Fun............................

 

..............................the science of naming things.

Rudolph.......

 

more fun here

Not Me..............................

      The God with whom you are having problems, or whom you hate or ridicule, is not the God we are talking about.

     When we talk about goodness, an animating intelligence in the universe and in our hearts or a pervasive positive unity or presence, we are not talking about an old bearded guy in the sky, Parvati, or a Jewish Palestinian baby.  We are talking about a higher power, a power that might be called Not Me, a kindness, a patience, a hope, which is everywhere, even in our annoying, self-centered, fraudulent selves.

     The lower powers—greed, hatred, addiction, ignorance—are easy to connect with and describe, but a higher power is not easily defined.  It can't be controlled, manipulated, or appropriated.  It opens us and heals us and brings us together, and turns hearts of stone into human hearts.  Anytime you are experiencing love, you are experiencing the God we are talking about.  But as novelist David James Duncan says, "God" is the "worst nickname ever."

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

About those meetings.................

 Accenture's team also discovered that something that nearly every meeting does is a waste of time: introductions.  The data show that everyone except for the person speaking is neurologically frustrated during these recitations.  Instead of an introduction, Accenture now puts names on paper tents in front of attendees. Using name tents also avoids "introduction creep" in which one person offers an in-depth description of his or her job, career and personal goals, sporting activities, children, and dog.  People are able to meet each other during frequent breaks without formal introduction.

-Paul J. Zak, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness

A worthy suggestion ...................

 We have to come up with a new word for "reporters" because they are not "reporting" the news but instead spinning propaganda - so calling them reporters becomes Orwellian. How about calling them "liberal artists?"

-as culled from here

Opening paragraphs................

      Salmon Portland Chase never liked his name.  In his early twenties, Chase wrote to a college classmate that he was thinking of changing his "awkward, fishy name" to something more impressive, like Spencer Payne Cheyce.  Five years later, he had another idea:  Samuel Paca Chase, taking the names of one of the early justices of the Supreme Court, Samuel Chase, whom Chase believed was a distant relation, and William Paca, another signatory of the Declaration of Independence, apparently simply because his last name started with P.  During the Civil War, when an admirer wrote that he was thinking of naming his son Salmon Portland, Chase replied that he "had the misfortune to be born about a year after my uncle Salmon Chase died at Portland; and to have a sort of monument to his memory made of me by giving me the name of Salmon Portland."  His uncle "was an excellent man and Portland a very respectable city, but somehow I never liked the name derived from them."  Chase urged the father to think of "the feelings of your boy, fifteen years hence or twenty," and to find a better name.

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival

It may be piling on, but I have to agree .....

The Washington Commanders is the single worst team name in all of pro sports. Try and think of a worse team name than the "Commies"- you won't be able to... 

-Chris Lynch

It's a good thing "social" media hadn't.................

 ................................been invented yet, or things might have gotten really nasty:

"At the beginning of the contest the Progress had declared that Huey would not resort to criticism of his enemies but would discuss issues.  Then, with a fine disregard for logic or consistency, the paper predicted that his speeches would be a welcome contrast to the 'tawdry howls of his senile, asinine, scurrilous' foes."

-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long

Ed. Notes: The contest was for a seat in the U. S. Senate.  The Progress was a newspaper controlled by Huey.  The year was 1930.

Checking in with Althouse.....................

 As cut-and-pasted from this post:

While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: he likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signalling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics....

Democrats are crazy to let conservatism take possession of the crude, manly sector!

That, in my limited experience, is a fairly sizable sector.

Yep........................

"The world defies our attempts to confine it with neat definitions."

-Tim Harford, from this post

So call me Steve..................

Johnny Cash........................................

…….........….was ahead of his time with A Boy Named Sue.

Fifty years ago...............................

Johnny Cash..................................................A Boy Named Sue

Surely they will wake up..................

.............................once they realize they are morphing into the "new Victorians."  Although with what passes for history teaching today, they might not understand that it's not a compliment.

Something to look forward to...........

Opening paragraphs....................

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you will all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best "Poor Uncle Claudius" am now about to write this strange history of my life;  starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, about eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.

-Robert Graves,  I, Claudius:  From The Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius Born 10 B.C. Murdered And Deified A.D. 54

thanks Michael

Puncture......................

Irreconcilable differences between old and new can be found in something as seemingly trivial as naming conventions.  The industrial age insisted on portentous-sounding names of great seriousness and formality, to validate the organizations which spoke with the voice of authority:  "Bank of America," "National Broadcasting Corporation,"  "New York Times."  Each of these three names stood for a professional hierarchy which claimed a monopoly of specialized knowledge.  They symbolized a starched-collar kind of mastery, and they meant to impress.  Even the lowest-ranking person in these organizations, the names implied, had risen far above the masses.

The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order:  "Yahoo!,"  "Google," "Twitter,"  "Reddit," "Flickr," "Photobucket," "Bitcoin."  Without having asked the people in question, I feel reasonable sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company "National Search Engine Corporation" and Mark Zuckerberg never felt tempted by "Social Connections Center of America."  It wasn't the style.

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt of the Public

Comedy for the ages....................

Abbott & Costello..............................................Who's On First

Faithful readers .............................

..............will have noticed a name change in the header above.   My long-term partner in the real estate brokerage business recently decided it was time for him to retire.  He has kindly allowed his name to be connected to this blog, with no editorial input, for the past nine years.  It just seemed appropriate, out of respect to him, to retire his name from these pages as well.

Ah, government.........................