no longer works in our own latte-sipping era -- I’ve never actually seen anyone use a saucer in that fashion (though come to think of it, a scalding black veinte  really could use one).  

~

Having brought us to the brink, and now losing their nerve, Republicans are now trying to scoff the whole thing aside as a non-issue:

Representative Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican, played down the importance of this week’s deadline  and said the White House “is trying to scare the markets.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-13/effort-shifts-to-senate-leaders-to-resolve-fiscal-impasse.html

The slightest acquaintance with the foreign press would suffice to disabuse him of that notion.   To quote simply the broadcast I happen to be listening to in the background at this very moment -- one very far indeed from White House control --  consider the (basically pro-Arab, and Islam-friendly) site Medi1.com, a joint French-Moroccan venture (and very professionally run),  which (by its writ) by no means focuses on America, but rather the francophone and arabophone pourtour of the Mediterranean -- the way they characterized l’enjeu this morning was:  “Eviter un Armageddon économique pour toute la planète”.   Perhaps somewhat dramatically phrased, that, but the point is:   The whole world is watching, and taking this very seriously indeed.

~

For more from this pen, try these:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 24 January 2015]  Precedents from European history, ca. 1900:

Parliamentary minorities now wielded a new weapon … : obstruction. … Here, the old idea that the rights of minorities must be protected  was extended into the absolute refusal to allow the expression of unwelcome opinions. … Open discussion was the chief pillar of parliamentarianism, but as soon as the chamber admitted biter enemies of the regime  as well as polite dissenters, parliamentary debates  degenerated into farce.  It had all started in the Mother of Parliaments, with Parnell and his Irishmen in the 1880s;   but in the Hungarian and Austrian parliaments, too, there were many who felt too strongly about their cause  to play the parliamentary game.

-- Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:  Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 138

.

Hour Wars (fusée horaire)

Time was, if an Anglo-American sought a safe unflustering topic to discuss in the drawing room, topic of choice was the weather.    But now, in the midst of global climate change and its strenuous deniers, so bland and traditional a greeting as “Hot enough for you?” is liable to provoke a fistfight.

Alright -- Into the lumber-room of forbidden subjects it goes, lying anyhow among the jumble of race, class, religion, economics, sex, and all the other no-nos.   So, what remains as a sufficiently anodyne conversation opener?

How about, “What time is it?” ? -- Well, so far  that sally leads to no bloodshed on the Yankee side of the Atlantic:  But do not try it in Spain.  That nation is now heatedly debating bringing its time-zone into line with geographical reality.   Sounds straightforward enough.    But -- How did it ever get out of sync in the first place?  Turns out it was nakedly political;  you can hear the strange tale here:

   http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5631230

In summary:  The dictator Franco, back in his heyday, changed his country’s highterto realistic and conformable timezone  to be one hour later -- so as to share the timezone of the fascist dictatorships, Germany and Italy, to the east!   And to this day, no-one has undone it.

Local News

Yesterday evening, I almost blogged about two things.

(1)  As those of you know who are on my mailing list:  Last night, my wife and I witnessed what might have been the aftermath of a gruesome and macabre murder.  As nothing whatever appeared in the media for some hours after the discovery of the corpse, I considered at least mentioning it online.

[To be continued, D.V.  My wife needs the computer, and so I retire for the night.

However, should I (cholilleh) by any chance tomorrow turn up dead --

Don’t believe what you might read in the press:

It wasn’t suicide.

The finger points to …

=>   MR  BIG  <=

…   …      ……………………..  ]

[Update]  To resume.

However,  abstention was in order.  For, interesting though the incident might be for those who have often walked that bucolic lakeside dock, improbably  overlooking the lieu des faits, it really is nothing more than a local police-blotter fait-divers, of which the world has millions every day.  To discuss the matter on this site would (especially as I have no inside dope whatsoever) to descent to the level of FaceBook, that venue of the ephemeral.

The only detail possibly worth sharing, as presenting a sign of the times, was the sight of a team of grim-faced burly firemen, carrying a long gaff suitable for fishing cadavers out of the slimy depths, incongruously decked out in pale pink shirts.  When I mentioned this to a friend at work, she explained that it was for “Breast Cancer Awareness”.  But in that case, why weren’t the gentlemen likewise decked out in sombreros?  (Hispanic Heritage Month.)

[Later update]  The story is getting weirder, so I’d better elaborate.  This, from an e-mail sent to friends:

Early this evening, S. and I walked to the library, via the dockside on Lake *****.   There were half a dozen people standing around, and a couple of policemen.  Someone pointed to what they thought looked like a human corpse floating not far from the dock.  I peered to make it out;  it looked like Hollywood’s idea of a zombie.

Now, today at work, a friend had given me a nice Halloween drawing, so the first thing that occurred to me was that it was a Halloween prank.  A couple standing beside us concurred.

Twenty minutes later, as we returned from the library, we saw: half a dozen patrol cars; two or three fire engines; a large inflatable boat labeled “marine rescue”; an ambulence or two; and various other vehicles with flashing or whirling lights.  Some firemen were trudging back from the scene, one of them holding a long gaff.  “Uhh… looks like it wasn’t a Halloween prank”, I said.  The fireman would neither confirm nor deny, saying only “The police are handling it.”

