Dear _________,
What a beauty! There are some sparse directions on the back, leading me to a slightly-defaced replica here, but you get the idea. I'm particularly intrigued by the many clearly pentagonal plates in his ventral armour, as well as the more hexagonal shapes meeting in "four-corners" fashion right at his middle.
I suppose it isn't that many years since I thought a "flying saucer" shape was a believable interstellar spacecraft geometry. These days "spherical" makes a lot more sense to me, from a self-preservation perspective, even though NASA et alia seem to prefer trees of cylinders. That said, this fellow is eerily reminiscent of flying saucer and makes a convincing argument from a submersibles point-of-view.
Anyways, I'm sorry I can't send a more direct reply, but thanks for the picture, anyway!
A bemused amateur of Creation and its Author
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Cinquains
It's not great; a bit jumpy, to be sure. Never tried Cinquains before; the only one I know has a 2+3 rhyme scheme, and I don't know if that's traditional. Today I prefer initials.
Surely
Thou, Lord, hast made
This cathedral chamber
Sing of thy praise, to thy glory
Echo
Thou, Lord
Have set me here,
Heart unto Thee longing
Thine own self to seek 'till life's end
Aching
Come, Lord
Fulfill your work:
Feed, pray, as Only thou
Can satisfy, my soul enflamed.
Amen.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The debate whimpers on
Dear Toby,
you wrote
I've done what digging I could, and I'm annoyed at myself having slightly shifted the axes of the survey in my thinking; I don't expect you'll find much to enjoy in it, yourself, though. The refference is note 36 here
Well, if one does successfully avoid begetting, that certainly reduces the number of people involved. Success is arguably tricky, though. What's more, much of what follows is in fact supposing other people are involved, potentially adopted children in particular.
I also think here you're transplanting my use of the word "fun" beyond the scope I intended for it. And I don't see how it's a legal issue?
See, that's very sneaky of you to suppress the "X"; the government makes a statement about the pair (X,Y) and an oposite statement about the pair (X,Z). It's worth noting that we can then infer which statement the government would make about the pair (Y,Z), or (Y,Y) for that matter. Or, how about, following your example, suppress the second in the pair: X may marry, but X may not marry? Surely we're not discriminating against X on the basis of sex in this case, because we admit both possibilities even though X's sex doesn't change?
There's an important difference, though. Laws ignoring marriage between two individuals of different race are fundamentally motivated by a desire to prevent procreation arising from "different" races, so-called "miscegenation". This in turn was necessary to establish as fact in Law what was a lie in Nature, that distinct races were and ought to be sundered species. On the other hand, the heretofore universal understanding that a marriage involves one man and one woman arises from similarly heretofore-universally understood connection between marriage and the foundation of a new family potentially including new people (new voters, new soldiers, new workers! Who doesn't want these?).
"Sometimes with", eh? With fidelity in the case of "sex" perhaps, and without it in the case of "race"? Or have you suggestions of a facet of human nature faithfully classified by "race"? Let me be even clearer: Sex is a real difference. Ask any doctor whether the sex of his patient is relevant to the care thereof. Race is a much fuzzier and mutable thing; it may be a relevant notion for insurance companies, but a surgeon usually doesn't need to know his subject came from the East Caucasus mountains in order to find his way around.
I simply can't agree that a single-sex pair can be healthily married. And that's not a matter of on-average tendencies...
This is getting the notion of "someone else" backwards altogether! For a child to be potentially placed in the care of a single-sex couple, it necessarily follows that neither of them conceived nor bore this child OR one of the couple has been unfaithful. The child belonged with different people in the first place; the single-sex pair are "someone else". Again, I'm not saying that a pair of men is inherently incapable of meeting the material needs of a growing child; I do say that the example they give includes a priori a fundamental defficiency, and a child shouldn't be kept in their long-term care any more than it should be raised by a convent or monastery.
I'm not sure what you mean here; the government no longer asks people to avoid sodomy, for instance. I believe the various states still restrict sale of tobacco and alcohol to minors, whether said minors, the salespeople, or their respective parents feel otherwise?
Again, I'm not sure what differently-done-things you think government is encouraging by discriminating on the basis of half a pair's sex.
Different values? Almost certainly; but why not ask me what I value?
