Yet Another Sunday

Fuck Hope, There's No Such Thing
I'm paraphrasing Admiral James Stockdale in the head there. What we hoped would be a nirvana-like Sunday has turned out to be just another day of full-blast construction noise at the construction site next door. The bastards started at 8 this morning. And it's a Sunday, you see; and it's the week that the Holy Day season really begins; but the foreigners who put up the money for this 18-story hotel don't give one shit about the customs of New York City, not one shit about the feelings of the residents of this mostly residential neighborhood, their only feelings are for their current investment situation and the time-bossed schedule they've set up for the construction assholes to follow, the contractors making promises to meet certain schedules and to meet certain costs--and We the People of this neighborhood have to endure it. This noise, for those of you who've never had an 18-story building built right next door to your home, is absolutely nervewracking at its lowest level and absolutely demonic at its highest level. Today's noise is low-level but it's quite distracting and therefore disturbing--tomorrow morning at 7 am, the Devil himself mounts a demonic concrete-busting tractor and then the true hell for residents begins--and goes on for 7 straight unbroken hours--and NYC is right in the middle of a snowstorm, too--but that doesn't stop these construction dudes--they worked Friday all day in almost blizzard conditions--today's like a spring morning for them--it's cold and it's raining, but it's picnic weather for these birds. Another ironic thing about this construction site: this noise is being made by just about 5 human beings--the heavy machinery operators--or today, it's about 4 guys overthere making all the noise--the roar of these hi-revving motors--like the roaring of a garbage truck when the boys are packin' that big jaw on the back there that eats up that garbage and then that high-pitched outrageous high whine when that big jaw takes a big gulp of garbage--or in the case of construction sites these garbage trucks eat wood and brick and dirt and dust--or there are the sounds that are heavy thuds of a big shovel shoveling chunks of concrete into the back of a big high-powered dump truck--accompanying all of this is the constant beeping of those devices laws mandate they put on the backs of trucks that back up--a most irritating peeping beeping sound--God it's devastating to peace of mind. The major brain-damaging sound will occur all day tomorrow when the concrete buster gets back to its full-throttle mode and holy gawd of a million gollies, that's a noise that will send even the most apologetic do-gooder straight into the highest flames of the disruptive lake of fire!

Anticipation is a big problem in living in the heart of Manhattan these days--Anticipation is a form of hope, and hope is the only thing sailors once had, "Their destinies were anchored in hope," and yet according to a sailor, Admiral James Stockdale, there is no such thing as hope--there is faith but no hope--and those who survive have no hope--and those with hope don't survive--and further, according to the Admiral (the most decorated man in the Viet Nam Farce), those who commit suicide were those depending most on hope.

The Admiral in Politics

Admiral Stockdale believed if you are being tortured--and the Admiral was tortured daily and madly by the Cong--the hopeful say, "Oh surely this will end soon; or surely this war will be over soon." Those are the ones who crack up. Admiral Stockdale said his method was to think: OK, I'm now in a world of torture--there is no hope of this torture ending--it will be--it is inevitable--therefore, you say to yourself, fuck these bastards, let 'em torture me, I'm gonna make it, goddamn it, fuck hope.

I am trying to relieve my own mental breakingdowns over this construction noise by following the Admiral's orders!

Admiral Stockdale, in case you've forgotten, was Ross Perot's vice presidential running mate--back when--the same dude who in his first debate his opening statement was, "Who am I and why am I here?" Obviously running for vice president was like being tortured to the Admiral.

Stockdale as a Prisoner of War
On a mission over North Vietnam on September 9, 1965, Stockdale ejected from his A-4E Skyhawk, which had been disabled from anti-aircraft fire. Stockdale parachuted into a small village, where he was severely beaten and taken into custody.

He was held as a prisoner of war in the Hoa Lo prison for the next seven years. Locked in leg irons in a bath stall, he was routinely tortured and beaten. When told by his captors that he was to be paraded in public, Stockdale slit his scalp with a razor to purposely disfigure himself so that his captors could not use him as propaganda. When they covered his head with a hat, Stockdale beat himself with a stool until his face was swollen beyond recognition. He told them in no uncertain terms that they would never use him. When Stockdale heard that other prisoners were dying under the torture, he slit his wrists and told them that he preferred death to submission.

From Wikipedia
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We the People of New York State Bullshitted by Our Governor
Governor David Patterson is a professional politician. His father, Basil Patterson, was also a professional politician. They are members of the New York State black Power Elite, and I make the color distinction because the Power Elite that truly rules us is basically white male. David and his dad have lived their whole lives in the political context. As politicians they are totally interested in themselves, fuck their constituents.

The Governor says New York State is in the worst economic condition ever in the history of New York State--30 billion dollars in the hole--no explanation how this just so suddenly happened, except the Governor says it's because so much New York State income comes from Wall Street. He has to tax the poor he says! Listen to this, he can't tax the rich because if he does, they leave the state and the state loses revenue! However, if the poor leave the state, he doesn't give a shit, though we ask him, if the poor leave the state, who's gonna pay the taxes and tolls and fare increases? How stupid are our politicians? Listen to this, the New York State Governor says 300 million dollars of NY State income came from Wall Street bigshots getting huge bonuses! The Governor says he's for more and bigger bonuses for the Wall Street criminals! It brings him in more money! Doesn't such explanation of flim-flam defy logic to you like it does to me?

This is the kind of backwards thinking that is ruining this nation! Reduce taxes! Reduce tolls! Reduce subway fares! Put off paying interest on borrowed monies!

God, the political context is too scary for hopeful me.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Snow Job

Blizzard Hits New York City
Nobody showed up today at the magnificent hi-rise underground offices of The Daily Growler except me and I'm a horse--not a talking horse, no teevee star me, but an editing horse--and I'm here by nature of my stable being a floor down from this office in which I now sit uncomfortably--my big horse's butt just doesn't fit in one of these human monkey chairs--and that's what humans are to plain ole ordinary horses--big monkeys--monkeys who enjoy grooming things, like horses--groom, groom, groom, like a bunch of monkeys--just like a bunch of monkeys--we horses call it a form of human monkey masturbation--but then masturbation to a horse is another world.

It is snowing like Paradise Lost outside--though it hasn't hampered the construction noises from next door getting more and more irritatingly disruptive--to the point that if I were a human monkey I think I'd be taking an AK-47 to those bastards making the noise--and it's an awful noise even to a horse.

I've put a little Lester Young on the office stereo so I'm sort of horsing around here like a damn be-bop horse--pretending to be a reporter...

"And in the news today, same ole shit, a couple of murders in the outer boroughs, 2 babies and an old geezer bought the farm in a spectacular fire in Duh Bronx, and the billionaire mayor has declared war on all poor people by raising property taxes, taxes that will be passed on to renters and consumers and condo owners--in other words, the human monkeys will be paying off the debts incurred by incompetent human monkey know-nothings...."

Hey, I rather enjoyed that. That was a horse reporting the news. How 'bout that, monkeys?

I'll probably lose a chance at a big stud fee for writing this. thegrowlingwolf perhaps could emasculate me--wolves go for the lower extremities when they are at their predatory best. The belly is the weak point on all animals, their most vulnerable area to mortal wound. Horses aren't predatory so I'll simply swift kick your ass if you try and gobble into my stomach area--I'll drop kick your ass back to the Stone Age--don't horse around with me. Horses can bite, too--damn right we can!

I had an uncle who was a circus horse--he trotted around this ring with a human monkey on his back for his hay and grooming. I've heard him joking about getting in a bad-ass mood during rehearsals and dumpin' the human monkey straight out and on her dumb ass--and then horse laugh about it. Of course, he never fucked up during a big-time show--where he was the star horse for several successful years--he's out in a pasture now just outside Sarasota, Florida, studdin' like he was a Roman emperor around a flock of young boy human monkeys.

Do I think a horse will ever be elected president of the USA? Probably not, but I'll bet a lot of horse's asses will be elected to the job; what do you bet?

I'm jivin' around the room here to Prez--coolin' my hooves to his jump and drive--whoaaaa, Nellie...I'm having a fun like a barrel of human monkeys!

Y'all take a snow day,

mredtheeditinghorse
for The Daily Growler

thegrowlingwolf on Emulation

It Is Snowing Big White Butterfly-Looking Flakes
It is a miserable day in the USA's largest metropolis. It's misty. "Look at me/I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree." A pianist named Errol Garner wrote the tune "Misty." And I know of what he speaks when he speaks of a kitten being up a tree. Even though it's a miserable day we still have to keep kicking against the pricks to survive...

