Second meaning, obviously. Nice one that I didn’t know.

fustian |ˈfəs ch ən|
noun
1 thick, durable twilled cloth with a short nap, usually dyed in dark colors.
2 pompous or pretentious speech or writing : a smoke screen of fustian and fantasy.
ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French fustaigne, from medieval Latin fustaneum, from (pannus) fustaneus ‘cloth from Fostat,’ a suburb of Cairo; sense 2 perhaps from the fact that fustian was sometimes used to cover pillows and cushions, implying that the language was “padded”; compare with bombast .

“I think, therefore I am.”

or

“Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am“

Sea Horse
by Edward Weismiller

You might think it would leap the waves
in a white fire of foam
racing, eyes mad with what might be delight:

a runaway, or loosed from a god’s
team, galloping in its vast
pasture. But this one
was the size of a brooch, thin, and red-gold, and still.

The children had sent for it
from the Atlantic.
It arrived by air in a pouch of seawater containing
all it needed to sustain life as it crossed the continent.

Following instructions
we made it a small, nourishing ocean
in which it anchored itself upright
to a strand of seaweed, and, staring jewel-eyed

at nothing, slowly faded white
and died.

Edward Weismiller

A lot can be said about this poem, but I’m not going to say most of them. Or anything insightful really, but I will relate a bit about a seahorse farm I visited in Hawaii.

It was an organized tour, off the cruise ship. And the company was one of quite a few in the area. They were taking advantage of something interesting, though I can’t quite recall the details. It had something to do with a large pipe which pulled water up from the depths of the ocean. We are talking several thousand feet deep. Anyway, this company was using this pure water to breed seahorses for the aquarium trade. Apparently seahorses die very easily in captivity, and haven’t been successfully breed (in quantity) while captive. Lots of wild seahorses were dying as a result of the pet trade.

So, the company was developing techniques for raising seahorses in bulk, in captivity. And, they were getting successful. The survival rate for the spawn was up to 50% or so, which is far, far, FAR higher than it is in nature. In the wild, fewer than 2% would survive to adulthood. Fifty percent was enough that the company was becoming mildly profitable. They estimated that they needed a survival rate of seventy percent to be truly profitable.

Anyway, it was interesting to me. The poem above in no way reminds me of that seahorse farm. It makes me think of one of my odder friends, who I’m particularly fond of, and lets me see her in a different light. I’m particularly fond of the first, second, and fourth stanzas. Jewel-eyed is a vivid bit of imagery too.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Osama Bin Laden
George Bush
Aaron Burr
Benedict Arnold
John Wilkes Booth
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Ted Kennedy
Alger Hiss
J.Edgar Hoover
Charles Manson
Michael Moore

This list is a partial response to

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2010/08/20-worst-americans.html

I got bored and decided not to finish out the top twenty. President Obama might go into the top twenty. Its too early to tell. He is a solid president, but I despise his policies, and his policies are what I will rank him on. (F.D.R was a great president based on his abilities, but his politics and policies are what were so odious).

Ranked in order.
1) Franklin D. Roosevelt – the “New Deal”. He started America down an evil path, one its still firmly on, and which has done more harm to this country than any action, ever.
2) Osama Bin Laden – Yeah, he isn’t american, and he’s the only major non american on the list. (Why not Hitler, etc?). BUT, 9/11 not only murdered several thousand American innocents, on American soil, its been used as an excuse for a lot of evil in and of itself.
3) George Bush – Came to office with a large budget surplus, left with a bigger deficit and a massive, massive expansion of the federal government. Also the patriot act, and used 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, which we shouldn’t have done. (Afghanistan was/is needed. Iraq wasn’t).
4) read about him
5) read about him
6) I’m no fan on Lincoln, but he shouldn’t have been murdered.
7) read about them. While I agree it wouldn’t have been good for the U.S alone to have nuclear weapons, I’m not going to sympathize with these two. Liar, drunkard, probable rapist and almost certainly a rape abettor.
9) Read about him
10) Did some good, did a lot more evil.
11) Penny ante compared to the others on this list, but a nasty evil man.
12) I just despise this sanctimonious bastard. In reality, he probably doesn’t crack the top twenty.

When I was at the library the other day, I noticed they had a lot of the “modern Scholar” series on CD. These are a series of lectures, recorded specifically for this series, about virtually every topic you can think of. Series cover finance, the supreme court, baseball, science fiction, the crusades, philosophers, etc. The list goes on and on.

I grabbed the “History of the Supreme Court”, by Professor Kermit Hall. It consists of 14 lectures, covering thirteen defining cases of the Court. Each lecture is a bit over 30 minutes in length. So far, I’m about 2/3rds of the way through, and I’m really enjoying it.

Its well worth looking into, if you like this sort of thing.

Its amazing how one thing leads to another, over the years.