No, that's not my meaning in claiming statistics, and neither do I think this is a case of the government permitting some harm so that more good may result: it really is an assertion that one specific kind of harm should NOT occur, that of children being raised under an a-priori bad example of human sexual expression; rather, children should be raised such that they mature understanding what children's AND parents' roles are in a family, whether they then go on to establish families of their own or not. I don't pretend that all extant families are healthy or happy; but we don't need to add to the list of possible reasons a family can be unhealthy!
you wrote
Well, I would like to see your survey data, because I certainly don't believe it. Since that seems to be what you were originally talking about, maybe you can ignore the rest of this. But since it's about something important to me, I'll say it anyway.
I've done what digging I could, and I'm annoyed at myself having slightly shifted the axes of the survey in my thinking; I don't expect you'll find much to enjoy in it, yourself, though. The refference is note 36 here
My original focus on taxes comes from the setting in the first half of the video clip, so I won't harp on that. But I'll still focus on legal issues. That is, I disagree with you that sex is most fun between one man and one woman, who ought to be married, without trying to avoid begetting. But since that sort of thing only affects the people involved, it doesn't matter much if we disagree about that.
Well, if one does successfully avoid begetting, that certainly reduces the number of people involved. Success is arguably tricky, though. What's more, much of what follows is in fact supposing other people are involved, potentially adopted children in particular.
I also think here you're transplanting my use of the word "fun" beyond the scope I intended for it. And I don't see how it's a legal issue?
What does matter, and affects many people, is the attitude of the government towards this. And yes, it is a matter of the government's attitude towards individuals, not just couples. The government says that X and Y may marry but X and Z may not; that is discrimination between the individuals Y and Z.
See, that's very sneaky of you to suppress the "X"; the government makes a statement about the pair (X,Y) and an oposite statement about the pair (X,Z). It's worth noting that we can then infer which statement the government would make about the pair (Y,Z), or (Y,Y) for that matter. Or, how about, following your example, suppress the second in the pair: X may marry, but X may not marry? Surely we're not discriminating against X on the basis of sex in this case, because we admit both possibilities even though X's sex doesn't change?
The current laws that don't recognise marriage between two individuals of the same sex discriminate based on sex just as much as past laws that didn't recognise marriage between two individuals of different races discriminated based on race
There's an important difference, though. Laws ignoring marriage between two individuals of different race are fundamentally motivated by a desire to prevent procreation arising from "different" races, so-called "miscegenation". This in turn was necessary to establish as fact in Law what was a lie in Nature, that distinct races were and ought to be sundered species. On the other hand, the heretofore universal understanding that a marriage involves one man and one woman arises from similarly heretofore-universally understood connection between marriage and the foundation of a new family potentially including new people (new voters, new soldiers, new workers! Who doesn't want these?).
(where in both cases, 'sex' and 'race' are further defined by the government, sometimes with and sometimes without fidelity to an
underlying facet of human nature).
"Sometimes with", eh? With fidelity in the case of "sex" perhaps, and without it in the case of "race"? Or have you suggestions of a facet of human nature faithfully classified by "race"? Let me be even clearer: Sex is a real difference. Ask any doctor whether the sex of his patient is relevant to the care thereof. Race is a much fuzzier and mutable thing; it may be a relevant notion for insurance companies, but a surgeon usually doesn't need to know his subject came from the East Caucasus mountains in order to find his way around.
I certainly can't accept the government's doing this for such a flimsy reason as that an opposite-sex couple (healthily and happily married) will raise a child better than a same-sex couple (also healthily and happily married).
I simply can't agree that a single-sex pair can be healthily married. And that's not a matter of on-average tendencies...
That may or may not be true on average, but it's certainly not true in every case. Given that a couple is raising a child together, the child should have a stable home with the customary legal protections, and it's quite perverse for the government to say that their family won't get the same status as the family next door because it might have been better for the child to be raised by somebody else all along, rather than the healthy, happy parents that they have.
This is getting the notion of "someone else" backwards altogether! For a child to be potentially placed in the care of a single-sex couple, it necessarily follows that neither of them conceived nor bore this child OR one of the couple has been unfaithful. The child belonged with different people in the first place; the single-sex pair are "someone else". Again, I'm not saying that a pair of men is inherently incapable of meeting the material needs of a growing child; I do say that the example they give includes a priori a fundamental defficiency, and a child shouldn't be kept in their long-term care any more than it should be raised by a convent or monastery.
