HONOUR IS TO LIVE AND DIE FOR ONES BELIEF.

Rubashov answered just as quickly:

HONOUR IS TO BE USEFUL WITHOUT VANITY.

No. 402 answered this time louder and more sharply:

HONOUR IS DECENCY–NOT USEFULNESS.

WHAT IS DECENCY? asked Rubashov, comfortably spacing the letters.  The more calmly he tapped, the more furious became the knocking in the wall.

SOMETHING YOUR KIND WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND, answered No. 402 to Rubashov’s question.  Rubashov shrugged his shoulders:

WE HAVE REPLACED DECENCY BY REASON, he tapped back.

Arthur Koestler’s most famous novel focuses around Nicolas Rubashov, one of the Old Bolsheviks, an educated revolutionary who helped during the 1917 Revolution, and is arrested at the beginning of the novel as part of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.  The novel tracks Rubashov’s time in prison, and he “logically” works his way through his past and through the crimes he is accused of, so he may capitulate and be brought to trial and be made a public example of a traitor to the Party.

Much of the book plays like much of the Russian novels I’ve known, with long passages from characters declaiming their philosophies, albeit here the subject matter is more political than religious.  Rubashov spends his time in solitary confinement, his only communication with other prisoners gained by tapping on the pipes between the walls, or by the daily hour of exercise given, walking in a circle with another prisoner.  Otherwise, Rubashov writes in his diary, and neurotically paces the room, six and one-half steps each way, only stepping on the black tiles.  Rubashov’s compulsion for the black is echoed near the end of the book, when the interrogator Gletkin has compelled Rubashov to sign confessions for crimes (or attempted crimes) that Rubashov did not commit, and Gletkin tells Rubashov: “Your task is simple.  You have set it yourself: to gild the Right, to blacken the Wrong.”

Ultimately, though Rubashov capitulates (to the disgust of the prisoner next door, No. 402), citing reason and logic as his reasoning, it is not clear what his reasoning precisely was.  It would seem that Rubashov does what the party asks of him simply because that is what he has always done, unsatisfactorily failing to save himself or his revolution, or at the very least, go down with a shred of pride or honour and go down fighting.  Rubashov is, in many ways, the worst kind of coward: he allows friends and lovers to be killed to save himself before his arrest, and another friend will die while he debates on capitulation.  I find myself aligned with the prison barber, who secretly passed a note to Rubashov during a shave, reading only:

DIE IN SILENCE.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

1. Rays: +155
2. Philadelphia: +154
3. Yankees: +145
4. Reds: +132
5. Twins: +127

And the bottom five:

1. Mets: -126
2. Nationals: -130
3. Mariners: -149
4. Pirates: -149
5. Cubs: -237

Get the whole list at USS Mariner.  I don’t know if the system is truly accurate, but it definitely confirms what I would expect with the Rays, and Phils at the top, and the Cubs at the bottom.  I’d love to do some historical Misery Indexing.  Quickly, for fun, in the 1960 World Series, with the famous Mazeroski homer, the respective indexes (for the series only):

Yankees: -41
Pirates: 41

Obviously, any two teams playing each other will have zero sum Misery Indexes.  But the huge gulf there I’d say pretty well captures a series with four tight wins and three wild blowouts.

Mr Beck offered the placid throng an insipid stew of mildly uplifting flag-swaddled God-talk, Bob Hope troop fluffing, “America is the promised land” crypto-Mormonism, and weird “only you can prevent the Eschaton” civic exhortation. This certainly does not strike me as the sort of production one would mount to promote across-the-board legalisation of capitalist acts between consenting adults. Of course, no one ever suggested Mr Beck is the second coming of Murray Rothbard. Still, Saturday’s patriotic pray-in strikes me as precisely the sort of production one would mount to summon and inspire the most staunchly conservative of the nation’s strangely aggrieved religious, white, middle class whilst trying hard not to arouse alarm.

ZING!

