Category Archives: Hmmm . . .

Testing, testing, 123 . . .

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Thanks, Erin. 🙂

Herewith, the rules:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

My wife happened to be walking up to me with a book just as I caught the tag, so the book is Camp’s Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B. C. to the Present (which should be a fruitful source for this sort of thing).

(Our topic is “Greed,” btw; the book is arranged thematically.)

“Yuppies’ creed: ‘I want it all and I want it now.'”

—Russell Baker, New York Times, February 6, 1988

“I think the enemy is here before us. . . . I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed. . . . I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land.”

—Thomas Wolfe, You Can‘t Go Home Again, 1949

Weird meme. 🙂 So, tags:

Sara
Wayne
Ruth
Doug
Bill

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .”

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Unexplained Blue Cloud Floats, Darts Around Customers At Gas Station

I don’t even know what to say about that except—that’s really weird. I guess it’s a salutary reminder, though, that we really don’t know as much as we think we do. Hamlet was right: there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy (at least, most of our philosophies).

Washington politics at their oddest

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No, I don’t mean D.C., I mean my home state; which tends, politically speaking, to be strange, but not as strange as Oregon to the south or British Columbia to the north. This gambit, though, is the sort of thing you might expect to see come out of Oregon:

New initiative: No children? Then no marriage
‘Absurd’ idea aims to start discussion

I may comment on this later; right now . . . I’m speechless.

Cannibalism between consenting adults

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You might not have heard this, but the lawyer for Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, is defending his client’s actions on the grounds of mutual consent–Meiwes wanted to eat somebody, Bernd Brandes wanted to be eaten, and who is the state to interfere with the actions of two consenting adults? Unfortunately, as the inimitable Theodore Dalrymple points out, he has a case. Can modern philosophy and jurisprudence really come up with any coherent reason to convict him?