The irritating aspect of the nation's economy having already crashed is pitching me outside the boundaries of my literary context, making me face reality in the jokey political context...and once again I'm deliriously amazed at how our representatives in Congress continue to "let be" (let it be, let it be), without any blame even, free from any threat of punishment or threat of P time, the ruinous rulership of this Power Elite numbskull egomaniac spoiled-brat rich kid son of a wimpy ex-president faux president to still wallow lasciviously in the pigsty mess he's made of his time in office--ruling with rude ineptitude and following backward-thinking--and our spoiled brat rich boy "president," this AWOL coward in his military career, continues to fuck us up as a failed military leader and diplomat, continues to get people throwing their shoes at We the People of the USA--a shoe thrown at you, by the way, even where I come from means get the fuck out of here--absolutely the worst president ever in a long line of, I think, mediocre presidents, not being blamed for any of his "wrongs"--his actions excused simply because he's a member of the Power Elite, folks, and as Veblen said, to these people, one of them fucking up is covered by the traditional nobility bestowed on them by society as members of the Power Elite thus making them blameless for whatever their mistakes--in the Power Elite, there is no such thing as mistakes--that's why you'll hear these Wall Street bastards talking about "It was a good plan but it had too many regulations on it"--the blame, you see, being projected on the weaker force...

...and I just can't ignore the agony this little pissant has brought to the world! He's wrecked our economy and put us in an irretrievable state of debt--he and his crooked pals at Goldman Sachs, like Hank Paulson, that rat pack of Wall Street Power Elite cronies--and believe me, these assholes have had their greedy noses deep in the asscrack of their legendary Wall Street wizard, Bernie Madoff--and oh how they all know each other--the Power Elite are all intertwined--each linked with each other's asshole--noses up asses!

I keep harping on the Power Elite. I read the Internet news and pundit blogs looking for intelligence but all I find is meaning well but going nowhere hypotheses--bullshitters so caught up in their own philosophies--their own out-of-touch deductions--that I find most of what they are writing stacking bullshit upon bullshit, writing as though they are so more insidely informed than the rest of us...which after you read their thoughts you realize they know no more about what's happening than a well-informed high school senior does.

I suppose any journalist whose column has made it regularly into the NYTimes is making big bucks--I mean, you ain't no joke in journalism when you are a byline-journalist with the NYTimes or Washington Post--you gotta be living a comfortable life--I mean drinks every night with some other pundits in "the know"--or a party at the Lehrers's, or a dinner at Martha Stewart's, or maybe a date with Katie Couric--or cigars over champagne and fresh shrimp with some Hollywood producer thinking maybe of making a film out of your latest investigative-reporting expose book...
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em·u·la·tion

Pronunciation:

\ˌem-yə-ˈlā-shən, -yü-\

Function:

noun

Date:

1542

1obsolete : ambitious or envious rivalry 2: ambition or endeavor to equal or excel others (as in achievement) 3 a: imitation b: the use of or technique of using an emulator

— em·u·la·tive \ˈem-yə-ˌlā-tiv\ adjective

— em·u·la·tive·ly adverb
__________________________from Merriam-Webster Collegeate Dictionary online__

The Power Elite seek emulation--I refer to a statement in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class--emulation leads to competition which leads to contests--and life is a series of competitions and contests--we are challenged several times a day in terms of this emulation...

Goes back to our predatory days--the predatory stage of class development--
When men became the hunters, the priests, the owners of property, the chiefs, the boogiemen--
When women became these men's property--
Yes, a part of our original states of masculine mind see women as necessary possessions--
Women are industrious. They are industry. The men are warriors, commanders, hunters, great wrestlers, great arrowshooters, great killers of mass destruction...
Women are practical--they do the industry work--they build the homes, they plant and tend the crops, they have the tons of babies needed for a family to survive in primitive times--and in a way, we are still in primitive times--
In terms of Earth time--sidereal time--we are but babies.

The Power Elite has a firm control on us. It's a control they've built up for hundreds of years now in this country--and the world--like Henry Kissingassinger's consulting firm having an office in Beijing.

Take the Kennedy Family. Why are they so admired by us? They are considered to be rich of course but they weren't always rich--they didn't get rich until Joe Kennedy's bootlegger business took off in Irish shanty Boston and gained him wealth enough to venture into Honey Fitzsimmons's domain and eventually seduce his virgin-daughter Rose!

Then Joe went Hollywood and he really got rich and he got so fucking important Frankie Delano Roosevelt (in the Power Elite by nature of his Dutch forebears (crooks and slaveholders every damn one of 'em)) made him Ambassador to England where old Bootlegger Joe was caught up in some pretty shady affairs--some intimating that Joe was a spy--Joe the Bootlegger in London in the social world big time--in the upper echelons of the USA Power Elite--taking the Irish shanty potato-famine refugee Kennedy family to top-of-the-heap power and political presence in this country that especially blossomed after WWII--old Joe hoping it would mature in his most-prized son, Joe Jr. But Joe Jr. fucked up and got himself killed by the Japanese--and so then old Bootlegger Joe, now Ambassador Joe, picked on his weak-ass son, John Boy--made poor old backaching John Boy go to war and try and get himself a hero, which John Boy did with his PT-Boat 109 affair.

And now, currently, New York's Power Elite is gloating over Caroline Kennedy wanting to be senator in place of Hillbilly Hillary. The trouble with the Power Elite that rules us here in New York City is they know nothing about the reality of living in New York City and New York State. The real estate Goliaths and real estate developers are NYC's ruling Power Elite and most of them live in the clouds no matter where they're living--and Caroline Kennedy, I'll guar-and-damn-tee you, is highly invested in NYC hi-floor real estate and the Kennedy Foundation and the JFK Foundation have real estate interests in NYC, too--and what about all of Jackie O's prostituted wealth? and who got her brother's share of the Kennedy pie after he foolishly tried to fly his toy airplane to his family's private airport--and we just recently were forced by the Kennedy Adoration Society here in NYC to now think of the Triboro Bridge--a beautiful bridge, by the bye--quite an engineering feat if I'm to believe Robert Moses--as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge--or the RFK bridge as it's now being referred to by the teevee "news" entertainment program talking heads--
Like why did Philadelphia name their sports arena RFK Stadium?

So the sons and daughters of these Power Elites who rule us carry on the privileges habitually expected by their forebears no matter how crookedly their wealth was made (stolen)--those who rule over us--who make laws we have to follow--who set up the habitualities we're all supposed to adhere to and keep our hands on the fucking plough so Caroline Kennedy doesn't have to get callouses on her privileged hands...I wonder if Caroline has ever cleaned a toilet bowl in her life? "Mommie, I flooded the toilet bowl...where's Rosita our illegal immigrant maid? Mommie, I think you should have Rosita deported...she's refusing to clean my shit up after me." That's a parody on the kind of life Caroline Kennedy's had. I join with Gary Ackerman (an NY politician) in asking, "Why not J Lo for the job?" I say, let Hillbilly Hill pass it on to Chelsea Clinton--Chelsea's a member of the New Power Elite--hell, she has a bottle of vintage wine on rack in the 21 Club's fabulous Power Elite wine cellar--quite an elaborate place under the 21 Club--built during Prohibition! Hell, old Bootlegger Joe Kennedy probably had a bronze-plaque on the wall at 21 back in his fornicatin' heyday! ("The Kennedy boyz on the rooftop, Kennedy boyz on the tiles, Kennedy boyz with the clap and the crabs and the piles, Kennedy boyz with their butts all wreathed in smiles, as like their father they revel in the throes of fornication.")

The noise of construction going on right next to me is double-time disruptive today. They've got their Caterpillar jackhammer tractor out again. They're tearing down a concrete wall. So far it's taken 'em over a month to tear this wall down--and they're whacking at it maddeningly today--even though it's freezing and snowing...

