Contradictions

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. But remember,

Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Look before you leap. But remember,

He who hesitates is lost.

Nothing venture, nothing gain. But remember,

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Seek and ye shall find. But remember,

Curiosity killed the cat.

Save for a rainy day. But remember,

Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Life is what we make it. But remember,

What is to be will be.

Too many cooks spoil the broth. But remember,

Many hands make light work.

One man's meat is another man's poison. But remember,

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

With age comes wisdom. But remember,

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come all wise sayings.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. But remember,

A setting hen never lays.

A hollow pot makes the most noise. But remember,

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

To thine own self be true. But remember,

The nail that stands out gets hammered down.

Faint heart never won fair lady. But remember,

The meek shall inherit the Earth.

The Policeman

The policeman stood and faced his God.
Which must always come to pass.
He hoped his shoes were shining as brightly as his brass.
"Step forward now officer. How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To my church have you been true?"

The officer squared his shoulders and said,
"No Lord, I guess I aint.
Cause those of us who carry badges can't always be a saint.
But I never took a penny that wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime when the bills just got too steep.
And I never passed a cry for help, though at times I shook with fear.
And sometimes, God forgive me, I wept unmanly tears.

I know I don't deserve a place among the people here.
They never wanted me around except to calm their fear.
If you've a place for me here. Lord, it needn't be so grand.
I've never expected or had too much.
But if you don't, I'll understand."

There was silence all around the throne where the saints had often trod.
As the officer waited quietly for the answer of his God.
"Step forward now, Officer, you've borne your burdens well.
Come walk a beat on Heaven's Streets. You've done your time in Hell."

Author unknown

The Shape of Things to Come

Leó Szilárd was a Austro-Hungarian physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933.

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilárd waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilárd told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come.

Richard Rhodes

Elisha and the Bears

2 Kings Chapter 2

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. 25 And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.

Theodore Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt was a born raconteur. His tongue was silver, his knowledge encyclopedic, his intellect monumental, his enthusiasm infectious and his charm irresistible. He held the company spellbound as he carried them with him from one subject to another, from politics to religion to ornithology and philosophy, tropical medicine to African anthropology.

^^^^^

Theodore Roosevelt held many attitudes that the social thought of the 1990s quite correctly rejects. Some of his convictions can be especially troubling to those who view him with inadequate understanding, or without considering the Victorian world out of which he emerged. He was a white supremacist. Women, he believed, had an obligation to breed prolifically. The couple who chose not to have children-- many children-was committing a crime against the nation. He was a staunch nationalist, a big-game hunter, and glorified war.

Fields of Putrefaction

From "A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Vol. 3" by Francois Guizot

The battle lasted two days, the first against the Ambrons, the second against the Teutons. Both were beaten, in spite of their savage bravery, and the equal bravery of their women, who defended, with indomitable obstinacy, the cars with which they had remained almost alone, in charge of the children and the booty. After the women, it was necessary to exterminate the hounds who defended their masters' bodies. Here again the figures of the historians are absurd, although they differ; the most extravagant raise the number of barbarians slain to two hundred thousand, and that of the prisoners to eighty thousand; the most moderate stop at one hundred thousand. In any case, the carnage was great, for the battle-field, where all these corpses rested without burial, rotting in the sun and rain, got the name of Campi Putridi, or Fields of Putrefaction, a name traceable even nowadays in that of Pourrires, a neighboring village.

The Problem with Plurals

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;

but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.

One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,

yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;

yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,

why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,

and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,

why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,

yet hat in the plural would never be hose,

and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.

We speak of a brother and also of brethren,

but though we say mother, we never say methren.

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,

but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

Mongols at War

The situation in the beleaguered capital of Zhongdu was one of despair and the population was reduced to eating human flesh.

