Execution Day

O All-seeing Light, and Eternal Life of all things, look upon my misery with Thine eye of mercy, and let Thine infinite power vouchsafe to limit out some portion of deliverance unto me, as unto Thee shall seem most convenient.  But yet, O my God, I yield unto Thy will, and joyfully embrace what sorrow Thou wilt have me suffer.  Only thus much let me crave of Thee (let my craving, O Lord, be accepted of Thee, since even that proceeds from Thee)—let me crave even by the noblest title, which in my greatest affliction I may give myself, that I am Thy creature, and by Thy goodness (which is Thyself), that Thou wilt suffer some beam of Thy Majesty so to shine into my mind, that it may still depend confidently on Thee—Amen.

King Charles I of England is said to have uttered this prayer from The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney as he mounted the scaffold on the day of his execution, January 30, 1649.  See, e.g., The Booklover's Almanac, (Robert Brittain, comp. and ed. 1991).

Wish I'd Said That...

[T]he world has its reasons for not being Walrasian.

Robert Solow via Lars P. Syll, via BDL.  Wish I'd written the whole thing, actually, but then I'm not a macro man, am I?*  Also on the Macro beat: Miles Kimball offers cool definitions of "IS-LM" and "grok."

Also:

“Qualia” is just a pretentious label for “WTF, unsolved problem”. 

James Wimberly explaining Higgs-Boson.  So at least I now know what "qualia" is.  For the work of a guy who (like me) does not understand the Higgs Boson, but who exhibits his incomprehension with great panache, go here.


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*What, I wonder, is it like to be "a macro man"--to spend your entire life steeped in a stew that turns out to be so much goofball gobbledygook goulash?  Is it like being a senior professor of dialectics, turned loose from East Germany in 1989?

"If the King Wants My Head, He Knows Where to Find It"

I lately heard this attributed  to Lord Coke, responding to King James I, who (so it seems) wanted Coke to knock it off, else he (James) would knock it off.

Charming and plausible--Coke was, after all, a man with a sharp tongue and evident physical courage.  But my friend Carlton, who is much better at Coke than I am, says it is a new one on him.

And so off to Google, which availeth not.  And so?  Is it out there but unGoogled (can anything be unGoogled?)?--in Catherine Drinker Bowen's charming but not particularly reliable biography, perhaps (but isn't that in Google books?--I haven't checked)?  Am I misquoting?  Or--

I suppose it could be Tom Lehrer (snark).  

Barry Lyndon on Irish Ancestry

I presume that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of the house of Barry of Barrogue, of the kingdom of Ireland, than which as more famous name is not to be found in Gwillim or D'Hozler; and though, as a man of the world; I have learned to despise heartily the claims of some pretenders to high birth who have no more genealogy than the lacquey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the boasting of many of my countrymen, who are all for descending from kings of Ireland, and talk of a domain no bigger than would feed a pig as if it were a principality; yet truth compels me to assert that my family was the noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world;  while heir possessions, now insignificant, and torn from us by war, by treachery,by the loss of time, by ancestral extravagance, by adhesion to the old  faith and monarch, were formerly prodigious,and embraced many counties, at a time when Ireland was vastly more prosperous than now.  I would assume the Irish crown over my coat-of-arms, but that there are so many silly pretenders to that distinction who bear it and render it common.

 --William Makepeace Thackery, Barry Lyndon, 

Ch. 1, page 1 (Penguin, 1975)

Too True, Too True

I think I got this from Michael Quinion, though I can't find the source just now:

The Poles always get it in the neck from both ends.

Today's Quote: Just Don't Annoy the Ducks

As they say in Thailand:

I better get home, or the ducks will have something to eat.

Translated: "...or my wife will chop my cock off." Cf. link.

What a Woman Lady Needs to Know

Is this man trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to play the lover; is he likely to let his women be troublesome?  Is he, above all, likely to babble about my affairs?

--Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier 33 (Vintage Paperback)'

I hate to think what my life would be like if I ever tried to stop my women from being troublesome.

Reality Descends on Edmond de Goncourt

Jules, younger of the de Goncourt brothers, died on the night of June-18-19 1870, something like halfway through the life of the literary diary that will make him famous alongside his elder brother, Edmond. Over the next couple of days, Edmond records the inevitable impulses of rage and despair. Then, for most of a month, silence. Then on 14 July:

I had put up for sale the house in which he died and to which I had not desire to return. Today I received some perfectly acceptable offers for a six-year lease. Well, unreasonable and illogical though it may seem, these offers have plunged me into a profound melancholy. I find that i am attached to this house in which I have suffered so much by bonds whose existence I never expected.

--Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals 166
(NYRB ed. copyright 1962)

...but just ahead lay the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris and the Commune: evnets which, inter alia, appear to have reinvigorated Edmond as the inimitable observer and journalizer, the person who more than anyone else has shaped and defined out view of 19th-Century Paris. Remarkably, he makes no mention of the fact that July 14 is Bastille Day

Frlom the Annals of Abstract Agency

Further proof that nobody actually does anything any more:

We've had "mistakes were made."

We've had "the dude come up dead."

No we have "there was a spoilage."

The Cheney Syndrome

Learning of Dick Cheney's latest hospitalization somehow recalls to mind the response: "Hope it's nothing trivial." But who said it first? I had thought Ben Hecht (1894-1964). but John stumbles onto it in the Wiki on The Rev. Sir John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919). Since the Wiki apparently comes from the storied 11th ed of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910-11), the dates make it unlikely (though I grant, possible) that Hecht said it first: maybe he got it from Brit 11. Apparently Mahaffy also said:

James Joyce is a living argument in favour of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island – for the corner boys who spit into the Liffey.

Hecht might have wished he said that one, too.

Line of the Morning:

David Brooks, on trash talk in high places:

Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

Link.

Quote of the Day

"We never tortured anybody," he said. "Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture."

Link.