In the movie Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks plays an infantry captain who led his company onto the slaughterhouse called Omaha Beach. Musing over his company's history since he took command of it and led it in North Africa, he says, "How many men have I killed?" IIRC, he decides the number is 91. The captain is not talking about German soldiers. He is referring the men under his command who had died in combat.
If TX governor Perry wonders about his body count, it surpasses the fictional company commander's. 235 people have been executed during the governor's 11 years in office.
Duane Buck, who killed two people was scheduled to be #236, but the USSC has issued a stay of execution so that they can consider whether a psychologist's testimony that blacks are more violence-prone was unduly prejudicial. This should be an easy call. Stats do not predict what one person will do. And the stats that the shrink cited may not necessarily be gospel.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=140482847
On thin ice
This summer, Arctic Ocean ice was the second thinnest it has ever been, the thinnest year being 2007. Scientists predict that the polar ice cap will disappear entirely in summer by as early as 2030. This year's loss of thickness was due to warmer ocean water temperatures and an absence of cloud cover. One guess as to why the ocean temperature is warmer and clouds were fewer.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140516890/arctic-ice-hits-near-record-low-threatening-wildlife
Word watch
Bill Shakespeare enriched our everyday speech more than most of us know. A 20-year-old British student decorated her notebook with phrases that we all use every day.Shakespeare competes well with another source in embroidering our language, that being the Bible. A difference is that the Bible was compiled over about a thousand years. Will had just a few years in which to pen his pearls.
Compare Shakespeare's gems with the products of today's scriptwriters: "I'm like . . . what's up with that?!" "I like your booty!" "I heard that." "Oh please." "Heh-LOW." Yeah, right.
Thin ice - Stab, I guess you don't know that your musings here are in direct conflict with those of the distinguished President-elect Richard Perry, PhD.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Top Commentator Deb over on the Journal site, there are THOUSANDS of scientists who also disagree. That despite the fact that a poll of scientists done last year showed that those disagreeing comprise something like .017% of scientists, most of those being petroleum geologists or faculty members at fumblementalist colleges who teach creationism or ID or whatever they are calling their bogus science these days.
Shakespeare - Now there is a young woman who is going places. Probably the most prolific writer in history was Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, better known as Rumi, a 13th century Persian Sufi mystic poet. He wrote tens of thousands of poems and is considered to be the most popular poet in contemporary America.
But Mr. Bill was right up there in Rumi's league in productivity, quality and popularity.
If you peeked into a farmhouse in 18th, 19th or early 20th century America, you were likely to find two books, the King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. It is no accident that our greatest writer, Mark Twain, frequently parodies both. He knew that his readers would get it.
Later in the 19th century, you could add another "book": the Sears Roebuck catalog. I just discovered that the Central Library has the old Sears catalogs on microfilm. Fascinating…you could buy everything from a spool of thread to a house and have it delivered RFD. Wonder if Amazon will ship me a house via UPS.
And my farm wife grandmother added a fourth: the complete works of John Milton. After the Bible and Shakespeare her favorite source of quotes was Milton's "Paradise Lost". She had most of all three memorized.
T.S Eliot once said "All poets borrow; great poets steal."
ReplyDeleteShakespeare did a lot of both, because he read all of the extant histories wherein he found his plots. "Romeo and Juliet" is drawn from the great Germanic legend of "Tristan and Isolde". "Hamlet" originated in the Icelandic sagas, but probably came from far earlier Indo-European sources.
My favorite play contains my favorite device, the witches as seers in "Macbeth". At each encounter, the witches tell Macbeth the absolute truth, yet because he hears what he wants to hear instead of what they are really saying, he comes to a bad end.
I think that old Will got that from the great Greek historian Herodotus. He tells the story of, I think, Croesus, who has got the itch to attack the Persians. But first he consults the oracle.
The oracle tells him that if he attacks the Persians he will destroy a great empire. Hot dog, let's go. Of course, the oracle didn't mention that the great empire would be Croesus's.
I guess that is just human nature, because we never seem to learn. The CIA told Dick Cheney that Saddam probably did not have WMD. Dick Cheney heard in his own deranged head "Saddam has WMD". Yet another disaster.