It was the defeat of the Chin capital, Zhongdu (the site of modern Beijing), that gave rise to one of the most notorious stories of Mongol atrocities:

[An envoy from the Khwarazmshah] saw a white hill and in answer to his query was told by the guide that it consisted of bones of the massacred inhabitants. At another place the earth was, for a long stretch of the road, greasy from human fat and the air was so polluted that several members of the mission became ill and some died. This was the place, they were told, where on the day that the city was stormed 60,000 virgins threw themselves to death from the fortifications in order to escape capture by the Mongols.

The Mongols also employed other gruesome terror tactics to weaken the will to resist. One infamous incident occurred during Tamerlane's Indian campaign. Tamerlane, an heir to the Mongol martial tradition, built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads in front of the walls of Delhi, to convince them to surrender.

The Cloaca Maxima

The Cloaca Maxima (Greatest Sewer) was a sewage system constructed in ancient Rome initially around 600 BC.

Most homes in early Rome were not connected to the sewers, and wastes were thrown out into the street. However, a widespread street-washing policy (using aqueduct water) sent most human wastes into the sewers nonetheless. Eventually a law, called the Dejecti Effusive Act, was passed to protect innocent bystanders from assault by wastes thrown into the street. The violator was forced to pay damages to whomever his waste hit, if that person sustained an injury. This law was only enforced in the daytime, presumably because one then lacked the excuse of darkness for injuring another by careless waste disposal.

According to Lord Amulree, the site where Julius Caesar was assassinated, the Hall of Curia in the Theatre of Pompey, was turned into a public latrine because of the dishonour it had witnessed.

マイケル

My Favourite Star Wars Character

A friend recently asked me if I could name my favourite Star Wars character. That was easy - Darth Vader.

I hope it is not a 'mainstream' answer, however I found the masked Vader fascinating, what we don't know intrigues us. Years ago I read of how his helmet was styled after the kabuto and menpo, and as someone who has had an admiration of Japanese culture for many years, this just made him even 'cooler' in my books.
It also came to pass, about a decade ago, that I was curious to see how my name was written in its original Jewish script. I took an interest in the Hebrew characters, for their aesthetics if nothing else, and I sometimes sign off on documents and blog posts with the Hebrew spelling of my name. Anyway, I was studying Vader's suit one fine day in 2003 and I noticed some characters printed on his life support machine on his chest. Upon closer inspection I concluded that they were Hebrew characters and turned to my old friend Google for deciphering.

There is some discrepancy as to what the Hebrew script reads, however a few websites translated it thus: "His deeds will not be forgiven until he merits." I was not particularly interested in whether this was the correct translation, but hey, it sounded dark and mysterious and it is befitting of him.

Other reasons I'm a Vader fan:

• black and red, my favourite colour combination,
• he wears a cape, which is excellent,
• his synthesized voice is a rich baritone,
• his personal flagship is the Executor, which I'm sure you'll agree is the most awesome capital ship in the Star Wars galaxy, perhaps even science fiction in general,
• his leitmotif is The Imperial March, a magnificent composition.

Even as the Imperial Military Executor, second highest ranking sentient being in the galaxy, he was not afraid to participate in dogfights, follow troops into enemy installations and engage Jedi and other significant rebels in melee combat.

Vader had two personal residences on two planets. There was Bast Castle on Vjun, which featured a 6m statue of himself. Apparently the castle was meant to be in The Empire Strikes Back but alas it was left out. He also had a skyscraper on Coruscant called, simply, Darth Vader's Palace. As someone who holds a keen interest in castles and skyscrapers, I admire Vader's choices of residences.

Up until the late 1990s, Star Wars fans could tell that Vader was a man with a mysterious and tormented past, full of conflict. The arrival of the prequel trilogy and subsequent illumination of his childhood lessened the mystique that surrounded Vader. A similar demystifying was visited upon the villainous Hannibal Lecter M.D. when his formative years were fleshed out in Hannibal Rising.

So there you have it, there are few cinematic villains who can stand alongside the infamous Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith.

マイケル

The London Slum

"Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms of huge and almost countless population, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach - dark corners, which no lighting board can brighten."

Devil's Acre, Westminster