Best Chart Ever

It's not the courage of teenagers which makes the most impression; it is the language of attorney's:

"The only reason the School Board wants the club banned is because the name, Gay-Straight Alliance, violates the Board's abstinence-only policy."

Confessing to dying newspapermen about writing angry letters sparked discussion in the face of multi-media mosaics at the 50th Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival.

Bolano's concurrent fleas are "chinculaes, applying to a certain class of traveler, adventurers of the mind, those who can't keep still mentally, or "a person who doesn't pretend to reconcile the irreconcilable."

Spangler's decision-making model prefers individualists who are "concerned with rights and duties implying a duty not to harm or help."

Bolano affirms: "neither believed in a hybrid form of socialism - public happiness - they believed in the possibility of self-realization."

For a situationalist drawing universalist conclusions; a Summer docent on a Georgian plantation is drawn, hopeless, to slave narratives.

Lying at the bottom of the in-box for years is "A One-Day Course by Edward Tufte, Presenting Data and Information," depicting a map by Charles Joseph Minard portraying losses by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812 incorporating six variables: size of the army, location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat."

Mysterious reappearences of such honesty assure the story at least stays neutral.

Inherent

The transformation of twelve ordinary people into marathon runners on NOVA this week implies inherent heroism.

Skiing, which takes advantage of harsh weather, otherwise disadvantageous to so many others, implies inherent selfishness.

A Marine in the local rag states, "for me, the physical excitement isn't the attraction - it's the opportunity to make a difference."

How much can a willingness to commit institutional acts of violence also contain the inherent opportunity to make a difference?

In most Friend Bob-exchanges something is left off the table lest this participant become a persistent bore. Our last dance omits that even if it's not intended, the existence of an Anglican break-away implies homophobia, just as the existence of a continuing church, implies the opposite, even if none, or only one, of its members desires full inclusion for g,l,b,t persons.

Shopsin says, "you don't do the right thing because you're a great person, you do the right thing because you don't have any f'ing choice," though Roberto Bolano warns, "virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed."

Along these lines, Bolano raises, "the stamp of ultraconcrete literature, a nonspeculative literature free of ideas, assertions, denials, doubts, free of any intent to serve as a guide, neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier."

To write any other than a Book of Lists is to affirm Bolano.

When Amer Ghada (Bold & the Brave 22) asks Toba Khedon what transformed him into this creature - this Purge - he responds, "I took philosophy to its ultimate end. To separate the spirit from the selfish desires of the flesh."

In his review of The Future of Liberalism, Thane Rosenbaum contends, Alan Wolfe contends, a "true liberal is pragmatic, sober, skeptical and emotionally detached," while, "both the political right and far left, in contrast, are romantic at heart rushing into military adventures and domestic crusades."

--underscoring a conversation between the Spotsyltuckian and a Yankee, yesterday, as to why the South scored initial victories but could not sustain in the long run.

Wolfe ascribes the Civil War "as an example of these different temperaments: the liberal North was frugal, business-like, impersonal, rational, while the conservative South was impetuous, chivalric, glory-seeking, evangelical, romantic."

It must never be forgotten the rise of the Nazi's was assured by Stalin's actions to suppress moderate German Social Democrats whom he considered the true enemy.

In 1797, George Washington wrote to Rufus King, "having taken my seat in the shade of my vine and fig tree, I shall endeavor to view things in the calm lights of mild philosophy," remembering at this same time, Washington incorporated a radical emancipation of his slaves into his will.

Do we agree with Toba Khedon that the creation of a beautiful life requires the purge of all disruptive elements?

No, redemption arrives instead, inherent, in small waves: the 92-year old self-described 'old boot' who advised the Golden Rule as she awaited in her wheel chair, helpless, past any physical capability to achieve it beyond her transcendence; a 100-year old local farmer riding his tractor one more Spring planting season; the Colonial Beach Drifters achieving state finals attributing their success to the team manager with cerebral palsy.

