I have striven to keep
this blog on an elevated plane, what with tutorials on the Critique of Pure Reason and Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I mean, you can't get much more ethereal than
that, right? But every so often the
pedestrian world interrupts my philosophical meditations, and this seems to be
one of those moments. So, for the next
few paragraphs, I am going to complain.
This is, as I understand it, more or less standard for blogs in general. Consider what follows evidence that I am
human, all too human.
First of all, my right
knee and leg hurt. Six weeks ago, I made
the bad mistake of trying a little running [or, more accurately, shambling] as
part of my morning walk. My ego had become
involved in exactly how many minutes it was taking me to complete the course of
slightly less than four miles, and I thought that if I did little bursts [so to
speak] of trotting I could bring my time down to 57 or even 56 minutes. Well, I did, but I also seem to have
permanently irritated my aging joints, with the result that I now take many too
many doses of Ibuprofen and Tylenol. I
finally gave in and made an appointment for this afternoon with a doctor. We shall see.
At the same time, I have
been dealing with a bizarre problem triggered by the efforts of the U. S. Post
Office to upgrade itself. Three weeks
ago I sent out the annual fund-raising appeal for my scholarship organization,
University Scholarships for South African Students. A number of envelopes came back marked
"undeliverable at this address."
Now, this is not at all unusual.
There are always a few folks who have moved or died or gone
missing. But when the envelope addressed
to my sister in Washington, D.C. came back, I knew something was wrong. It seems the P. O. now has a machine that
reads the zip code electronically. It
reads from the bottom of the envelope up, and since I have a logo [a map of
Africa] above the return address on my envelopes, my zip code is actually lower
than the zip code of the addressee, so the machine was sending all the
envelopes back. The post office people
said it would be fine if I just scratched out the return address and remailed
them [no extra postage required], but then some of those envelopes also started
coming back. I had visions of my
twenty-two year old organization crashing and burning because of this
technodisaster, so I decided to have new envelopes printed up with the return
address above the logo. Now, I am engaged in sending out a duplicate
mailing to all the folks who have not yet responded [some of the letters got
through, apparently -- how?]
While this was happening,
I received word from Paris that our "syndic" [the company that
manages the copropriété
] has started work shoring up the building my apartment is in. For some years Susie and I have noticed
cracks in the wall in the interior courtyard that gives access to our
apartment. Well, we have renters who
arrived on Saturday [old friends from my childhood, no less] to find that the interior
courtyard is dug up ["to a depth of three meters," according to a
neighbor who wrote me an email], and the entire area is a shambles. I will refund their rent, needless to say,
but my little Parisian getaway, the apple of my eye, is momentarily a disaster.
Confronted with all of
this, I consider it really unfriendly of Obama to so completely louse up the first
debate that I can no longer luxuriate in the discomfort of the Republicans. Did the President not know that I was already
struggling with a full complement of little crises?
Oh yes, did I mention that
we just called in an exterminator to deal with an infestation of humongous
cockroaches? And that it has been raining
for the past two days?
Would anyone like a quiet
discussion of the subtleties of the Subjective Deduction in the First Edition Deduction
of the Pure Concepts of Understanding in
the Analytic of Concepts of the Transcendental Analytic?
5 comments:
"Would anyone like a quiet discussion of the subtleties of the Subjective Deduction in the First Edition Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding in the Analytic of Concepts of the Transcendental Analytic?"
Ummmm, no. But I would like to hear your views on "Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Laws"
Am I right in thinking that this text is not only about the absence of Feudal law in America but also the separation of church and state?
I had never heard of it1 But it is on line, and I will read it when I get a chance and see what it has to say.
Remarkable the things you learn even at seventy-eight.
Congratulations on joining the legion of low road bloggers. I've been doing it for years. Unfortunately, there are times when such annoying, distracting, and unpleasant (more or less mildly so) events are so numerous and occur within such proximity to one another that blogging them is not possible......I have almost managed to collect all of the books I recently shipped to myself, but along the way I've gotten lost looking for the post office and have enjoyed the puzzled responses of local residents who would have never imagined that anyone would need to ask the location of a building which was standing almost immediately in front of the conversationalists.....
John Adams' Dissertation is an extraordinarily overheated piece of writing. Despite the over the top rhetorical flurishes [and a good deal of inaccurate history], it seems to be mostly about the hated Stamp Act. That and the fear and hatred of Catholics. It is certainly disestablishmentarian, that's for sure.
Since you read Andrew Sullivan's blog, it may not be out of place to remark here that Sullivan's reaction to the first debate has been absurd: his statement in a recent post (to which my attention was directed -- I don't ordinarily read Sullivan) that Obama was "incapable of making a single argument" is ridiculous.
So while the first debate didn't go well for Obama, he did not do as badly as Sullivan thinks. Moreover, Sullivan's devoting an entire recent post to a single poll (the Pew poll) is evidence that Sullivan does not understand anything about polling. So if I were you, I wouldn't rely on him as a responsible guide to this election.
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