New research hints at an unthinkable, abominable use of the remains of unborn children.

Is rate of lesbianism closely correlated to incidence of a certain hormone imbalance?

Meredith Kapushion, a sometime Hillsdale College Honors Program member and snack bar personality, has started blogging, albeit in a group.

New Car!

For all of those who have associated me with my rusty Celica since before Hillsdale, you may be grieved to know that I have retired the hulk and replaced it with a used blue-black Honda Accord of great condition!

"I dissent."

Today is a day that will live in infamy. I was dismayed by our high court's Lawrence decision, but it wasn't unexpected. Scalia's dissent was very good--and very bitter. Everyone should read it. Maybe I should blog it.

Ron Weasley is still alive!

I wasn't planning to, but found myself at B&N on Friday evening and then proceeded to stand in line for 40 minutes to obtain Harry Potter V. I then stayed up til 5:20 a.m. and got 306 pp. into the tome. I finished Tuesday night. Probably better than IV, but not as good as II or III.

There will be eight books after all!

The thing I was most surprised by in Harry Potter V was J. K. Rowling's clever ruse for writing an extra book. But putting Dolores Umbridge in charge at Hogwarts, she was able to fail the entire student body for that year. Accordingly, the next volume will be "Year Five at Hogwarts (Repeated)." This will allow Rowling to write not seven, but eight books in all, and milk the franchise for a corresponding portion of additional earnings. :(

Final Grades

I got my final grades today and was pleased to discover that the fifth semester (Fall 2002), the grades from which I had feared to check, was in fact my best semester at OSU--3 As, including both seminars. My final average was a measly 2.67, though; the 40 quarter-credit hours (i.e., my "Semitics minor") was 3.71. I suppose this does correlate somewhat with my final undergrad GPA of 3.675.

Kissing feet

A conversation between Harriet Vane and the Dean of Shrewsbury College:

"I wanted to find out whether Annie could really have seen what she said she saw. These people sometimes let their imagination run away with them. If you don't mind, I'm going to lock these doors and remove the keys. I'd rather like a second opinion."

"Aha!" said the Dean. "The exquisite gentleman who kissed my feet at St. Cross Road, crying, Vera incessu patuit dean?"

[Recalling Aen. I.405: et vera incessu patuit dea. Ille ubi matrem.]

"That sounds characteristic. Well, Dean, you have got pretty feet. I've noticed them."

"They have been admired," said the Dean, complacently, "but seldom in so public a place after five minute's acquaintance. I said to his lordship, 'You are a foolish young man.' He said, 'A man, certain; and sometimes foolish enough to be young.' 'Well,' I said, 'please get up: you can't be young here.' So then he said, very nicely, 'I get your pardon for behaving like a montebank; I have no excuse to offer; so will you forgive me?' So I asked him to dinner."

- Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, ch. 16.

Suffice it to say that I've had occasion and inclination, though never quite the nerve, to be such a foolish young man as Lord Peter Wimsey.

I didn't realize that I had accumulated so much junk mail and wastepaper while in law school!

Excellent Adventure

I spent the weekend with my brother and sister-in-law, more or less celebrating my birthday in the process. The drive out along US 142/42 was an interesting tour of a part of Ohio I haven't seen for a while--from the old United Technologies plant we almost purchased outside London to the triad of little universities just east of Xenia. We visted the Cincinnati Art Museum, dined in downtown Cincy, and attended a performance of a contemporary play at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. The museum was disappointing relative to my memories, but this was first visit since seeing the Louvre, the National Gallery, the Vatican, and the Uffizi. They've reorganized some of the Hiram Powers marbles, and I don't think I succeeded in finding all of them. _Gingham Dog_ was an interesting and unexpectedly intense play depicting a marital breakdown between a white man and a black woman in New York in 1969. In many ways a fascinating, multivalent commentary on the several sides of the Civil Rights movement, it came at a high price: I don't think I've ever been so emotionally drained from watching leading actors yell at each other. All in all, a very good weekend away!

I'm listening to Hail to the CThief and am rather glad that it's at least more immediately penetrable than Those Two Awful Albums after OK Computer.

Done with OSU

I'm officially done with all of my OSU coursework. Final round of finals are complete. It's a very odd feeling. I feel that I've truly graduated now, or that I'm on the outside looking in, or that it's time to get on with life, or (even!) just a little sad. :)

I think I did pretty well on my Arabic final, and then went and read the beginning of Gilgamesh XI, went out for pizza with the "guys" (my Akkadian class of classicists and Hebraists), then smoked a Partagas Black, then had (another) beer with Dr. DiCarlo (a polymath chiropractor, classicist, and budding orientalist whom I shall miss considerably), and had coffee with a friend who recently passed her Ph.D. generals.