The dock was now surrounded by yellow tape.  No attempt had been made to fish the body out.  From a new angle, and now taking the whole thing more seriously, I could see that it was indeed human, or had been;  its hands stuck up from the water, rigid as claws.

[Update 10/10/13]   I shared this incident with some friends and coworkers, current or former residents of this town, and however slight it be in the larger scheme of things, it piqued their interest.  One of them today asked whether the “Flyer”, the local giveaway rag, had reported on the story (which is indeed a big one for our sleepy hamlet).   And so I dragged today’s issue from our sopping front lawn, dried it, and perused.

My heart gave a start, confronted with a large color photograph of the dockside area of that very lake!  Only -- no mention of the body.   Instead, a story about the little three-foot-by-three-foot artificial boxed islands, planted with tall grass, which have been dubbed “floating wetlands”.  Cute, but actually a silly designation, since the point of wetlands is to absorb excess water, whereas this particular lakelet, itself brought into being only by the labors of engineers, suffers rather from chronic aqueous insufficiency.

[Update, a couple of days later]  Finally, the briefest of mentions has appeared on the Web.  The deceased was in his thirties, race and name unknown, of no known address.  But -- get this -- the police are saying, “No signs of foul play.”

Corpse appears in broad daylight in six inches of water, looking like a mummy that has been dead ten thousand years.  No-one knows how it got there.  Hands turned into zombie claws.  “No signs of foul play.”

Right.

[Update, evening of 20 October 2013]  No -- Wait -- this is too weird.

My wife was driving home from the computer lab this evening, on **** **** Parkway, which runs by that very lake, and noticed two squad cars.  Between them, on the roadway … a large, compact pile of human intestines.  But no body.   “They looked fresh,” she said.

[Update 22 October 2013]  And again, no reflection of this in any news source that I can discern.

My wife commented:   If we just chanced upon these incidents, within a few days and within walking distance of each other, and they go unreported -- how much else might be going on that we don’t know about?

Both these bizarre incidents look less like accidents, or any sort of crime that makes straightforward sense -- more like warnings, like the horse’s head in the bed.

This hamster is for deliminative purposes only, demarcating between two unrelated topics.

(2)  Like several million other folks, I watched, more or less mesmerized, that video taken by the helmet cam of a biker, part of the wolfpack running down a motorist from out of town, in a car likewise containing his wife and young child.  But again, the interest of the incident does not necessarily extend beyond the confines of Manhattan.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzkePTTALg

But since this week’s New Yorker promotes it to its Talk of the Town section which goes out to the whole world,  presumably the proverbial Ladies of Dubuque are even now Tweeting about it, so I’ll toss in my dime (inflationary value of two cents):  the moreso as Mr. Paumgarten’s effort in that magazine turns out to be a strange, free-associational piece, by no means reportorial, but starting elsewhere (in the movies), then meandering into the incident, and back out again.

The streetscape is the sort to which we have become acculturated by video games:  featureless, depopulated.  And with the anomie common to such pastimes (such as Grand Theft Auto, where we are set into the driver’s seat of a criminal), human values mean nothing:  we can equally well identify with the biker posse of pursuers (Git ‘im!) or with the automobile driver (knock off as many bikers as you can -- pock, pock, pock).

Nevertheless, it is a real street, behind the shaded windows of which (we presume) actual people have been born, and have died, and have watched TV.   Which leads us to the actual mini-observation that I wanted to get off my chest.

Chase scenes are among my favorite things in movies;  the medium is suited for this like no other.   But for these to work, certain liberties must be taken with engineering realities and the laws of physics.   Thus:  Vehicles keep racing along despite sustaining improbable levels of damage;  traffic (when present at all) always obligingly lets the racers by;  and when the inevitable crash eventually comes, airbags do not deploy (since that would obscure our view of the highly-paid star).

Of the conventions involved in movies shot in New York City, one that most requires the suspension of disbelief, is that, whenever the hero needs to go out and brood, or the like, the streets are conveniently deserted.   That never happens in actual life, save perhaps the early morning of New Year’s Day.    So in this video, since it is a video, we don’t immediately cluck in derision at the fiction of their being no traffic other than that required for the chase, on this major street in broad daylight -- but then we realize with a shock -- Wait -- This is a real street, in real time, and the chase is real, and several people really did get hurt.

End-Of-Text hamster hereby ends this essay.

[Afterthought, 20 October 2013]  The reasons I blogged about the latter incident, were:

(1) The creepily intimate weirdness of having a first-person, helmet-cam view  of an ongoing violent incident.

(2) The increasing resemblance of life to a video-game.

However, the reason this story figured prominently in the media  had nothing to do with that, but rather the fact that  one of the bikers who attacked the driver  was an undercover cop.

A very tricky job, that;  we salute those who can pull it off.  His participation in the gang’s crime  is suggestive of the Stockholm Syndrome, but probably goes deeper than that.  After all, the hostages didn’t choose to be hostages;  whereas an undercover cop chooses that risky line of work, and already at the outset  joins the gang.

Further reflection would take this insight deeper still:  the way in which we are, each one of us, undercover in whatever environment life has currently thrown us into.  As:  An old antiwar guy, who finds himself in a work environment which ….

.