Back when I was a teenager, was a member of the Science Fiction book club. I picked out a book with a nice looking dustjacket. It was a man with a sword, being menaced by two tiger sized siamese cats. This was the first few books of the Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. If I have to identify the Chronicles of Amber for you, then you aren’t a geek.

I’ve liked Zelazny ever since.

A few months back, I learned that a massive compendium of Zelazny’s work was being published. Four of the six volumes were already out. I bought them, and spent several weeks reading them. I had never known he was a poet. So, while hanging out in my living room one evening, I read one of the poems out loud. The birds instantly took notice. Backs straightened and bird eyes swiveled around and focused on me.

Since then, I’ve made a habit of reading poetry to them. I often skip a day, but I try to read a poem a day to them. They still take note. Mind, I suspect that they would take note if I was reading the phone book. But since poetry sounds different, I could be wrong. The phone book is not interesting reading, so I don’t plan on testing this theory. Besides, I don’t actually have any phone books. The Internet and GPS have killed off any need I have for them.

Anyway, you can’t read poetry aloud for long without developing an interest in it. So I’ve been doing some casual poetry reading, and study, for the past few months.

The road to it is interesting though. A nice illustration on a book jacket catches a boys eye. That leads to a life long love of an author. The middle aged man that the boy grew into (physically anyway), looks into this favored author a bit more, and discovers he was a poet. Against the odds, this ties in with his love of parrots, because the parrots love poetry. (Or love the man reading aloud to them – close to the same, because poetry is meant to be read aloud, and prose is not). And that leads to the man appreciating poetry more. All because of a cheap dust jacket illustration on a cheap copy of a fantasy book. That illustration had an impact over twenty years later.

The world is a richer one than we often think.

To be clear, I’m a strong supporter of gun rights, and I do keep one (well, three, actually) in the house. But, I think we can all empathize with this poem.

Another Reason I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House by Billy Collins
(From Sailing alone around the room).

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Lawyers for the towns of Chattanooga and Red Bank (where a similar system is deployed) write, “[Drivers] are not entitled to a trial by jury, a presumption of innocence or a heightened burden of proof.”

That’s typical for civil offenses, which bear a lower burden of proof. But its atypical for traffic violations, which often carry a presumption of innocence and allow citizens to request a trial by jury. The shift is likely due to the light penalty associated with the ticket, but it’s worrisome because that penalty could be bumped at some point to a full moving violation.

See, this is a prime example of why I favor strict limits on government, and police power. Scope creep.

Simple truth: I’ve never in my life met anyone (who is older than a toddler) who is a law abiding citizen. They don’t exist. Everyone has broken some law, at some time, even if its only going 36 in a 35 zone. So being a hardass in preservation of your rights in any encounter with the police is the intelligent thing to do. (Even if the practical effect is to make your own life miserable).

A friends 9 year old daughter watched Star Wars for the first time the other night. During the famous trash compactor scene, she came up with a profoundly insightful question.

Katie had the line of the night during the garbage-chute scene: “Who would throw away a one-eyed octopus?”

Good move – laws should be very clear about what they are outlawing. They need to have a bright, clear line about what is illegal, and what is not.

Supreme Court Deals Blow to “Honest Services” Law

The Supreme Court sided with former Enron CEO and smartest-guy-in-the-room Jeffrey Skilling and media mogul Conrad Black on Thursday by ruling against a fraud law commonly used to go after white-collar criminals. The “honest services” law, which the Court determined to be excessively vague, allows prosecutors to file suit against executives who don’t act in companies’ best interests. The law was critical in targeting former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (whose own trial has been keeping Chicagoans entertained since June 3), lobbyist Jack Abramoff (now employed at a kosher Baltimore pizzeria) and former New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, who was indicted last January. Now, there’s concern that today’s ruling could overturn convictions and make it harder to file fraud cases. Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled that Skilling’s “honest services” conviction was flawed (he’s serving a 24-year sentence for duping investors about Enron’s financial health) and that the law should only be limited to “schemes involving bribery and kickbacks.” The Court also challenged the conviction of Conrad Black, who was sentenced to 6 ½ years in prison in 2007 for allegedly stealing millions from the Hollinger International Inc. media company through insider dealings. Both cases will be sent back to appeals court, but the ruling won’t necessarily overturn their convictions. Despite the victory over “honest services,” the Supreme Court disagreed with the second part of Skilling’s argument—that bad media coverage had prevented him from getting a fair trial in Enron’s home city of Houston.

Okay, I’m not a fashion plate, by any means. I’m pretty much an anti-fashion plate.

BUT, even I know that cowboy boots are not to be worn with shorts of any kind. Or anything other than long pants – except in the bedroom, where it is acceptable to wear only cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, with nothing else. But, no spurs.

From a book review on Amazon, about the book How to be alone, we have

a point Franzen makes tellingly when he says that while a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian might appear totally different, the truth is that both “watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance… both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman.”

Or, one of my personal favorites,

Just remember, you are unique. Just like everyone else.