An editor scoffed the Spotsyltuckian pieces resemble lists of quotes.

Take these pieces, then, or leave them, since it isn't possible to write or create anything which does not carry inflated inherent ego and implied consequences though lists may come as close as possible.

She Does Her Crying in Private: Part II

People keep asking what's up post-retirement.

Uncomfortable confessing to volunteerism, the standard reply is, 'working at a hospital.'

--doubling as a PTSD reaction to serving chronics in the way our Lenten guru D-Day says she was once accused of being "eaten up with pride and self-love."

You own your guests via an insider's knowledge of their tragedies.

Larger ramifications are politcal, tempered, at best, per D-Day, who "can look back on the early religious fervor which underlay my radicalism and finally saved me."

Yet another refuge is cirmudgeonism,

--or career enhancement for David Cameron, who upon his son's death, the NY Times reports, found "those insights lent a powerful humanity," to a politician, "who is Eton and Oxford educated and his wife the daughter of a viscount."

--or redemption for Big Brother racist Jade Goody, per the AP, once "the actual posterchild for British boorishness," now determined, "to spend her dying days in the spotlight; her frankness largely winning the media over."

After it becomes known BL fathered a disabled child, and DH lost one, their lunatic rants, or eccentricities, soften.

Can we attribute, then, Jerry Lewis' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award speech, to a defensive curmudgeonism, or is he just a plain and simple a-hole?

It's possible to land, undefined, larger than yourself, dispensible.

Joseph Ellis maintains George Washington's "Mt. Vernon correspondence allowed him to retain a zone of personal control amidst an increasingly, discordant political world that seemed to defy control altogether -- the last sliver of his private personality never made the trip."

--never making the trip: this, the second lesson of Lent.

She Does Her Crying in Private

In an endless winter, MLB broadcasts non-stop A-Rod.

Brian Wilson sings paeans to Spring.

Since the entire starting five of our local squad are felons, basketball loses any off-season baseball attraction it might have yielded in the void, yet, in Lenten redemption, the Times features a portrait of unselfishness: Shane Battier, who excels in statistical non-records such as blocking the line of sight of a Kobe so his effectiveness diminishes just so much the Rockets win.

Instead of comparing baseball to football, ala Carlin, the Times contrasts the ease of selfishness in basketball, where there isn't an opportunity for everyone to bat.

(Except, perhaps, for a little-known Jamesian consideration, of how many games Manny costs a team by not hustling in the outfield.)

No one statisticalizes who recovers blocked shots rather than who flicks them refundably into the 5th row.

"I know it's been hard for you," says Lana in SG 38, "since Zor-el was killed, and you're focusing all your efforts on pulling your mother out of her slump, but Kara, it's okay to be selfish sometimes."

Is it?

During Lent?

The President reverses predecessor's bans on photographing coffins.

Sec-Def, the hold-over, says he welcomes an opportunity to re-think the issue.

In his review of The Republic of Suffering, Thomas Lacquer reminds it was only in the aftermath of the Civil War that the dead first demand our allegience from beyond the grave, and establish they, and they alone, own the experience.

After fourteen decades, with no end to this winter in sight, the matter continues unresolved, as evidenced by existent pain viewing a dinner at the Bunkers where Archie invites a Gold Star father for Thanksgiving dinner and Mike invites a draft dodger -

- not unlike Andersen's story of the Red Shoes who dance as if they had PTSD after the feet of the vain heroine are amputated.

The local rag reports on five couples living within a mile of each other in the Lake Anna countryside who've been married more than 50 years.

Ernest, cab driver for young women of the segregated Mary Washington campus - the endurer of racist taunts - responds by ensuring his daughters graduate from the same integrated collge.

When asked how he managed, Ernest says, "God did it."

This, the lesson, of Lent.

Everyone Else is Doing It

Whenever you listen to a live album recorded in Japan the crowd sounds hysterial.

Doesn't matter if it's Cheap Trick or Brian Seitzer, they go nuts.