I don't know that either you or I will tell the other anything that we haven't already heard. I don't like it when the government tries to tell people what to do,
I'm not sure what you mean here; the government no longer asks people to avoid sodomy, for instance. I believe the various states still restrict sale of tobacco and alcohol to minors, whether said minors, the salespeople, or their respective parents feel otherwise?
and I don't like discrimination on the basis of sex; much less do I like discrimination on the basis of sex in order to encourage people to do things differently.
Again, I'm not sure what differently-done-things you think government is encouraging by discriminating on the basis of half a pair's sex.
You seem to have different values from mine, and apparently you have statistics to show that the government is telling people what to do and discriminating against them in a way that will do more good than harm in the end.
Different values? Almost certainly; but why not ask me what I value?
No, that's not my meaning in claiming statistics, and neither do I think this is a case of the government permitting some harm so that more good may result: it really is an assertion that one specific kind of harm should NOT occur, that of children being raised under an a-priori bad example of human sexual expression; rather, children should be raised such that they mature understanding what children's AND parents' roles are in a family, whether they then go on to establish families of their own or not. I don't pretend that all extant families are healthy or happy; but we don't need to add to the list of possible reasons a family can be unhealthy!
Monday, July 27, 2009
You're really NOT going to like it...
At this cardinal point in the history of our Null Epistolary, we wish to thank our Lord God for giving us the unhappy atheist writer DNA who revealed His glory by pointing out such wonders of creation as are manifold to be seen, both on Earth and in the Heavens, whether fully known or thoroughly mysterious; and who painted them with such charm and hilarity, even through his own hidden pains.
We pray, Lord God, overlook Thou his honest, if stubborn, ignorance of Thee, the first Author of all he authored and wrote about; and admit him in time to the fullest happiness which only Thou canst by the vision of your Loving Mercy and Justice can give.
This has been blog post number 42.
We pray, Lord God, overlook Thou his honest, if stubborn, ignorance of Thee, the first Author of all he authored and wrote about; and admit him in time to the fullest happiness which only Thou canst by the vision of your Loving Mercy and Justice can give.
This has been blog post number 42.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Gaude!
Ego Vir in Via scribo
Amice,
salve!
Hic est gaudium medium. (Non est gaudium magnum, quia non novum pappum nuntiat; interea, gaudium maior est quam favam gellam repperire ... )
Si non Latinam sciis legere, pagina ipsa hae utiles praebet.
eh? quid cogitat?
vale!
ok, sorry for any and all solecisms, anglic calcae, and generally-bad or painful Latin in the above...
Amice,
salve!
Hic est gaudium medium. (Non est gaudium magnum, quia non novum pappum nuntiat; interea, gaudium maior est quam favam gellam repperire ... )
Si non Latinam sciis legere, pagina ipsa hae utiles praebet.
eh? quid cogitat?
vale!
ok, sorry for any and all solecisms, anglic calcae, and generally-bad or painful Latin in the above...
some guy on the street
insomnia
Dear United Sandmen,
Never mind making my eyelids heavy, I don't want sand near my eyes. But if you could re-arrange those sandbags to hold back floods of useless distractions, I'd have an easier time with my preferred variation on counting sheep.
Thanks,
the much-too-imaginative some-guy-on-the-street
Never mind making my eyelids heavy, I don't want sand near my eyes. But if you could re-arrange those sandbags to hold back floods of useless distractions, I'd have an easier time with my preferred variation on counting sheep.
Thanks,
the much-too-imaginative some-guy-on-the-street
Monday, July 20, 2009
unlicensed poetry
Dear Quizitor,
You tell me
or failing that,
A couple years ago, you told me instead
of which, of course, I can produce no evidence; but I'm not quite sure what to make of the shift. Perhaps I'm become more staid in my preference for 62-storey drop-subjects! Who knows?
But what I most want to know is ... where can I get some of those cream buns?
some guy, who, while largely pedestrian, is fond enough of versifers
You tell me
|
or failing that,
|
A couple years ago, you told me instead
|
of which, of course, I can produce no evidence; but I'm not quite sure what to make of the shift. Perhaps I'm become more staid in my preference for 62-storey drop-subjects! Who knows?
But what I most want to know is ... where can I get some of those cream buns?
some guy, who, while largely pedestrian, is fond enough of versifers
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