And then I read where the Chicago Tribune megacorp (includes the LA Times) is totally in debt and collapsing now--and I read where the Detroit Free Press is stopping home deliveries and cutting back on weekend editions. And I read where the whole town of Fairfield, Connecticut, got ripped off of all their money by good ole Wall Street goofball Bernie "Made Off With Your Money" Madoff--and, hah-hah-hah, Mort Zuckerman got taken, too--he owns the New York Daily News--a rag of a tabloid-type newspaper--the most popular newspaper in New York City--it's subway reading material and a substitute umbrella when you're caught in a sudden rainstorm--Bernie ripped Mort off big time. I'm rolling in the aisle of my own comedy club with laughter--

Bernie ripped off the Power Elite--ruined some Power Elite widows and some Power Elite show-biz folks, like Steven Spielberg. Hah-hah--oh shit, what glee such shenanigans bring me--and now Jesse Jackson Jr. (I suppose we could say Daddy Jesse Jackson is a member certainly of the black Power Elite thereby giving his son some emulational quality) is claiming he was working undercover with the Feds to bring down the Illinois governor, who to me looks like Donald Trump with his hairpiece died shoe-polish black. The old pianist, Earl "Fatha" Hines (a pianist original), used black shoe polish in his wig hat near the end of his life--a guitar player who worked with the Fatha told me that--and NYC once had a dude who played the drums over in front of what was then the Sears & Roebuck Bldg and now is the Paramount Bldg on Seventh Avenue. He played behind a big cardboard sign that said he had been featured in The Gene Krupa Story movie--and this dude was a little short dude and he wore his hair slicked flat back on his head--holding it down with black shoe polish--then there was the dude who with a pair of drumsticks played the manhole covers right out in the middle of Sixth Avenue no matter the traffic--everybody called him Buddy Poor--me and my photographer friend stopped and tried to talk to Buddy Poor one day--he was drinking something yellow looking out of a plastic bottle that my friend swore was a Clorox bottle--but Buddy didn't have much to say--he was simply taking 5 and had to get back on stage soon...

This morning our governor laid whole bunches of troubles on the backs of we folks who want to love living in New York State and especially New York City--and he really got pissed off at Saturday Night Light (Live) making fun of him--and the actor who played him did a good job of mocking his blind look, too, and of course it was offensive--television is offensive to me--and David Patterson, blind or whatever, informed We the People of New York State that due to the NY State budget being suddenly billions in the hole (unaccounted for, of course) he was cutting services to us--hospital services, nursing home services, monies to New York City--plus he's gonna put a tax on soda pop--everything but diet sodas--it's for our health you see. Why can't these government motherfuckers stay out of our lives--our morals--what the shit does the New York State governor care for the average Joe's health? Not one iota! He has not one god-damn care for the people of this state--only the wealth of this state. Aha! Gotch'ya.

And today the New York City crooked-as-snakes-at-night Manhattan Transit Authority is going to pull the wool over our stupid eyes--they are billions in the hole, too, and now they say they have to raise money or they'll have to cut services--like...

Such bullshit. They want to raise subway and bus fares--yep, make it harder on the workingclass--the workingclass that is taxed at every turn it takes--payroll taxes, state, city, and Federal taxes, taxes on food, taxes on beverages, taxes on alcohol, taxes on gasoline, tolls on highways and bridges, taxes on our clothes now--taxes on necessities--

No taxes however on the Power Elite and the little new-rich elitists. No salary cuts in Albany or in the New York City City Council or mayor's office--with all their assistants and go-fers and interns and brother-in-laws and limos and helicopters and police escorts and security staff and their own cooks and their illegal immigrant maids and nannies...though they are asking union members to take salary cuts--and they are cutting monies to education--and the governor is raising tuitions at all the state colleges.

They always cut services to We the People--and raise our taxes--and cut health services and fire houses and cut the cops back to skeleton forces--always We the People have to sacrifice, while in the meantime the criminals on Wall Street are having a ball, partying hearty in their private clubs, or still making those power lunches and those junket trips and those golf outings and getting those yachts all ready for the spring yachting season--or their moves to their private islands and Florida estates or Caribbean Island getaways--vacation homes, summer homes, NYC apartments, District of Corruption homes and apartments--

How can we have any hopes with this mess in charge of us? The same people who caused our economy to hit rock bottom and who are now telling us how to rebound--idiots!--who keep voting for wars and more wars, and trillion-dollar Pentagon budgets, and continued wasting money on the Star Wars missile system, and continuing to promote the ruining of our wilderness lands, continuing to promote the use of dirty coal and the reckless mining of coal using the blowing up of a whole mountain no matter the destruction to the local environment and the health of the local inhabitants--and the miners--and fuck the people, the Power Elite want that coal--that Rockefeller coal--oh yeah, why do you think old John D. Rockefeller the Third or Fourth is governor of West Virginia? Standard Oil was into coal mining. They were into copper mining in Montana, too.

You see the Power Elite needs slave labor--cheap labor--that's what the Repugnican Party is all about--cheap labor economics--the rich getting richer and the poor kept poor--wealth must be kept in the hands of the Power Elite--the leisure class--the class that abhors common labor--the leisure class that expects comfort and ease at the expense of a cheap-ass poorly paid labor force--that's why the Repugnicans are blocking helping the US auto industry--because of the UAW--with the Power Elite auto CEOs complaining about assembly line workers making 75 dollars an hour--and janitors making $65,000 a year! OH LAWDY LAWD--and these assholes are making multimillions a year--and they ain't taking no cuts either! Fuck you and your problems--they don't want 'em, thank you!

Veblen writes: "The motive that lies at the root of ownership is emulation...." (p. 35, Theory of the Leisure Class, Mentor Books, 1956.)

And then I relaxed at 1 am last night by checking in with Pastor Melissa Scott, the official religious guru of The Daily Growler, and Melissa was "lecturing," as she calls it, on an old bible manuscript--Dr. Gene Scott once owned the largest private collection of holy books in the world--and Pastor Melissa trotted out a manuscript page from what's called the Beatty Papyri--Melissa was using a copy of a Pauline epistle from Dr. Gene's several pages from the Beatty Papyri:
CHESTER BEATTY PAPYRI.

On November 19, 1931, a Philadelphia millionaire named Chester Beatty was vacationing in the Middle East. When an Arab offered to sell him some Old Testament papyri in Greek, he agreed to the purchase. He turned the entire collection over to two scholars to examine, F. Kenyon and H. Saunders.

A detailed study showed that these were second and third century manuscripts containing portions of Paul's epistles and the Gospels. The manuscripts are now kept at the University of Pennsylvania.

This comes from a very interesting site--check it out:
www.angelfire.com/nt/theology/Bible06.html

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What Melissa brought to bear when she had her cameraman take a close up of her Beatty Papyri copy of old mad Saul of Taursus's letter to the church at Ephesus was that in this manuscript, there was no punctuation. Brilliant woman this Melissa whatever her name really is--and she suddenly mentioned Aristophanes of Byzantium, the fourth librarian of the great library at Alexandria! She says when the Ptolemy at that time put Aristophanes in prison--to keep him from going to another library--Aristophanes wiled his time by punctuating manuscripts! Melissa said Aristophanes invented punctuation--and using comparative ancient bibles, Melissa gave what I thought was a great lecture on original punctuation--but, then, I'm prejudiced--Melissa Scott is one of the sexiest women alive to me, Praise the Lawdy Lawd!--that's the wolf in me talking--the man in me knows this woman's a mean mistreater--I mean, she could milk the life out of any man I know--and I mean that "milk the life out of a man" literally. Hell, she killed Dr. Gene Scott--he couldn't handle her--only a man like Yahweh can satisfy so mean a mistreater as Pastor Melissa--anyway, Melissa showed some interesting knowledge by explaining Aristophanes's method of punctuating--inventing full stops of 3 types which he used as dots within manuscripts. Then she says he invented the comma--and she showed three ancient examples of the different uses and periods and commas in old bibles and how different the meanings of this one "verse" from the Beatty Papyri page were in these differently punctuated bibles.

Here's Aristophanes of Byzantium's Wikipedia entry:

Aristophanes (Greek: Ἀριστοφάνης) of Byzantium (c. 257 BC–c. 185 BC/180 BC) was a Greek scholar, critic and grammarian, particularly renowned for his work in Homeric scholarship, but also for work on other classical authors such as Pindar and Hesiod. Born in Byzantium about 257 BC, he soon moved to Alexandria and studied under Zenodotus and Callimachus. He succeeded Eratosthenes as head librarian of the Library of Alexandria at the age of sixty.

Aristophanes is credited with the invention of the accent system used in Greek to designate pronunciation, as the tonal, pitched system of archaic and classical Greek was giving way (or had given way) to the stress-based system of koine. This was also a period when Greek, in the wake of Alexander's conquests, was beginning to act as a lingua franca for the Eastern Mediterranean (replacing various Semitic languages). The accents were designed to assist in the pronunciation of Greek in older literary works.

