Hard Science

During the winter of 1777/1778, as back-bites pierced his hide as bullets never could, George Washington wrote, "whenever the public gets dissatisfifed with my services, or a person is found better qualified to assume her expectations, I shall quit the helm and retire to private life with as much content as ever the wearied pilgrim felt upon his safe arrival in the Holy Land."

Leaving, at last, on his own terms, he retired, indeed, to private life, upon the rolling banks of the bucolic Virginia riverside.

--the public role he played, featured, in the end, less idealism than a practicality borne of experience.

Friend Larry and I often lament the absence of a Sports Management degree program at the time we attended University. The game afoot, in those days, political science, yielded only one lesson of use, a lifelong practice of the Hawthorne Effect.

Stefan Zweig, per Clive James, says Montaigne read history not in order to become learned but to see how other men handled events and to set himself beside them.

A recent study at Durham University comparing subject difficulties found some signicantly harder than others -- so much so a student could expect two grades higher in the easiest than the hardest.

The accompanying chart in the Economist conveys Science the hardest. It is well History exceeded the complexity cut (as opposed, for example, to Film Studies, the easiest, thereby degrading, appreciably, the A achieved in Hitchcock, many summers ago).

A desire to know Hard Science remains despite an F in Chemistry, and D's in Biology and Ecology. Accordingly, by page 20, I was more lost in Dawkins' Ancestors Tale than the species listed as extinct, though, efforts continue, lately, with 'Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs, Soft Tissues and Hard Science.'

Dinosaurs is where it starts for boys, at least, those of our generation, who marvelled hearing Cronkite intone how awesome it might have been to face an Allosaur football team.

Upon becoming a soft tissue dinosaur, myself, I'm entitled to (per M. Porter, concluding, in the manner of Professor Eobard Thawne, the devolution of Big Monkey to Little Fish) a singular world of my own creation.

Mr. Rat further dichotomizes this theme, declaring, in The Wind in the Willows, "it's my world, and I don't want any other; what it hasn't got is not worth knowing, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing," simultaneously pointing out, perhaps, conversely, in relation to Toad, "he was going to spend the rest of his life in a houseboat -- it's all the same whatever he takes up; he gets tired of it and starts on something new."

What remains, upon retirement, to carry anew for the cause?

Spielberg, dedicated publicly to Shoah, intends to film Tintin, whose creator Herge, as the Economist demonstrates, "spent the war working for LeSoir, a Belgian newspaper seized by German occupiers and turned into a propaganda organ, usually explained by Herges' naivety as an author of children's comics (a defense also used for Wodehouse)."

Springsteen, pop market purveyor of Pete Seeger - famed labor balladeer - cuts an exclusive deal with the fanatically anti-union Wal-mart.

Is consistency, mandate, over a lifetime?

Our local rag this week contains an obit of a 96-year old woman who attended the same church for more than 80 years.

Does longevity, alone, distill inconsistency?

Joseph Ellis (himself accused of certain inconsistencies) writes Washington loathed "any form of dependency," holding a "deep distrust of any authority beyond his direct control."

Assuming this status is achieved by retirement, to what is the retiree still bound?