"Ethics"

By Linda Pastan

In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
if there were a fire in a museum
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter – browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond saving by children.

One recycled essay

My hastily-written final essay for my everyday rhetoric class. (It's still decent though.) It's about business and management rhetoric in educational policy discourse:

1. Analogy, Borrowed Terminology, and [Terministic] Screens in the Rhetoric of Educational Discourse

---

i. Four recycled essays
ii. Two recycled essays

Market troubles

I meant to post this a while ago. Best use of a green screen ever:

Yes!

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Thursday that, if elected, he would like to take a page from the British government and appear in question-and-answer sessions with lawmakers.

"I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons," McCain said in excerpts of a speech he is to deliver later in Columbus, Ohio.

1. McCain urges UK-style sessions for U.S. president


I also came across this...
2. Things younger than John McCain

Potty poetry amalgam

Here I sit, all broken hearted,
tried to shit, but only farted,
Taco Tuesday's got me loaded,
microwave burrito near exploded,
420 today and shit's abuzz
but the pumps don't work, b'cause
the vandals took the handles.

Wow...

"Learning, therefore ... helplessness and fatigue?"

Wreckless Pelicans!

1. Pelican swallows pigeon in park
2. Diving pelican slams into swimmer's face in Gulf off Florida

Reverend Wright's Outrageous Comments

1. Obama's Minister's Outrageous Comments — The Onion

$6.4 million better spent on other things...

...such as helping the poor, feeding the hungry, investing in sustainable energy, funding underfunded/overcrowded schools, investing in cancer/AIDS research, donating to other charitable causes, ...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton lent her presidential campaign $6.4 million over the past month, her campaign said Wednesday, underscoring the financial advantage held by her rival, Barack Obama.

1. Clinton lends her struggling campaign $6.4 million
2. Clinton 'heading for the exit'
3. N Carolina poll win boosts Obama
4. Pundits Declare the Race Over
5. Clinton vows to continue campaign



6/23 update:

1. Clinton seeks help repaying debt

In the report filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission, Clinton reported owing about $10 million to vendors as of May 31, and also having loaned her own campaign nearly $12.2 million. During May, as she fought to stay in the race, her campaign ran a deficit. She raised about $12.6 million, loaned herself $2.2 million -- but spent more than $19 million.

"Calculating Machine"

by E.B. White [my emphasis]

    A publisher in Chicago sent us a pocket calculating machine by which we may test our writing to see whether it is intelligible. The calculator was developed by General Motors, who, not satisfied with giving the world a Cadillac, now dream of bringing perfect understanding to men. The machine (it is simply a celluloid card with a dial) is called the Reading-Ease Calculator and shows four grades of "reading ease"—Very Easy, Easy, Hard, and Very Hard. You count your words and syllables, set the dial, and an indicator lets you know whether anybody is going to understand what you have written. An instruction book came with it, and after mastering the simple rules we lost no time in running a test on the instruction book itself, to see how that writer was doing. The poor fellow! His leading essay, the one on the front cover, tested Very Hard.
    Our next step was to study the first phrase on the face of the calculator: "How to test Reading-Ease of written matter." There is, of course, no such thing as reading ease of written matter. There is the ease with which matter can be read, but that is a condition of the reader, not of the matter. Thus the inventors and distributors of this calculator get off to a poor start, with a Very Hard instruction book and a slovenly phrase. Already they have one foot caught in the brier patch of English usage.
    Not only did the author of the instruction book score badly on the front cover, but inside the book he used the word "personalize" in an essay on how to improve one's writing. A man who likes the word "personalize" is entitled to his choice, but we wonder whether he should be in the business of giving advice to writers. "Whenever possible," he wrote, "personalize your writing by directing it to the reader." As for us, we would as lief Simonize our grandmother as personalize our writing.
    In the same envelope with the calculator, we received another training aid for writers—a booklet called "How to Write Better," by Rudolf Flesch. This, too, we studied, and it quickly demonstrated the broncolike ability of the English language to throw whoever leaps cocksurely into the saddle. The language not only can toss a rider but knows a thousand tricks for tossing him, each more gay than the last. Under the heading "Think Before You Write," he wrote, "The main thing to consider is your purpose in writing. Why are you sitting down to write?" And echo answered: Because, sir, it is more comfortable than standing up.
    Communication by the written word is a subtler (and more beautiful) thing than Dr. Flesch and General Motors imagine. They contend that the "average reader" is capable of reading only what tests Easy, and that the writer should write at or below this level. This is a presumptuous and degrading idea. There is no average reader, and to reach down toward this mythical character is to deny that each of us is on the way up, is ascending. ("Ascending," by the way, is a word Dr. Flesch advises writers to stay away from. Too unusual.)
    It is our belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feeble-minded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending—if you will pardon the expression—and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer. The movies long ago decided that a wider communication could be achieved by a deliberate descent to a lower level, and they walked proudly down until they reached the cellar. Now they are groping for the light switch, hoping to find the way out.
    We have studied Dr. Flesch's instructions diligently, but we return for guidance in these matters to an earlier American, who wrote with more patience, more confidence. "I fear chiefly," he wrote, "lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wonder far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. . . . Why level downward to the dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring."
    Run that through your calculator! It may come out Hard, it may come out Easy. But it will come out whole, and it will last forever.

Study: Nearly 80 Percent Of Roommates Got So Drunk Last Night

1. Study: Nearly 80 Percent Of Roommates Got So Drunk Last Night

Kansas...

So there was a really strong storm here earlier, and after a bit I checked the weather. My weather widget said, oh you know, it's 62 degrees-- the moon is so-and-so and it's partly cloudy. I checked weather.com and it said something to the effect of "THERE HAS BEEN A TORNADO SIGHTED IN YOUR AREA, SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!" Right after that there was an announcement over the dorm speakers and everyone huddled downstairs (not that we'd be safe if a tornado actually hit us anyway), and we waited there for a while.

I just got back to my room. It's almost 2am. I guess we lost a few of the smaller trees. Kansas is awesome.

(Oh, and notice that the sirens never went off, just like they didn't go off when we had the microburst.)

1. More than 8,400 [and counting] without power as hail hits Lawrence


Update:

Westar Energy is reporting that more than 8,600 customers are without power in Douglas County around 2:20 a.m. today as a severe thunderstorm hit Lawrence.

The Journal-World has received several reports of storm-related damage, including downed trees and debris blocking the road in northern and western Lawrence.

6News Chief Meteorologist Jennifer Schack is reporting that the storm had winds in excess of 80 mph in Douglas County.

The severe thunderstorm warning issued for Douglas County expired at 1:45 a.m., and the tornado watch is no longer in effect.

A tree has fallen on a mobile home on Perry street. The family who lives there has been set up at the Holidome, according to Jane Blocher of the Red Cross.

Police and emergency crews are responding to large downed trees, including at Sixth Street at Iowa and Trail Road near Fireside Drive. Also, a roof has blown off a building on Sixth and is on the road on Florida Street.