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| "An attacking wild boar got my shirt but fortunately not my best gal or my college graduate! By St. Patrick, my good luck makes me feel as if I'm walkin' on air!" |
Even though Michigan does not permit or recognize same-sex marriages, a marriage is not automatically terminated because one partner undergoes sex-reassignment surgery. Burnett v. Burnett.
A full set of Platonic Ideals in perfect working order has been discovered in an enormous cave in Colorado, effectively refuting Aristotle's critique of Platonism.
Conventional wisdom is that rivalry and many wars among the Greek city-states after they joined to repel Persia left Greece too weak to resist Macedonian conquest. The Colonel is always skeptical about conventional wisdom. Is there a rival narrative?
"As William James pointed out, analytical thinking always begins with some personal bias -- scratch a mathematical model and you’ll find that its creator prefers blueberry jam to marmalade." --Jonah Goldberg
"It's not enough to bash in heads; you've got to bash in minds." --Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon
Heinlein's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what stupidity adequately explains."
"Truth is theft. To possess yourself, lie. The past lies before us. Then we lie. Then the future lies after us." --The Confounder
The iMam: Apple's new religious guidance device for Muslims.
"Nice things are nicer than nasty ones." --Kingsley Amis
"Institutionalizing fraternity is the surest way to totalitarian despotism." --Leszek Kolakowski
"Gorgons and griffins don't exist. Rhinoceroses exist. They just look as if they don't." --apologies to GKC
J.D. Salinger found it impossible to fit into a society that ignored the truths he learned in the war.
"Then there is the paradox that every religion, and no other, is the one true religion. For this paradox, atheism counts as a religion, and so does Gaullism, or as it is more often called, self-worship." --Sir Harry O. Triggerman
"A hippopotamus is a fast, cranky, nearsighted, powerful man-eater with a head and mouth big enough to devour a man whole. Or a manhole cover." --Roy Marshrigger
"Gamechanger missiles drone on till they start boring."
There are fourteen possible year-configurations: seven ordinary (365-day) years and seven leap (366-day) years. A perpetual calendar, fourteen pages long, cries out for an appropriate illustration to accompany each year, but few things come in logical groups of fourteen.
(Oops -- that was an OCD item, not an ADHD item. Sorry. When you have both, everything must be just so, but not for long.)
"I used to love the deep end, but I've gone off it." --Margery Gorrish
"Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy. After a war, it seem more like astrology." --Rebecca West
"Does astrology work in the Southern Hemisphere?" --Internet question. One possible answer: "Just as well as it does in the Northern Hemisphere."
"Frozen methane is ice you can set on fire." --Dr. Science Head
The Colonel does all his cloud computing with a nifty app called Aristophany. He records the names of his enemies into another called Ostrakon.
"To possess another language is to possess another soul." --German saying (translated, duh)
Margaret Mead famously said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." To paraphrase: what starts as a small group of people trying to cover their butts can morph into a great destructive evil.
"You were given the choice between hot fudge sundaes and vegetables. You chose hot fudge sundaes and you will have vegetables." -- not Churchill
Medical science is coming close to blocking all the near exits from this life. Much unpleasantness lies between the near and far exits.
When philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell emerged from the delivery room where his wife had just given birth, a well-wisher asked, "Is it a boy or a girl?" "Yes," he replied. You just want to smack people when they do that.
Esteemed Colonel,
ReplyDeleteThis is one of your best.
In answer to your question, there is no rival narrative concerning the cause of Greece's defeat by Macedonia.
The Aristophanes joke is very subtle -- way too subtle for Aristophanes' original audience, I might add -- and much appreciated by this reader. May I never bee consigned to the dark cloud of Ostrakon.