He also invented one of the first forms of punctuation in the 3rd century BCE; single dots (distinctiones) that separated verses (colometry), and indicated the amount of breath needed to complete each fragment of text when reading aloud (not to comply with rules of grammar, which were not applied to punctuation marks until thousands of years later). For a short passage (a komma), a media distinctio dot was placed mid-level (·). This is the origin of the modern comma punctuation mark, and its name. For a longer passage (a colon), a subdistinctio dot was placed level with the bottom of the text (.), similar to a modern colon or semicolon, and for very long pauses (periodos), a distinctio point near the top of the line of text (^·).^[1][2][3]

He died in Alexandria around 185-180 B.C.

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I'd just never thought about where punctuation came from...thanks, Melissa, for turning me on to something I'd just never even thought about--and that's still amazing me--how come I never wondered about punctuation--that I realize I hadn't is funny to me, too, since I worked for years rewriting and repunctuating the copy of writers and copywriters and wannabe writers in teevee and advertising and publishing--trying to make sense out of writers whose writing showed they knew nothing about grammar--punctuation--the meaning of commas--in fact, they really didn't know how to write--they'd all been "taught" how to write--oh they thought they were natural-born writers in the sense, "Hell, anybody can write," but they weren't.

I am however.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

thegrowlingwolf PROPHECIZES!

Yeah Verily, I Say Unto Thee
I was listening to Amy Goodman this morn and she had on the Indian (the place the stupid slave-trading Colombo thought was the Dominican Republic) novelist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) and Arundhati was talking Frankenstein stuff--you know, We the People of the USA represented so proudly by our fearless leader, Georgie Porgie Bush ("We're trading nuclear secrets for Indian mangoes...."), are creating a monster by joining the Brits and the Indians in saying the attack on Mumbai was India's 9/11...

I pause and ask myself why a pigeon couple has landed on my window sill. The male a big blue & white street pigeon standing there preening and by his side his rather dove-like plain-jane female. He was being a gentleman with her so I assumed they had already mated...

What the hell are pigeons doing mating in December? Is global warming fucking up their pigeon brains?--the weakest brains there are, according to old traditions--"He's pigeon-footed and pigeon-brained to boot!" Synonymous with "pea-brained." I would assume calling someone a "turtle-brain" is worse, isn't it? Or how about a "swan-brain"? That's rather poetic--"The swan-brain pigeons flying vainly yet stupidly north for the winter."

Poetry takes my mind off prophesying--EXCEPT...

Praise de Lawd, my Great White Massuh, De Lawd, that is (I'm speaking minstrelsy white English, the language of the white playwright), De Lawd drunk on de firmament, the likker of Hebbin'...

De Lawd hath come to me, thegrowlingwolf , and he saith unto me, "Dammit, Wolfie, you're getting too god-damn namby-pamby in terms of the departure of your vast challenging knowledges--whether real or imagined." "You're talkin' gibberish, Big Dude." "No, I ain't, I'm talkin' high-Hebbin'-Latin...what I'm drivin' at is, you're gettin' lily-livered with your wise criticism, your lambasting, your rakin' 'em over the coals." "You're obsolete, Big Daddy, like way behind the times with your vernacular." "Fuck you, Wolfie, heah, have a slug of this firm-ah-ment, heah, loosen up your wig. I'm sayin' I give you permission to start prophesying. Tellin' the future. You're a writer--you can predict the future simply by writing down a characterization in your mind and then typin' it out...." "I know what you're saying, Lawdy Lawd. Maybe I should listen to you this time." "Hey, my peeps down there on earth are predictin' Armageddon any day now. I heard my man Jack Van Impe talking last night--I couldn't sleep--that god-damn firm-ah-ment goes right straight to my head--and, shit, I'm outta weed...anyway, Bro Jack was babbling (I invented that word, you dig?) about how he'd found out through secret inquiries that the Bilderbergs, a secret society of the Devil down in Virginia, according to Bro Jack, is at the moment preparing to microchip every living human being in the world--Bro Jack got very red honky faced excited sayin' that this microchip jive is the 666 mark of the beast that crazy son of a bitch John the Revelator imagined while the Greeks had him exiled on that wild-ass Isle of Patmos I created for a Greek goddess who later ditched me for that god-damn Zeus, so I made that Patmos a wild place full of burning bushes and eyeball-devouring snakes and monkey-size scorpions and vampire rats and toxic roaches and castor beans--god-dammit, Wolfie, I hate castor beans."

So De Lawd spoke to me--over a couple of shots of Baker Beam's Best--and told me to prophesy.

OK, here I go--grrrrowling all the way--bells on bob-tailed nags--

--I was thinking about how practical and smart smart women are--and now I can refer back to Arundhati Roy and her theory that the US and Britain are creating a Frankenstein monster out of India because the Power Elite in India are beginning to think of themselves as a nation like the United States--a powerful nation, a military contender for world domination--a nation who now when attacked by terrorists have to attack back like G.W. "Killer" Bush did when Saddam Hussein and Osama "Who?" Bin Laden laid 9/11 on the US of A. This Indian Power Elite--still promoting the old ways of the Caste System and rajah rule--wants to drop nuclear bombs on Pakistan--the hated Pakistan, the Muslim maverick split off Indians that happened after WWII, after India declared its Independence but the Muslim Indians didn't want to be Indians--they hated the Hindi--and the Buddhists--so they split off and became Pakistan--West Pakistan and East Pakistan with India sitting Shiva-like right in the god-damn middle of this new Muslim nation--and then East Pakistan, also Islamic, decided they didn't want to be Pakistanis, so they split off from Pakistan and became Bangladesh--and it all goes back to the Before Christ days--ancient times--the Hindu Kush nomadic tribes came rushing out of the Himalaya Mountains to takeover Central Asia after defeating the Persians under Cyrus and right behind these tribes came the Mongolian Hordes and the the Islamic Caliphate movement sweeping out of Arabia, one of the most successful world conquering moves yet--conquering lands from Arabia all the way up into Russia taking all of Central Asia as it swept on into Afghanistan and then into India and all the way around the Mediterranean to Spain and Northern Africa--taken over by the Muslims--Africa Islamified; Spain Islamified--Indonesia Islamified!

So Roy says with great encouragement from Britain and the USA the Power Elite in India are seeing a chance to become the power brokers in their area of the confused world--and the USA is meddling in it already--Condo-Leasing Rice has already been to Mumbai; John Kerry's there now! Even, and this is alarming to me, John Negreponte is there now--and in case you've forgotten who John Negreponte is--think: Greek shipping tycoon's son born in London; came to US and served as a mass murderer and teacher of torture in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador--organizer of the death squads that killed thousands of indigenous (jungle residers) Hondurans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans; and John was in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra bullshit deceit and our disrupting the Nicaraguan democratically held elections to keep Danny the Red Ortega from winning by a landslide--oh yeah, Dear John's been anywhere there's violence, a lot of which he caused or set in motion himself! And now he's head of security in Iraq or some such bullshit job as that. Amazin' how this renegade world-traveler wildcat son of the Power Elite has gained control of so much persuasive power in We the People's USA--and John is still in the government; he's been in the government since before the Reagan years, that's Ronnie "Star Wars" Raygun--the man who could fly from the District of Corruption to Tokyo in 3 and 1/2 hours--the man whose last couple of years in office he spent pretending he was three years old again--eating Jelly Beans and leaving presidential duties to his second actress wife who ran the government by consulting with soothsaying-phony Jeanne Dixon, a witch of a bitch, one of those gutsy babes who instead of becoming a Holy-Roller woman preacher became an Astrologer! Oh doesn't that sound scientific? And it is. Scientists were the first astrologers, though as science evolved it shirked off its wild off-the-map hypotheses--and this was especially true when later sky watchers discovered that the whole sky system all astrology was based on was a photographic image of the universe--which means like the painting of the star system on the roof of the big room at Grand Central Station--it was a BACKWARDS look at the constellations--the star stellae that mark the trail from which we evolved--as plasma particles probably--certainly becoming spermy (sperm are seeds) slime in some Lower Austro-Afroland swamp of a Mother Earth womb.

The Power Elite in India based on this Mumbai attack wants India to be recognized as a SuperPower, like the USA, Mother England, China, Israel--"We've got nuclear weapons so let's use them against those scumbag Muslim bastard Paki rats! Let's bomb those desert Devil worshippers back to the fucking Stone Age."

