Clarence Thomas has published his memoirs. Whoopty-damn-do. I confess I haven't read it, but from all reports, it seems that the Judge holds a grudge, or rather an extensive portfolio of grudges. So do I, Judge, so do I. I'm still angry, too.

I have been keeping journals for nigh on thirty years, long before you could get an MFA in Dear Diary, and I have a record. Take this entry:

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the starry crown?
Good Lord show me the way

O sinners, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O sinners, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the robe and crown?
Good Lord show me the way

As sung by Alison Kraus for O Brother, Where Art Thou.

This was the first thought that bloomed in my deviant brain I heard the news about the I-35W bridge going down into the Mississippi at Minneapolis:

"What a rush it must have been to ride that bridge down to the river."

        Pontem perpetui mansuram in saecula mundi.

       (I leave a bridge forever in the centuries of the world.)

                           Caius Julius Lacer

Lacer was a Roman engineer. He built a bridge across the Tagus River in what is now Spain for the Emperor Trajan round about 105 A.D. A bridge which still stands and is still in use nineteen centuries after its construction, despite attempted demolition in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars.

Today the bridge is called Puente de Alcantara, or Bridge (Spanish) of the Bridge (Arabic). It is 194m/637ft long and 8m/26ft wide, spanning the river with six arches up to 58m/190ft high. Halfway across the bridge is a triumphal arch in honor of Trajan.

Built of granite blocks laid without mortar. One thousand nine hundred and two years ago.

To say this bridge has stood the test of time is not only a trite kick-it-it’s-dead cliché, not to mention a sublimely ridiculous litotes (an understatement), but also the simple truth. Caius Julius Lacer’s epitaph has yet to be gainsaid.

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore, do they?

AP Poll: 'None of the above' leads Republican field

2007-07-17 18:03:26

WASHINGTON (AP) - And the leading Republican U.S. presidential candidate is ... none of the above.

The headline says it all, folks. 23 percent of Republicans in the latest AP/IPSOS Poll prefer NONE OF THE ABOVE over all the declared candidates of the GOP. Rudy 'Judy' Giuliani, Fred 'TV' Thompson, John 'Capt. Queeg' McCain, Mitt 'Headroom' Romney, they all take a back seat to...NONE OF THE ABOVE! A candidate we can all embrace, no matter how unlike minded we are on the issues. None of the Above has no issues, and takes issue with none, always in agreement in the midst of disagreement. None of the Above promises nothing to nobody...and delivers.

Less is more below the fold...

1. Belittle the act of coming out. Say it doesn't matter. "So what?"

2. Trivialize the personal costs, risks, and obstacles to the act of coming out.

3. Do not directly accuse, but imply, with whatever subtlety you can manage, that the act of coming out is somehow tacky, shameful, suspect and/or the result of the desire for personal aggrandizement and/or a personality disorder.

Did you ever lose someone and feel like you'd lost one of your own limbs?

The Amputee  

The amputee lies awake in an invalid bed.
A cloud of tattered moths
arc and peck,
a smear of ghosts
on a hot bare bulb.

Dismembered kisses
trace shivery arcs
in blood light,
curved needles lace
pursed lips,
eyes trailing smoldering threads
drawing the wound closed.

Wing dust sputters
on the imprisoned tongue
as the amputee lies awake
in an invalid bed.

"Humanity was My Business!" the Ghost of Jacob Marley thunders, with a good long shake of his chain and lock boxes, in reply to his former partner Ebeneezer Scrooge's remark, "You always were a good businessman, Jacob," in Charles Dickens' most famous story, A Christmas Carol—you may not have read it, but you surely have seen one of the 500 or so TV or film adaptations (I like the Alistair Sim version, myself).

President Calvin Coolidge is said to have said:

"The business of America is business."

Scientist Geoffrey Miller said, somewhat more recently,

"The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains."

What's all this business about business?

Virtually everybody in the virtual world has been enjoying a vast collective orgasm of schadenfreude at Paris Hilton's tearful court appearance and subsequent return to the County Jail. I know it's hard to have sympathy for someone like Paris, a twit whose twat makes so many public appearances that it has its own hairdresser. I think she should serve out her time in a jail cell, not in her living room. But I do have sympathy in the most visceral way for anyone who spent even one day in any kind of involuntary confinement by the state--I've been in jail--have you?

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born in 121 CE and became the Emperor of Rome in 161 CE. He was afforded the best education available to an upper class Roman, and followed the Stoic tradition. He spent the majority of his time as Emperor with his legions on the marches of the Empire, putting down revolts and repelling incursions by what today are referred to as "non-state actors." He contracted an infection and died in camp on the Danube in 180 CE.  