Right now, I'm staring at The Critique of Pure Reason and wondering if I need to read the Meditations first. And it's now Friday the Thirteenth!

Perhaps Aaron Streett will clerk for Rehnquist after all.

Almost done!

I'm almost done with my quarter coursework. All that remains for me to do will be completed next Thursday: to take an Arabic final (no mean feat, though), to attend a makeup Akkadian class in which we'll read from the section on the Flood in Gilgamesh, and then to go out for pizza with the Akkadian class.

Then, I'll be completely done with OSU and free of academic commitments. It will be a nice change. Time to do something economically productive and read widely outside of particular assignments and projects.

Life of a Sharia executioner. Lovely! I really loved the part about amputations. Maybe I shouldn't try to go over there seeking work....

I must say, the recent trip by Geoge W. Bush to the Middle East reminds me of nothing so much as the intervention of a Roman emperor between feuding clients. Ave, Caesar? Perhaps. iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.

A brand-spanking-new Seawolf-class SSN was attacked in the Arctic Circle by a polar bear.

The International Space Station nearly collided with an Italian satellite

I don't usually read his musings, but Rick Capezza has a smashing good retort to a variety of reformed kids who are apparently scandalized by the sex scene in Matrix Reloaded.

There was an strong earthquake in Sendai recently. I was there, in the subway even, just about five months ago, looking up family history.

I just learned that two of my former colleagues at Hillsdale College, have been keeping rather well-developed blogs: Josh "The Big Blue Smurf made me known as 'Wa'" Mercer and one of Hillsdale's finer polymaths, Steven Fettig

Niblets from Manfred

I read Byron's drama this evening, for the first time, and was moved by (just) a few lines which I shall reproduce here:

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life (I.10-11).

The Preacher's sentiment, well put.

               a tyrant-spell,
Which had its birthplace in a star condemn'd,
The burning wreck of a demolish'd world,
A wandering hell in the eternal space (I.43-46).

               Yet there was one--. . .
She was like me in lineaments-- her eyes
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty;
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears-- which I had not;
And tenderness-- but that I had for her;
Humility-- and that I never had.
Her faults were mine-- her virtues were her own--
I loved her, and destroy'd her! . . .
Not with my hand, but heart-- which broke her heart;
It gazed on mine, and wither'd. I have shed
Blood, but not hers-- and yet her blood was shed--
I saw, and could not stanch it (II.198-215).

Aye, if only the Gretchen we seek were a fellow intellectual. :(

l was detain'd repairing shattered thrones,
Marrying fools, restoring dynasties,
Avenging men upon their enemies,
And making them repent their own revenge;
Goading the wise to madness, from the dull
Shaping out oracles to rule the world
Afresh, for they were waxing out of date,
And mortals dared to ponder for themselves,
To weigh kings in the balance, and to speak
Of freedom, the forbidden fruit. (II.360-369).

               his aspirations
Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth,
And they have only taught him what we know--
That knowledge is not happiness, and science
But an exchange of ignorance for that
Which is another kind of ignorance (II.428-433).

Old man! there is no power in holy men,
Nor charm in prayer, nor purifying form
Of penitence, nor outward look, nor fast,
Nor agony, nor, greater than all these,
The innate tortures of that deep despair
Which is remorse without the fear of hell
But all in all sufficient to itself
Would make a hell of heaven,-- can exorcise
From out the unbounded spirit, the quick sense
Of its own sins, wrongs, sufferance, and revenge
Upon itself; there is no future pang
Can deal that justice on the self-condemn'd
He deals on his own soul (III.66-78).

Another Faustian sentiment.

               Glorious Orb! the idol
Of early nature, and the vigorous race
Of undiseased mankind the giant sons
Of the embrace of angels, with a sex
More beautiful than they, which did draw down
The erring spirits who can ne'er return (III.174-179).


I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim, and solitary loveliness,
I learn'd the language of another world.
I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,-- upon such a night
I stood within the Coloseum's wall,
Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome.
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bay'd beyond the Tiber; and
More near from out the Caesars' palace came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,
Of distant sentinels the fitful song
Begun and died upon the gentle wind.
Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach
Appear'd to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bowshot. Where the Caesars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through levell'd battlements,
And twines its roots with the imperial hearths,
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth;--
But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!
While Caesar's chambers, and the Augustan halls
Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.--
And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften'd down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill'd up,
As 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old,--
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.(III.263-301)

This long soliloquy seems to me to be the most beautiful part of the poem; in part, because I remember all too well central Rome at night, with its shadows and antique romance. Oh, how it draws one to itself! :)

Well, I've added a few features to this "blogspot." And I learnt a lot about debugging HTML in the process!

Is SARS really of extraterrestial origin?

Thulcandra as seen from Malacandra--first pictures!

Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

East Coker, V.