So Arundhati Roy set me up for my first prediction as a Prophet, the Prophet Homolobo, so:

So saith the prophetic word of the Prophet Homolobo: "Oh boy what a hellofa World War III's a comin'. I'm glad I'm not young. I predict young Amuricans can bank on seeing a nuclear attack on the USA--seeing a military invasion of the USA--the nuclear attack coming first! The Holy Rollers will be praising their Allah because they believe they are going to be rescued supernaturally from WWIII; the Jews will be not giving a shit, those fatalistic bastards--they would actually welcome the end of the world as long as they are sure they're taking their god-damn dog-like brother-and-sister Arabs with them! And the Buddhists I suppose will all set themselves on fire. And the Hindu will take their scimitars and behead bevies of Pakis and Bangladeshis and Pushtoons and Pashtoons--god-damn religious bullshit has led us to this stage in CIVILIZATION--a man-invented way of exploiting the masses--a manufactured state--not the natural state represented by the Mother Jungle."

What do you think? How am I as the Prophet Homolobo? Pretty Nostradumbass-like, right?

thehighlypropheticgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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A The Daily Growler Addendum:
A Korean professor has decided he's rebelling against English being the official language of the Internet. Surely this dude doesn't expect everybody to learn Korean! We jest, of course. We live with the Koreans and still don't know what they are--Mongolians? Chinese? Japanese? They hate the Japanese, We know that; they love some Jesus Christ, We know that, too.
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Auh, Taik-Sup (Korea University, Republic of Korea)
Promoting Multilingualism on the Internet: Korean Experience
Since its birth, the Internet has been dominated by the English language and North-American culture. In a world of five to eight thousand different ethnic groups who reside in approximately 160 nations states speaking 5,000 distinct languages, some language must be the common language of the Internet. Many people believe that English must be default the standard language on the Internet. There are clear indications of English becoming a lingua franca in the cyberspace. The autor summarizes the advantages of multicultural and multilingual Internet. He argues that multilingualism on the Internet is a necessary, if not the sufficient, condition for transforming an ephemeral (=unstable and transitory) cybersociety into a robust one.
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Yep, there's a problemo, folks--the Internet's gonna become the source of a new language--come on, you linquisticos, you Esperantoites, you Cobalt and Fortran grandfathers, you C++-ers, you phoneticists, we need a new language--a multitasking language--it's Babel all over again. It will have to be a language of symbols--oh, hell, what are we talking about?

We're stuck with English here at The Daily Growler--though Franny and Zoe, our two-headed girl reporter (our Lois Lane), speaks Hebrew--but does Hebrew count as a modern language? Mr. Ed, our editing horse, can pretty much write in any language that he behooves himself to write in--he does our translations around here--he and Google.

WE NEED A NEW LANGUAGE!

thestaff
for A The Daily Growler Addendum

Another Backward-Thinking Sunday

Same Old, Same Old
It is so still and quite this morning in the USA's largest metropolis. It's too quite. It's like people are sleeping late today. Too poor perhaps...too broke from last night's splurging...too broke--or am I repeating myself? I was blessed Friday evening with a banquet fit for a Power Elitist when the ever-blessed thedailygrowlerhousepianist feted the old Wolf-Man to a KC sirloin big enough to choke a horse at the old-time watering hole and feeding trough Keen's Chop House--and who the hell knows, it could have been horse meat--good horse meat if it was--thoroughbred all the way--washed down with several bottles of the late great Freddy Heineken's best and topped off with a high-priced snifter of Calvados. We mafficked with much manly glee and sporadic flirtatious conversations with our Australian waitress who's getting her degree in Psychology from Columbia--a peach of a woman I thought, though tdghousepianist wasn't so impressed with her as I--I the unfettered--I the maverick--I the bold--I the great pretender.

Now on this quite Sunday morning, I'm so well satisfied my head is as empty as my bank account. And, yes, folks, I am as broke as the rest of you! The whole lot of us are broke thanks to the most openly crooked corporate robbers and most openly dishonest and constantly lying politicians ever in the history of this corrupt nation. The most impeachable president in the history of this corrupt nation has promoted himself to the highest levels of the Power Elite where he's excused of his blunders and his lies and his thievery and his ruining of this corrupt nation--a nation corrupted from the very beginning when aristocratic slaveholding landowners and military champions wrote up the Constitution--a Constitution declaring this corrupt nation a Republic not a Democracy--all men were not created equal according to our Constitution--and according to this male-written and male-power-oriented document, women were created to be owned by MEN. This is a MAN's world, folks, and we men can't forget it because it's in our traditions--and it's in women's traditions to be subservient and submissive to men. And totally FUCK the Native Americans who originally OWNED all this land.

The Governor of Illinois is an open crook; and he's acting really proud of himself as he ducks and dodges his accusers and refuses to give up his Power Elite role in Illinois shenanigans. At the same time this governor was clowning around justifying his crookedness, several numbskull Amuricans looking for get-rich-quick gurus were bilked out of billions of bucks by a big-time Power Elite scam artist Bernard Madoff. Who dat? you ask. A Wall Street crook of the highest kind--a Power Elitist who was once Chairman of NASDAQ (whatever happened to the American Stock Exchange?), old Bernie Madoff was a master of deceit when it came to his HEDGE FUND business--Bernard Madoff Associates or some such Wall Street designation as that. Bernie scammed rich widows and Alzheimer's executives out of billions of bucks, which he then used to speculate with, really losing his investors money while reaping billions in profits for himself off his hedge-fund speculations. He trick-bagged his investors by returning them big dividends on their initial investments, luring in more and more of this wild wealth that seems to be out there by the billions upon billions! Imagine, being in an industry where you can steal a million or two and it is never be missed! Never accounted for.

Look at our faux president! This cocksucker is in Iraq today--gloating over his finest hour--this bastard who is honoring our troops--and our commercial teevee ego-trippers are honoring our troops all day today, too--this bastard who's gotten way over 4,000 of them killed and way over 20,000 of them maimed for life--this bastard who's killed some say over 600,000 Iraqis and has left 2 million Iraqi refugees scattered around the world--and this prick is over in Iraq honoring these sacrificial lambs--what an asshole--and yet we continue to honor him! You see, this is part of the Power Elite's privilege--to make drastic mistakes that affect the lives of millions of people--leaving huge numbers of people dead or starving to death--and you see, they are forgiven their mistakes because they are privileged by their Power Elite positions to be excused wrecking the economy or mismanaging a corporation into bankruptcy--still a privilege of the wealthy yet denied the common ordinary citizen--the consumers and producers--the lowest form of human beings in existence (the Labor Force) to the Power Elite. The scumbags who have to do the shit work. So this hedge-fund asshole is now being reprimanded by his peers! HAH. How many weeks of P Time will this scumbag serve? In the meantime, some poor black dumb son of bitch is doing 25-to-life because he sold an baby-laxative-cut gram package of cocaine to an undercover asshole cop who lured him into the deal--which of course is unConstitutional, but who the fuck cares?--a petty dope dealer is a common ordinary worker to the Power Elite--all of whom can dabble in cocaine to their heart's delight if they so choose. These people can drive drunk and wreck their BMW sports cars and nothing happens to them, or as in the case of movie star and Power Elitist entertainer Matthew Broderick--he and his chick at the time killed two Irish motorists when they were struck by Matthew's speeding BMW--and nothing happened to Broderick--no charges. Russell Crowe can throw a cell phone at a guy's head and almost kill him or brain damage the dude and he gets away with a slap on the wrist and having to pay the guy he almost beaned some pocket change in repentance. Or Halle Berry can hit-and-run in LA and she's excused because of the pressures on her life as a millionaire actress.

Did you ever consider the wealth Hollywood has stolen from the Amurican people over the years? Consider teevee for instance. There are at least 3 hours of prime-time shows every evening on teevee, on CBS, NBC, Fox, and Mickey Mouse's ABC. Each of these shows has at least two leading stars--those making the star dollars--3 shows a night, 4 major networks, that's 84 prime-time teevee shows running every week--and I count reruns as runs since the star actors get paid for the reruns--which means at least 168 actors a week are making star bucks--168 actors and actresses accumulating big-buck wealth whether their shows tank during the first weeks or go on for years. All the actors on the popular show Friends are now Power Elite members--each ending that show making over 12 million an episode--can you imagine! Of course it's an expensive lifestyle they lead and they have a lot of parasitical staff people they have to pay, their agents, their legal advisers, their accountants (accountants steal a lot of money from Hollywood elitists every year--when I once worked for Price Waterhouse, the PW accountant handling Diana Ross's account stole $200,000 from Miss Ross--accountant crooks use what they openly called "creative" accounting when dealing with their high-end Power Elite clients), their assistants (their hair people, their personal trainers, their speech therapists, their psychiatric therapists, their gardeners, their bankers)--still, come on, they lead the ultimate in privileged lives, unaccountable for much of anything in their irresponsible ways of living--lifestyles manufactured by the movie studios--marriages made in studio production offices--like Tom Hanks (Cruise?) and Katie Holmes--look how shooting-star their careers took off once they hooked up and fucked each other and made a baby--a worthless little parasite brat that We the People are gonna be burdened with supporting for the rest of his or her unproductive lives.

Like what qualifies Caroline Kennedy to be a New York State senator? Her grandfather was a corrupt bastard. Her father was a fornicating lying bastard who was hooked in tight with the Mob--probably thanks to old Joe Kennedy, the ex-Boston, shanty Irish bootlegger who happened to marry the daughter of Boston's leading shanty Irish political kingpin--all of these Potato Famine IMMIGRANTS crooked as snakes at night! Old Joe banging sweet Miss Rose, keeping her knocked up so as to give him time to fuck his Hollywood pretties--his little sex pets! And his sons took right after the old man--no woman was safe in their company--ask Mary Jo Kopeckne about how safe it is to be with a drunk Kennedy whose dick is overpowering his brain! Does that qualify Caroline to be a senator? She was so young when her father was blown away (by the Mob they are now saying), she surely has only vague memories of those times. And also, what do we do with the topless shots of Sweet Caroline and Jackie O strolling on the beaches of St. Tropez back at the height of their glory days together--Caroline and Mom walking hand-in-hand topless down the beach! Such a sordid family the Kennedys. I will never refer to the Triboro Bridge as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge--RFK, yeah he got religion when his brother was shot and killed--though it wasn't enough religion to protect him from the Mob.

You see, folks, it's another backward-thinking Sunday. I find it ironic how people who obviously know nothing about Economics or the workings of the stock market are now telling us the solution to this economic collapse still collapsing all around us! No mention is made of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars! No mention of the cost of those wars! No mention of the trillion dollar Pentagon budget and how this asshole Robert Gates is the man who got such a huge wasteful amount from Congress. Today he's trumpeting this bullshit of he's taking the poor slob soldiers out of Iraq--not to bring them home! oh NO! But to deploy them to Afghanistan, the righteous war this time, according to the people who know absolutely dickshit-nothing about Afghanistan history--who know nothing about the connection between Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India, how they're all kin and can be traced back to the Islamic Caliphate ravagings--the Hordes that swept all up and down the Silk Road--pushing Islam into Iran, into Afghanistan, into certain parts of India...

Forgive me. I said I was going to stay in the literary context and avoid the reality contexts, especially the political context--but it's all so simply observed and so easily commented upon--and the rest of the comments I read around the Internet are so illogical and tied to traditional fears--outside agitators--terrorists--when We, the USA, are the biggest and scariest terrorists in the world, though our terrorism has proven our downfall--we haven't won any military action since WWII--that's fact, folks, and we will continue to be the world's greatest empirical terrorists until Obama tries to do something about our plight and offer us his CHANGE! I don't have my hopes up, do you?

Mayor Billionaire Bloomburg here in NYC sez this city's now broke, too, and we're gonna have to tighten our belts--he's not tightening his, however--he's now the 5th richest man in the world moving up to 5th from 65th when he became Mayor of NYC--being elected because he was the darling of Ru(A)dolph "Mussolini" Guiliani, one of the stupidest men in the world; yet, so stupid he was ruthlessly people-punishing when he was at the top of the NYC political Power Elite. Assholes all of them! Our billionaire mayor is cutting police services and closing down fire houses! There ya go! Sorry son of a bitch. I say give him the boot rather than a third term and give his foreign-money-backed asshole real estate developer buddies the boot, too, these Power-Grabbing Elite intent upon raping the old neighborhoods of NYC in favor of hi-rise luxury apartments and hi-rise luxury hotels--one hotel here in NYC offering one suite for $45,000 a night! I say, immediately arrest any Power Elite asshole who can conspicuously spend $45,000 a night for a stupid scummy-germ-bacteria-ridden hotel room! Don't you think the maids in those kind of luxurious pomposity situations rub the drinking glasses all over their pussies before they put them in those sanitary sacks? Don't you think these underpaid illegal immigrant maids don't contaminate as much stuff in these rooms and kitchens as they cynically can?--surely those foreign chefs spit in their masters's food occasionally out of contempt!

Sorry, the stillness of this Sunday is fading. The mechanistic society is ready to begin destroying life as we know it. Life tomorrow? No thank you.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"Time, eater of all things lovely."

Time Changes Things or Does It?
I listened to rap/hip-hop/whatever it's called all night and I swear, man, I've floated off down some river-of-time tangent that is leaving me further and further away from the mainstream and stuck deep in darker and darker venues. The enthusiasm for this music is mind-boggling (remember that word?). Is it music? Musicians I know don't think it's music, but how are you gonna argue with P. Diddy, for instance, when this untrained musician will be sitting before you with a handful of Grammies and music awards and almost a billion bucks in his many bank accounts! And I listened to this same bunch, a stage full, of rappers all night and it was as if time did stand still for a solid 5 hours I swear--and I'm already swearing a lot in this first paragraph of today's ramble.

Time. And time...you think it's not complicated? Dig this...time has rendered even my vernacular off down some bottomless creek draining toward linguistic hell--linguistic obscurity--is linguistic hell like a word being reduced to an archaic state? Is the ultimate linguistic hell absolute deletion of a word or phrase from a language?

And time is fucking complicated. Everything humans invent is complicated. Did you ever notice that? A child can figure things out without much help--certainly without a manual; however, the further that child passes through the many veils of time the more confusion he has at figuring anything out. Check out the following little discussion of time I found while wiling away some time on the Internet.
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The puzzle is this. A river flows or passes in virtue of the fact that its constituent drops of water become successively closer and closer to, and then further and further away from, some spatial point regarded as fixed; i. e. at one point in time, t1, any given constituent drop of the river stands at a certain distance from the fixed spatial point, and at a successive time t2, it is closer to or further away from that point. How is it then that time flows or passes?

The advocate of the tensed view of time has an answer to this question. The constituent times that are future are becoming closer and closer to the NOW, and those that are future are receding from it.

It's not clear that the advocate of the tensed view of time is required to see the pastness, presentness, or futurity of an event or time as a literally relational property which depends on a time or event's relationship with this "NOW". This might too be taken as a metaphor, for the fact that futurity, an intrinsic property of certain events and times that comes in degrees, is gradually lost, until the object is present, at which time the event or time begins to gain intrinsic pastness.

Or an advocate of the tensed view might try to explain the metaphor without an appeal to an ontology of past and future events or times. This is the position of Arthur Prior. Prior views the tenses as unanalyzed one-place sentential operators: "I fell out of a punt" is analyzed as "It was the case that I am falling out of a punt"; I will have received my doctorate" as "It will be the case that it was the case that I am receiving my doctorate." Prior also requires more specific tense-operators: "It was the case three years ago", "It will be the case six weeks hence", etc.

To say that something has changed is to say this, according to Prior. Something that was the case is no longer the case, i. e. for some sentence S, to say "It was the case that S, and it is not now the case that S. Now the sentence S itself may have some tense operators on the front of it, as these operators are iterable. It was the case two months ago that was the case three weeks ago that I am getting married, and it is not now the case that three weeks ago I am getting married. It is this systematic change of the truth value of tensed sentences that is the literal truth behind the metaphor of time's passage or flow, according to Prior.

The advocate of the tenseless view of time has no such easy explanation of the metaphor of time's passage or flow. The advocate of the tenseless view of time analyzes such expressions as "now", "is past", "is future", as well as Prior's sentential operators "It was the case that" and "it will be the case that", in terms of McTaggart's B-concepts, by construing them as token-indexicals. "E is happening now" just means "E is simultaneous with this utterance"; "It was the case that P" just means "Earlier than this utterance, P". But these B-concepts attributed to events, times, or sentences, are eternally applicable. If an utterance of "The Civil War is past" at just means "The Civil War occurred prior to this utterance", that utterance is, if true, eternally true, and if false, eternally false. What changes, on the tenseless view of time, is not the pastness, presentness, and futurity of events, times, or sentences, for there is no property, intrinsic or relational, unambiguously designated by our "A-words". What changes (in David Kaplan's terminology) is the one aspect of the meaning of the A-words, the content of sentences containing them. (Although the character of the sentences remains constant.)

References McTaggart, J. M. E. "The Unreality of Time", in Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds., The Philosophy of Time. Oxford, 1993. Prior, Arthur. "Changes in Events and Changes in Things," in Le Poidevin and MacBeath, op. cit.