While on campaign he wrote—in Greek—what have been passed down to us as his "Meditations." In essence, he was keeping a journal in which he collected his thoughts, took notes, wrote down quotes, and so on—today perhaps he would blogging his 'meditations'—or, like me, he would keep a private stash of scribbles, stored, in my case, in a tottering and still growing stack of well-thumbed Moleskine memorandum books.

HONORED GLORY

"Here lies in
honored glory
an American soldier
known only to God..."

Here, lies are solemn.

Here, lies are told
in the cadence of boot heels ringing on stone,
in the snap of a bolt shooting home
in the breech of a polished rifle, held at port arms
in white gloved hands.

Here, we fold our flag
and tell ourselves
the soldier died bravely
in a just cause.

Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize winning physicist, the Pauli in the Pauli Exclusion Principle, as the tale is told, once succinctly reviewed a young physicist's paper, saying sadly, "That's not right; it's not even wrong."  I heard a soundbyte of Bush on the Beeb yesterday, and those three words said themselves to me with my own mouth. Not even wrong. Almost every statement that comes out of Howdy Dubya is so dumb and delusional that his assertions (pre-programed or otherwise) do not even rise to the level of being wrong. Not falsifiable, as Karl Popper put it; not susceptible to proof, because the proposition has no testable hypothesis. The Decider doesn't have a plan or a goal, much less a strategy, he has articles of faith so slippery that they can explain any fact and elude any test.

Oscar Wilde said, on hearing of the demise of his nemesis Lord Douglas, "I have no doubt that he is burning in heaven."

Jerry Falwell is dead since yesterday, and he will be dead a long time. That is some consolation. Some. Not much.

A co-worker me told that his wife knew Falwell personally, and when she got the news of his death by cell phone while driving on the expressway, she was so upset she almost had a wreck and had to pull over.

I can't find it in my black heart to feel the slightest bit of sympathy for the bereaved. I couldn't squeeze out even a single crocodile tear if you tied me to a chair and made me watch the PTL Club until I was as mad as Jose Padilla.  

On the other hand, I'm not singing and dancing like a Munchkin after Dorothy drops in on the Wicked Witch without leaving the house. Falwell was well past his "pull by" date, but the damage is already done. The man did a truly monumental amount of harm to our country and the planet in the three score and 13 years allotted to him by Fate. I do mourn. I mourn what he did in this life--I mourn that he ever lived.

U.S Army "Contractors" travelling in Canada earlier this year filed confidential reports that lead to a Defense Department espionage warning about mysterious coin-like objects with RFDs—radio frequency devices.

According to the Associated Press,

The worried contractors described...the coin-like objects, each marked with a sinister red dot...as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

I haven't posted a diary in some time. To be honest, I've been playing a kind of involuntary waiting game, a Cassandra struck dumb by the sheer enormity of the disaster we have loosed upon ourselves. Call me Chicken Little, but the sky really is falling.

As the events of the past few months have swept inexorably onwards, the words and music of an old country and western/pop song have begun to play in my head, as if a barfly in a disreputable dive somewhere in a seedy part of my frontal lobes had dumped a handful of quarters into an old Wurlitzer juke box and punched the button for the same song over and over again:

You got to know when to hold 'em,
know when to fold 'em,
know when to walk away
and know when to run.

Curtis Emerson LeMay  is, as architects don't like journalists to put it, "the principal architect," of one of the most pernicious memes in human history: The myth of strategic air power; the idea that the possession and use of technologically superior weaponry raining death from the air can win a war (and the peace) for a modern nation state.

You don't have to consult 50 years of case law and commentary by military lawyers. Almost every citizen who has not been hypnotized by Fox News or Talk Radio knows what cruel, humiliating, and degrading treatment is because we all have been humiliated, degraded, and treated cruelly at one time or another in some way or another, especially those of us who are non-rich, non-white, non-Christian, and non-conforming--You don't have to be an ex-POW to figure it out, though I imagine being locked in a concrete box for years at a time might clarify the issue for you.

Note: Since Dr. Omed is unable to figure out how to post a YouTube video to his diary (Being a relative newbie here in Kosville, I don't even know whether that's allowed, or even possible) I am reduced to posting a link to my blog, Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival, where I have posted the YouTube Viddy. SEE IT NOW. For pilgrims and seekers who fear the possibility of being struck dumb or going blind from watching Dr. Omed blaspheming in living pixels, I'm posting the text of the Sermonette as the diary:

In these latter days of the American Republic, it has become obligatory for all national politicians to end their speeches with some variation of the phrase "God Bless America." As a patriotic true blue citizen of these United States--never mind that I'm an atheist--tonight I feel like chiming in: