Daily Office: Friday
Morning
¶ Permission: When Kathleen, home late last night from Washington, told me that she just wanted to forward a message from her new personal computer to the office, before going to bed, I almost begged her not to. Then I wished that I had. Finally, though, I sort of fixed the problem.
¶ Eric: One of the smartest bloggers to grace the Internet has returned, après une longue absence, as a French textbook about a fellow called John Hughes (Zhan Ãœg) put it when I was in school (it is possible that I remember this because I never read next, or any other, sentence in the book), to the Blogosphere. “And they were Sore Afraid.”
Afternoon
¶ Strange Maps: Wow! If there was ever a site for me, Strange Maps is it! (Thanks, kottke.org.)
Night
¶ Full Faith & Credit: Article IV of the US Constitution begins:
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
This will sound elitist, but I’d be amazed if one of this country’s three hundred million people knows what this clause means. What it means was just tested in one of our most conservative states, Virginia, and amazingly well. The justices of the Virginia Supreme Court (a state, not a federal, court) probably don’t like same-sex marriage any better than the lower judges who ruled the other, more popular way, but they do credit to their grand old man, Thomas Jefferson, a man who always seemed to know when to turn off his inbred inner bigot in favor of his outer enlightened idealist.
Morning, cont’d
§ Permission. There oughtn’t to have been a problem. Kathleen’s new computer was provided with access codes to our wireless network within days of her acquiring it. For some reason, however, the passwords have disappeared. I found one of them on a scrap of paper in my desk drawer at about one-fifteen in the morning, and it worked.
Earlier, when Kathleen couldn’t log on, it made me almost ill. Here we were, in the middle of the night, with no one to call for help. It didn’t matter that everything would be cleared up in the morning. “In the morning” didn’t really exist for me, because, I discovered, I’m a terrier at heart. Confronted by certain types of problems, I turn them over ceaselessly until I solve them, often with a great deal of ferocious growling. (It’s not for nothing that one of Kathleen’s names for me is “Foo Dog.”) Sometimes, I don’t solve them. In old age, I have tried to avoid tackling problems in the middle of the night. But last night I could think of nothing else. If I didn’t have a third or fourth lookl at Kathleen’s computer, trying to figure out why it wouldn’t connect, I’d never get to sleep.
That’s why I was at the desk at one-fifteen. Having finally logged on (somewhat to my surprise), I almost immediately logged off, and closed the computer’s lid. What about that message of Kathleen’s? Well, to send it to “the system” at her law firm, I’d have had to get out the access thingy, the little atomic device that announces the code that changes every so many seconds. In any case, there was no need. I had already typed her message onto my computer and forwarded it to her at work via Gmail.
Earlier in the day, my inner terrier almost got me stuck in a tight spot. Determined to get rid of an unused treadmill situated in the blue room closet, I found myself, and it, wedged in a doorway. Happily, I was on the right side of the doorway. Otherwise, I’d have had to climb out the window.*
*Onto the balcony, as attentive readers will be relieved to remember.
§Eric. I’m very happy that time has borne this son back from “away” and right into action. (If you find this reference obscure — or didn’t even realize that it’s a reference — please start singing.)
Afternoon, cont’d
§Strange Maps. I wasn’t vastly taken by the particular map (of vanished London rivers) that Jason Kottke linked to, but when I scrolled up and down, holy bananapeels! (Search the page of “prototopological,” and get out your best pair of scissors!)
I could look at maps all day. I know, because I have spent days doing nothing but looking at maps. It might not seem very productive, and you don’t learn nearly as much as you think you do — as you find out if you try to draw a map from memory (just try sketching the outline of the US or France, two relatively simple, instantly recognizable silhouettes). But there is a part of the mind that swings wide open in front of a map.
The scariest feature of any map is the “You Are Here” pointer — if, God forbid, you actually need it!
Night, cont’d
§ Faith & Credit. And don’t you just want to take that apostate lesbian who has discovered Christianity and wash her mouth out with soap? Perhaps the judges foresaw the consequences of the wrong precedent: a jillion straight men claiming to be gay in order to deny their wives alimony! (I wink.)