Copyright © 1997 Carl Brock Sides. Permission granted to distribute in any medium, commercial or non-commercial, provided all copyright notices remain intact.
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My friend who lives in a boathouse on the Atlantic Ocean tells me I'm a fool to have so many timepieces around. I tell her, but look at them, everyone of them has a different time. That amuses me. I look at a clock and it tells me back face-to-face that it says it's a certain time while right next to it is a clock that tells me back face-to-face that it says it's a certain time, except its certain time is a minute different than the other clock's certain time.

My problem's with the flowing of time, same as the above time physicians used in arguing against McTaggart's "unreality of time"--the "tenseless view of time."

To me there is only sun-time and night-time (the right time...to be with the one you love). Hemingway wrote that his eyes were so sensitive to "daylight" that at the first crack of dawn his eyes woke him up--he couldn't sleep anymore as long as it was sun-time--that was work time to Hemingway. He'd clocked his eyes to wake him up at the crack of dawn so he could get to work writing.

All writers supposedly do their best work at the crack of dawn, nonstop up until around noon when the hunger-cravings start and it's time to break for lunch--the afternoons left for reading over what you wrote that morning--that's the perfect writer's time schedule. Of course, if you believe like I do, you believe everyone's view of life is different from everybody else's, no two alike--even the copycats can be apprehended because no two copycats are alike either.

And in a nick-of-time--after flying a stretch or two across some Internet spaces--I discovered Physical Geography--a new Sociology-bred "science"--check it out:
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(c). Concepts of Time and Space in Physical Geography

The concepts of time and space are very important for understanding the function of phenomena in the natural world. Time is important to Physical Geographers because the spatial patterns they study can often only be explained in historic terms. The measurement of time is not absolute. Time is perceived by humans in a relative fashion by using human created units of measurement. Examples of human created units of time are the measurement of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Geographers generally conceptualize two types of space. Concrete space represents the real world or environment. Abstract space models reality in a way that distills much of the spatial information contained in the real world. Maps are an excellent example of abstract space. Finally, like time, space is also perceived by humans in a relative fashion by using human created units of measurement. Both time and space are variable in terms of scale. As such, researchers of natural phenomena must investigate their subjects in the appropriate temporal and/or spatial scales. For example, an investigator studying a forest ecosystem will have to deal with completely different scales of time and space when compared to a researcher examining soil bacteria. The trees that make up a forest generally occupy large tracts of land. For example, the boreal forest occupies millions of hectares in Northern Canada and Eurasia. Temporally, these trees have life spans that can be as long as several hundred years. On the other hand, soil bacteria occupy much smaller spatial areas and have life spans that can be measured in hours and days.

For more of the fundamentals of Physical Geography, here ya go:

www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/
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Time passes so serenely slowly when you're working and listening to Satie's piano pieces at the same TIME. I'm collared by time. I'm colored by time. I'm aged by time. I'm reduced to bones by time. I'm trick-bagged by time. I'm allergic to time. Where's time in a photograph?

Time and the Aymara
Check out this concept of time and space--isn't space the container of time? Isn't infinity a time zone?
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Backs to the Future
Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of Time

By Inga Kiderra

Tell an old Aymara speaker to “face the past!” and you just might get a blank stare in return – because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind. ...

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the “language of Adam.” More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called “Andean logic” – which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no – to computer applications. ...

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year.”

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.

Take an “exotic” language like English: You can use the word “ahead” to signify an earlier point in time, saying “We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m.” to mean “It’s now 12:40 p.m.” Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

For more of this Aymara way of thinking, here ya go:

ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp
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Time on my (ay-mara) hands--and, yes, facing forward facing the past is an interesting concept--a rather literary concept, don't you think?

thetimelessgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"The unexpected will happen." G.W. Bush

Who's That Dude on the Roof--and It Ain't No Bull?
Darius Milhaud wrote a great little Les Six diddy called Le Boeuf sur le toit--having some fun with Brazilian rhythms--

And, yes, George W. Bush did say "The unexpected will happen." How brilliant is that? I keep thinking, how do you know that something is unexpected? It doesn't even work with death.

And back when I was beginning to write, when I began living in the literary context--much to my young wife's disappointment--I got really like expert-serious into track and field--and I attended track meets and analyzed them according to measurements of my own invention--and I grew up in a town that had a college that turned out world champion track and field teams for most of the years I was living there--my high school years--and I had become a kid fan of track and field stars and the first one I met seriously was the high jumper Walt Davis, the first man to high jump over 6 feet, and at the time I met him the world record holder. And I sat with him in an infield while he did leg exercises getting ready for his three jumps and answered my stupid kid fan questions...

And I had done cross-country with Bobby Morrow at one time the world's fastest human, running the 100-yard-dash (before they ran it in 110 meters) in 9.3 seconds, the world record, running 9.1 three times though denied the world record due to the prevailing wind factor--if the wind is blowing like more than 4 miles an hour at a runner's back during a race the time doesn't count--at the old track meets they always had a wind gauge out by the starting lines--and Bobby, the San Benito Flash, went to the Melbourne Olympics and won 3 gold medals. And when he came back an Olympic gold medal winner, I still ran cross country with him.


And I once attended a pep talk given by Glenn Cunningham, the American miler from Kansas who had held the world record back for the mile in 1938--and Glenn was a miracle kid. He'd burned his leg so badly as a kid the Kansas doctors said Little Glenn would never walk again much less run. I listened as old Glenn told his story to a bunch of us track and field enthusiasts who'd paid old Glenn to speak at one of our dinners--and Glenn's whole spiel was about DETERMINATION--that was the title of his pep talk--DEE-TERM-I-NATION--and he said when he ran he kept his sights and his thoughts on one thing--the finish line--and as long as he did that he always "determined" he had the greatest chance of winning, then using that determination to know within himself just what his capabilities were due to his work outs and trial times and this determination fixation--knowing automatically just how many strides at a certain pace and drive he had to keep going smoothly in time with the clock in his head--his thoughts on that determination.
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Glenn Cunningham

A Kansas Portrait

When he was only eight years old, Glenn Cunningham's physicians told him that he would never walk again after suffering from severe leg burns from a gasoline explosion. Cunningham not only walked but was one of the premiere milers in the 1930s. The Morton County athlete also starred in the 1932 Olympics.

For three years, from 1932 - 1934, he won the Big Six indoor titles and was again at the Olympics in 1936. Then in 1938 Cunningham became the world's fastest miler as he set a new record at Dartmouth College. That same year he also received a doctorate degree from New York University.

During World War II he entered the Navy and established new physical training programs at both the Great Lakes and San Diego training stations.

Cunningham received much recognition over a long period of time but perhaps one of his most satisfying experiences was Elkhart's Glenn Cunningham day, held in 1933 when he returned from Europe after winning 11 straight races. Cunningham would eventually see his records broken by several more Kansas milers.

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And Glenn inspired me to be a miler even though my track coach told me I was turning in championship 220-yard times--but I was determined to be a miler...

Thus my love of track and field...

And I subscribed to The Track and Field News, a track newspaper out of California and it came once a week and had all the results of track and field meets all over the world in it--and it kept track of the records, too--and it mentioned high school track and field teams--and it mentioned my high school track and field team--and we won the Texas State Track and Field Championship 2 or 3 years in a row--but I wasn't on the A team--NO, in fact, I never even made the B team. I participated in one meet--one god-damn meet and that was as a broad jumper, now called a long jumper. Believe it or not, I jumped 19 feet showing off at the broad jump pit one afternoon and that qualified me for the only meet I got to be in--and at that meet I fouled off the board three times and was disqualified.

But I still no matter my status did get to run cross-country with Bobby Morrow...and I did get to hang in the infields during track meets and I got to hang with the world's record holding shotputter who was from Texas, too...but in my senior year in high school, I dropped track and field and joined the golf team. I wasn't a good golfer but I was good enough that I earned a 1/2-semester golf scholarship to the college I eventually graduated from with an M.A. in Sociological and Economic Theory--though this is before I entered the literary context and started trying to sell track and field articles to sports magazines...