Written by 20-somethings dressed like Lolita in Wonderland, cell-phone novels (Keitai Shosetsu) about girls who learn their lovers are half-brothers, or who sell themselves to pay for their boyfriend's operation but die of AIDS instead, garner 1.8 million hits, and are replicated in manga, film and hardcover.

While technology empowers the freedom to type 10,000 words a day on an hour's bullet train commute, what's written so, tends to reinforce traditional values.

The women who write Keitai Shosetsu nevertheless are considered slightly abnormal (otaku).

Less a commercial venture, slightly abnormal English otaku William Tyndale, utilizing new 16th century techology, fatally, manages to change history

The Spotsyltuckian stalks out of a lecture by tv critic Marvin Kitson after he opens by stating there is nothing on but public television.

Clive James enrages by writing that "the story of a mentality as gripping as a thriller equals the same thrill as what the numberless readers of a book like the DaVinci Code are really after: they have just chosen arid territory in which to seek it."

Sez who.

Listen to Zappa, then, Michael W. Smith.

In the aptly named, Duty of Delight, slightly abnormal otaku Dorothy writes, "the professor has been out on a drunk and is lying trembling in his room while he is here. He has just stolen $5 from me, the dollars we had to send the sharecropper packages of clothes, and he must be tormented in soul as in body, weary of the idea of personal responsibility."

This is helpful.

Our slightly abnormal Pope, the Times reports, is "a theologian more at home in the library than the stadium Mass, more attuned to many doctrinal questions rather than potential political ramifications," like obsessing upon the efficacy of indulgences intended to reduce sentences in Purgatory.

While not helpful, it is so weird, it's definitely otaku.

Slightly abnormal impact is dependent upon reach and investment.

Otaku-Spotsyltuckian could be a Japanese cult favorite.

I wish.

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?

The Irresistable Urge to Solve Technical Problems

At the retirement open house, the Mentor said, "the real reason the Spotsyltuckian loves the beloved machine is its dependability."

The builders of the machines no longer have a place at the table.

That's not all bad.

Raised an industrial apprentice, the Dickensian way, S. offers, "once we separate the men from the boys, it's of no concern when workers at minimum wage come and go."

A., for similar reasons, doesn't believe it worthwhile to train anyone.

Racist, sexist, their day is past.

Their lasting legacy, nevertheless, remains efficiency.

Is the latter possible absent the former?

Yes: with access to the machine shop restored for repair - management trusting to pride of ownership - productivity soars.

Though ends do not justify means, in pursuit of ends, we often lose sight.

When a technical glitch surfaces in the design of the replacement for the beloved machine, our team resolves it.

We've already discussed the preeminence of duty whether or not the employer or task is worthy.

When Mr. Hardhead offers donations to our shelter, re-directing funds from the Diocese, from which he was in dispute, and I was not, the temptation to accept, clouds better judgment.

The resolution of the technical glitch described above can not excuse the result, in the name of a greater good, so why do it?

Prior to World War I, German industry triumphed in the manufacture of synthetic dyes and fertilizer. Unforseen consequences surfaced (then, and twenty-five years later) when a national need for the by-product, poison gas, was introduced which appealed not only to their patriotism, but as a challenge to the ingenuity of Jewish engineers dedicated to problem resolution.

Len Wein's Starbreaker (JLA 29) says, "eon's ago, I learned the greatest energies are contained in the bright minds and dark emotions of intelligent beings survive on the karmic energy of human suffering."

More innocuous, perhaps more terrible, is a heedless response to an irresistable urge to solve any current technical problem.

Richard Fortney says in Dry Storeroom No. 1, "a museum is a place where the visitor can come to examine evidence."

Jokes continued to entertain, during the retirement open house, as they had for years, on moving the beloved machines to the Museum of My Front Yard.

Fortney, reflecting upon a Diplodicus exhibit, writes, "not that I regard a constructed replica of an ancient fossil as an old friend, it is just consoling to pass the time of day with something that changed little in a mutable world."

Dependability has more than one meaning.