If you looked down upon the world from above, like an albatross, you might phant’sy there was some sameness among the people crowding the land below you. But we are not albatrosses, we see the world from ground level, from within our own bodies, through our own eyes, each with our own frame of reference, which changes as we move about, and as others move about us.
- Neal Stephenson
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”
“That is the only time a man can be brave.”
* * *
“A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.”
* * *
“Sometimes I think everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending is how you get brave, I don’t know.”
- George R.R. Martin
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
One of the nicer treats I got in Italy last year was lemon soda. It’s ridiculously easy to make yourself: two ounces of simple syrup, four ounces of lemon juice, and six ounces of club soda, served over ice in a pint glass. Stir well (the syrup sinks to the bottom on its own) and enjoy. The lemon juice from concentrate grocery stores sell for cheap works just fine.
Why this stuff doesn’t sell here in the States I’ll never know. We like soda here, and we like lemonade.
I guess the hard part is making the simple syrup. Boil some water and dissolve one cup of granulated sugar in it at a time while stirring well. When no more sugar goes to solution, stop and let the liquid cool before bottling it. You’ll use this stuff for cocktails as well as soft drinks like lemon soda. Once you have it on hand, you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Leap Year Day is coming up.
When I first became Trumwill, Will Truman, instead of the blogging and commenting that I had done under my previous name, one of my main concerns is that people would quickly figure out who I was. Because of my early blogging topics, which included complaining about my employer and the local Mormon culture, that was not something I wanted to happen. So I wove in a few fictions with fact (and, of course, created an alternate map of the United States). I’ve since abandoned most of these things (and the ones I haven’t are true in their own way, if not entirely factually accurate).
Anyhow, one of the early fictions was shifting my birthday and being a couple years older than I actually am. I was actually relatively methodical about it, taking on the would-be birthday of the brother I did not have (whose name, incidentally, was to be William – my fictitious middle name is his, as well). As it turned out, the older brother that my mother miscarried was to be born on Leap Year Day in 1976. Thus making the construct of Will Truman not a couple years older than my actual self, but by counting birthdays a quarter of my actual age.
I think of this brother I never had on every LYD, which isn’t often since they only come around every four years. To say that he is the brother I did not have is not entirely accurate. Or maybe it is. My mother has alluded to the fact that had he been born, I never would have. So in an odd way, I owe him my life. I owe a debt to the doctors that might have prevented the miscarriage but did not.
William X was actually to be named after my mother’s brother, William “Herzog”. William Herzog died in an accident when he was a teenager. He was my mother’s only brother and her parents were never the same after that. They descended into alcoholism and left my mother (more or less) to raise her substantially younger siblings until she could hit 18 and leave. Her parents had always wanted sons (in real life, my mother has a boy’s name). They lost the willingness to forgive my mother for being female.
I would not go so far as to say that I am a “black sheep” in the family. I take after my mother in some ways and my fathers than others. My lineage, temperamentally and especially physically, is traceable for the most part. But some aspects of my mind and behavior would be inexplicable. My head’s residence in the clouds doesn’t trace to my mother or my father, really. Even among the artsy types in my family (my mother is a spectacular writer, my great grandfather was an artistic pioneer), there’s always been something a little “off” in comparison with me and the rest of my family. But according to my mother, this was always true of William Herzog. He got cut a lot of slack for being the only boy, but nonetheless. I didn’t know this until well, well after the fact, but my deceased uncle and I both got in trouble in middle school for writing comic books during class.
So I guess it fits that I took his name (or, the name of someone who was given his name) in my writing. With the exception of an uncle on my father’s side, I have had the pleasure to get to know all of my aunts and uncles. The two I most resemble are easily the gray sheep that I didn’t particularly get to know because he went his own way, and the uncle who died well before I was born.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
So I’m in court, doing an eviction. The tenant gives a sob story and indeed breaks down, sobbing. It’s a heart-wrenching and depressingly credible claim of a recent medical challenge in her family. She’s just begging for some time. I get a nod from my client and offer to give the lady three extra weeks to move out.
That’s when I hear someone hissing.
Lawyers and law students will recognize this instantly. It is the signal made from the back row of a law school class when one student morally disapproves of what another is saying. I’ve not been hissed at since law school because attorneys are supposed to be mature enough to understand when a brother or sister attorney is just doing his job.
I’d been hissed at enough in law school that I pressed on and got my client his judgment (and gave this woman, who I genuinely felt sorry for, the three weeks my client agreed to). But it was one of those times I wanted to just stop what I was doing, turn around, and say, “Really?“
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Hurray for him who wins, for I am on his side!
- Loose translation of Florentine political aphorism
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Seventeen states — Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah — lack something that the remainder of the states in the U.S.A. possess. What is it?
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
In his powerful biography of Peter I Romanov, Robert Massie puts words in the mouth of the czar: “I will drag you, kicking and screaming if need be, into the modern world.” Peter could do that to his own people because he was one of them. By our standards, Peter was a hereditary monarch, a military dictator. But by the norms and culture of his own people, he was the man the Russian people recognized as their legitimate ruler.
We cannot make a similar claim to legitimacy over Afghanistan as Peter could over Russia. And it’s high time we recognized that.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
In the autumn of the preceding year, I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire for victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuinary penalties.
- Benjamin Franklin
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The best episode of The Simpsons, ever, was episode 402: A Streetcar Named Marge.
Discuss.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California. He is sometimes known as the "Transplanted Lawyer" in commemoration of a two-year sojourn in East Tennessee which was something of a transformative life experience. His interests include politics and public policy, Constitutional law with a focus on the separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies.
Will Truman is the pseudonym of a somewhat random guy that lives in the Mountain West with his doctorly wife. He has moved around frequently, having lived in four states in the last five years or so. Part-poligeek, part-geek, sometimes substitute teacher, sometimes professional gearhead, and off-and-on amateur fiction writer. He is primarily interested in the balancing of competing interests and points of view where answers are not easily found. He does (mostly) non-political blogging at Hit Coffee and can be found on Twitter.