“Therefore, to eat a shoe is a foolish signal but it was worthwhile.  And once in a while we should be foolish enough to do things like that.  More shoes, more boots, more garlic!”  -Werner Herzog

I recently watched the short documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the titular subject, in 1981 or thereabouts, eats his leather shoes to keep a promise to Errol Morris.  Herzog told Morris that if he ever finishes Gates of Heaven, and gets an American movie theater to put on the movie, Herzog would come to Berkeley and eat his shoes.  With a little help from Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Herzog braises the boots for 5 hours and eats them while taking questions in front of an audience there to see the movie that would start Errol Morris’ rather brilliant career.

I have to confess, that despite the adulations of Roger Ebert and many others, I’m not much of a Werner Herzog fan.  I’ve only seen a few of his films: Encounters at the End of the World, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, and Fitzcarraldo.  I’d call Fitzcarraldo of the best movies I’ve ever seen, so good I will continue to dive into the Herzog oeuvre, but I have not cared for the other three movies.  He is, however, interesting, to me. He also has something to say about everything, even though I tend to disagree with her perspectives, and I love his enthusiasm for what he does.

You can watch Herzog eat his shoe and talk about film and society and symbolism as an extra feature on the Burden of Dreams DVD.

The muffins sans ginger were wildly unimpressive.  They were light and airy and light blonde while our ideal corn muffins are yellow-brown and dense and heavy.  We also both realized we prefer our muffins without actual corn kernels in them.  The ginger muffins were better, but since the plain corn muffins are not something we plan to make again, I don’t know if we can count this test as definitive.  Next time we make a real, honest to goodness butter-rich corn muffin, and into half the batch goes some crystalized ginger, I think, and then we’ll call Shola up, get a reservation for two, and tell him what we think of his rule.

I repeat again, corn bread, polenta, corn soup, grilled corn with ginger-lime butter, anything you make with corn will taste better with ginger.

Not different.

Better.

Tonight: Katie and I are making corn muffins.  Some with ginger, some without.  I’ll report the results tomorrow.

And if you haven’t seen it, allow me to heartily recommend Exit Through the Gift Shop.

• Canadian raising occurs for /aɪ/ (as in price) but not for /aʊ/ (as in mouth) (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 114-15, 237-38). Consequently, the diphthong in like may begin with a nucleus of mid or even higher position [lʌik], which distinguishes it from the diphthong in live [laɪv].
• Philadelphia is situated in the middle of the only traditionally rhotic area of the Atlantic states. This area runs from Pennsylvania and New Jersey down to Delaware and Northern Maryland, and remains r-pronouncing today.
• The sibilant /s/ is palatalized to [ʃ] (as in she) before /tɹ/. Thus, the word streets might be pronounced “shtreets” [ʃtɹits].
• On may be pronounced /ɔn/, so that, as in the South and Midland varieties of American English (and unlike New York) it rhymes with dawn rather than don.
• The interjection yo was popularized in the Philadelphia dialect among Italian American and African American youths. The word is commonly used as a greeting or a way to get someone’s attention.
• The word “Jawn” can be used to describe a thing (”Hand me that jawn”), a person, (”That boy’s my young jawn”) or a place (”I was over at my boy’s jawn last night”) and is used in many situations to describe almost anything.

I wonder if native Minnesotans or Georgians (or elsewhere-ans) would find their own pages so innately bizarre.

Therefore, for federal income taxes, an individual who claims these earnings as a business can receive deductions for their computer or web hosting as a business expense.

I assume this is a true and accurate statement, because, uh, the government would not lie to me, no sir.  I file my taxes online every year, utilizing whatever free service I can find, and go for maximum speed, deducting nothing.  I assume I make so little that whatever errors I render won’t cause the IRS to beat me too handily in the event of an audit.  So even though this blog does not carry advertisements and it certainly costs me money (thus firmly qualifying as a hobby), I wonder: what kind of discount could I have gotten on this here MacBook?  And how much can I get reimbursed for my Interwebs hookup and my GoDaddy bill?  Anybody out there have a clue?

According to the City Paper, the actual point of the article was “to question the propriety of making people who earn practically no money have to pay a $300 fee just because they chose to report those earnings to the IRS”.  I do wonder, though, if what you’re doing earns you practically nothing, but your reporting it gets you slammed with a $300 business bill, well, you’re probably doing it wrong.