I moved to New Orleans and continued following track and field meets and writing these unsalable articles and sending them out to sports magazines and track and field publications. Determination boiled within me. "Dammit, dammit, dammit," I'd slam-bang around my apartment when I'd get a rejection notice from a magazine or a denial of press credentials from a track and field publication. I couldn't score. I covered SEC and Southwest Conference track meets and became acquainted with some t&f writers there--one of them finally told me how to get press credentials where I could go up into the press boxes and use the facilities up there--typewriters, wire services, weather--but still I couldn't hit in the working/paying market. One day, I showed one of my coverages to my pal the Cajun sidewinder--a thinking-drinking-inking Cajun etcher, a master etcher whose etchings sold like hotcakes to tourists down on Jackson Square--and he handed it back to me after he'd read it and said, "OK, but, you know, you need photographs with this. You know, give the article some reference to speed or the moving of man against his own created time, like show this guy Sime [Dave Sime, the Duke t&f star and former 100-yd-dash world record holder in the 1950s] you're writing about hitting the wire--you know, with a close up of his twisted-up-by-determination face."

I immediately shelved my desire to become a track and field coverage reporter--I had no camera--I had no photographic ability--I thought. One time I had borrowed my brother's Leica and tried shooting with it but my prints came out murky, orangy with light distortion, streaky with unidentifiable subject matter--no matter how alertly I studied that Leica, I couldn't get it to work properly. My brother laughed at me. He'd been a Navy photographer briefly during WWII--he'd been a "spontaneous photographer" as he liked to put it--just being somewhere at the right time and place and shooting off the cuff and getting a unique photograph, like the photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt he'd taken one misty-foggy afternoon in Philadelphia when Roosevelt visited the US Naval Station there, the station on which my brother was stationed, he so proudly displayed in his office--and my brother's laughing at my phirst photographic efforts phrustrated me to the point I resolved to write pure literature, fuck any words needing photographs to make them clearer. A photo-journalist I was not; a New Orleans Vieux Carre character of wit, booze-handling ability, caprice, and literary contextual knowledges all stirred up with my love of jazz and understanding of 4/4 time I was--that's what I was--a character in my own writing--going about acting out my own character(s)--plus I began publishing poems--and I was embarrassed at being a poet. Still I hadn't yet identified myself as a character within an ongoing continual-present novel--life in the literary context being a big huge wide-open prairie of a novel. Isn't being a human being novel? Universally I guess it's not but certainly locally it is.

Working out of New Orleans where I was an unsuccessful writer--drinking heavily--cheating on my young wife with artistic abandonment--yet she still loved me--I was a character of huge proportions--sitting drunk every night in Papa Joe's on Bourbon Street diggin' the sounds of all the fresh new jazz with Kenny O'Brien--young jazz, creative jazz, such great music coming out on LP records every day of every year back then and these were being played on Papa Joe's exceptional juke box--the jazz labels produced 45 rpm jazz records for juke boxes--some of those 45s were EPs, extended plays, each 45 holding 2 tracks--jazz having its own labels like Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Bethlehem, Pacific Jazz (later World Pacific Jazz), Mercury, Decca, Debut, Emarcy (really Mercury in Alfalfa), Columbia, RCA Victor, Vanguard, Norgran (Norman Granz), Clef, Verve, Mars (Woody Herman's own label), Herald, Riverside, Contemporary, Atlantic, Gene Norman, Candid, Epic, Capitol, Commodore, Dial, Everest, Asch--and there were many more I'm overlooking--but those were record labels that featured a lot of jazz--raising up off the bar at 3 am and asking, "Where does it all come from, Kenny?"

The music was inspiring me and New Orleans was inspiring me...and almost hitting The Southern Review up at LSU kept inspiring me...hitting more poetry than short stories was discouraging but fun--and at one time I wrote poetry under the name of Elizabeth Raintree Mitchell--my best woman-with-3-names poetry coming from this fictional babe, me in literary drag...and I was reading Norman Mailer saying he wasn't impressed with women writers...railing on Mary McCarthy--and she was a sexual beauty as well as a feisty and very witty writer--though Mailer said Mary wouldn't have written anything worth a shit had she not been fornicating with Bunny Wilson--oh the wonderful romantic affairs in the world of literary
context.

Bunny Wilson with the very young and tantalizing Mary McCarthy--Lucky Bunny

And then here I am back taking photographic memories with my literary context camera mind...photography again zooming up into my life especially after I met my New York City best friend on an afternoon back in the 1970s in Cinco de Mayo Restaurant in the Time & Life Building--and I met this man and he became immediately (spontaneously) my best New York City friend and he was a devout student of photography! He'd studied up in Harlem with James VanDerZee and David Austin and was a personal friend of Roy DeCarava and knew and worked with Gordon Parks--and my best friend knew photography and the philosophy of photography and the art of photography and I met him in my literary context and he was in his photographic context and the Gestalt of both contexts was the same, within the same realm, the same domain, the domain of style, the domain of vision, of graphically thinking, of design thinking, of improvisational photography compared with improvisational writing--photography based on the rhythms and directions jazz was taking artists of every kind in those glorious New York City days--days with horizons--days not yet imprisoned in the vertical aspects of life.

We'd be walking along a street and my friend would suddenly stop and say, "You see how the shadow of that building over there is portrayed on that building over here. You see that?" And I'd look and I'd see what he was talking about but not really. And he'd say, "You see how that shadow looks like a huge bird wing...look, you can even see the wing's feathers." Damned if he wasn't right. Suddenly, yes, I saw what he was talking about. Perspective it's called in photography. A the camera's perspective takes a good photographic eye--a framing eye seeing the photograph you want to take with your mind looking through the viewfinder--looking through your eyes like a camera is looking through its eye--the perspective made real by how well the photographer has learned how to use his or her camera.

And after palling around with this guy for 20 years, I, sneak that I am, I am part wolf, picked up a philosophy of photography of my own, though it wasn't until after my friend died in 1991 that I one day just up and bought a camera out of the clear blue sky.

Photographers like writers have to be constantly using their hands--when my friend didn't have his camera in his hands he had a Kool cigarette instead--and a lot of writers were full-time smokers (and drinkers)--and that's what killed my best friend the photographer: not photography--not the tons of women this guy attracted either. Women would see that camera in my handsome friend's hands and they'd immediately start swooning over him. "Oh, you look so thin, darling. Let me cook you a good meal, sweetheart." And he'd just say, "Go over there--that room there--and take your clothes off--there's an Yves St. Laurent peignoir in there you can put on...." Oh how that guy could get beautiful women out of their clothes--and then into his arms! Hanging around with a photographer is such a pleasure for a high-strung romantic like me--and I would boldly pick up his throwaways--I mean, come on, these women were the most beautiful women in New York City at the time. My friend was high profile, too, his photographer friends being a couple of top nudie photographers in the city at the time--and oh what fucking parties they used to throw--in their studio on upper Broadway--across from Teacher's bar where the uptown elite used to meet after a hard day's work--and where nearly every afternoon for years, until he got married, my friend and I used to be, socializing, drinking, seducing--oh the joy of it all--and it looks so damn good in my memory's photographs.

And when I finally bought a camera I bought a digital camera. And my friend would have laughed like a hyena at me for going digital--he had 3 cameras, none of them digital, two Nikons and one Hasselblad--and he worked silently like a cat when he worked--only the whirring of the camera motors is all you heard--that and the clicking as these mighty cameras unspooled the rolls of cold Kodachrome film, click after click, speed clicking as he went about on cat's feet, like the fog rolling in in that Carl Sandburg poem, shooting his dreams in his photographic context.

And I bought an expensive digital camera, at the time what the pros in my office advised me to buy, and I got the camera and all I could think of was windows--the windows of my apartment at first, using the window frames as frames for my shots--then zooming in on windows on buildings around me--just the windows--from out of a window onto a distant window--framing a window with a window--and these became my "window shots"--then that changed to "views from windows" and then that changed to "windows within windows."

But I still don't think of myself as a photographer--no, I'm a mad-hatter writer, but as a writer and as a character within my own novel life, I can be a photographer, too. I create photographs with words.

My photographs are lonely most of the time; taken off roofs while I was within the blues idiom of photography.

tgw On the Beach in Atlantic City




tgw:Photos taken in Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 25, 2003. In photo above: notice: who's that shadow person in the lower lefthand corner there? That shadow taking the photo! About as close as you're ever going to get to an image of thegrowlingwolf. "He's as imaginary as Jesus," John Lennon once said.
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Photographers on Photography

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~Dorothea Lange

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts. ~Minor White

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into. ~Ansel Adams

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. ~Eudora Welty

The camera can photograph thought. ~Dirk Bogarde

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. ~William Albert Allard, "The Photographic Essay"

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ~Ansel Adams

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. ~Richard Avedon

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. ~John Steinbeck

Just the unexpected I expected,
thegrowlingwolf [& thedailygrowlerstaff]
for The Daily Growler