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"Whenever one is about to do something truly horrible, we always say the French have been doing it for years." -- Stage Beauty

While we're in the snippet mode, those of you who know me well have heard me sing along with Ax'l thus: "Take me down to the prairie dog city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty..." Well, add to that, courtesy Penn Jillette, the fact that the opening of the Immigrant Song is exactly the same as the opening of Bali Hai. "Bali Haaaaiiiiiiii-AYE!" I'll never hear either song the same again.

Take me down to the prairie dog city. Pronto.

The debate season, as it turns out, ends with a whimper. NFARR (the villain in Aladdin Part 5) has been cancelled. I was looking forward to it, a little fun at the end of the season. Sort of an antidote to the TOC (although Robert the G was allegedly running a linguistics kritik, but then again, if you can't play games at a round robin, where can you?). And finances have knocked us out of NFL and sidelined our splendiferous Pfffters Hush and Emcee. So, it's over. I'll stop blogging now.

Yeah, right.

Emcee is signing up for Emory, the dog. I mean, Emcee is a dog, not that he's going to some canine institution of higher learning. Couldn't he go to college in Montrose? First Hush heads to Snodfart, then Emcee to the Confederacy. We need to follow E Rin's fine example. More gap years! More judges!

Burgers thinks I was aiming that random movie rant at him, although I really wasn't. I don't know where it came from, except that I'm always irked when people watch crappy new movies instead of good old movies. I got the b in the b when I watched It's Always Fair Weather over the weekend, for the first time in Cinemascope (via letterbox). If there was ever a movie screwed by pan and scan, it's IAFW, with three GIs dancing but you always only see two in the old ratio. Maybe that's the reason it's one of the great underrated musicals. Situationwise, saturationwise, apologize, Jerry-Lewis-wise...

By sheer serendipity (is there any other kind) I read a posting yesterday on some link blog about the beta version of Google on a web archive site. This is one of those outfits that has taken a photograph, so to speak, of the web at various moments in time, for historical purposes. I never did look at the beta version of Google (I wonder if they'll ever catch on, if all they do is searches), but I did immediately dig up a version of the page of Nostrum that was AWOL from AOL. Gotcha! I folded it into the new Nostrum pdf page with great glee. God, I love the internet!

But here's what I want to talk about today. (What? He wants to talk about something? There's a change!) Last night I was working on Caveman and playing around with the Greeks. The Greeks are pretty interesting, for many obvious reasons. I was ruminating about their architecture. For whatever reason, even though the Greeks understood the arch, they didn't like using it in their building. Despite the fact that arches are powerfully useful structural elements, capable of bearing more stress than planes, the Greeks just didn't like the look of 'em. They found them aesthetically displeasing, unlike the Romans who pretty much arched their way across Europe (take a look at those bridges and aqueducts that are still standing) and took arches to the next step with domes (360 degree arches). The Greek ruins only show columns and planes and triangles. The columns are still standing. The roofs are gone, because they liked wood over their heads, and wood just isn't going to last for two or three thousand years.

There is a tradition that the Greeks employed the Golden Ratio in their work, although my quick research indicates that this may be more of a legend than a fact. The Golden Ratio has, of course, become something of a grail over the ages. It's phi, and you know as well as I do that I can't do the math, so look it up it you need the details. It's 1.6 something. And it's very useful, like pi. (As a matter of fact, I understand San Francisco is installing pi-phi throughout the city and everyone will be able to get free internet soon, but that's another subject altogether).

The question to ponder is from the old Pythagoreans (I'm starting to feel like Donald in Mathmagic Land). In that Greeky, Platonic way of those old hifaluters, they believed that the numbers, or ratio, preceded reality. If this were the case, then following the numbers would be an expression of something akin to the divine, or at least something transcendent. The Golden Ratio, phi, has been famously used to determine facial beauty. If the eyes are a certain distance apart, the nose, the shape, the planes, etc., if you do the math, the closer the face's ratios are to phi, the more physically beautiful it is. Now, if you (Western, Caucasian you) do all this math on various faces, you will indeed find a lot more phi in, say, supermodels than in, well, whatever is the opposite of supermodels. The Western forms of beauty definitely conform to the Golden Ratio. This is why I have a more classically appealing face than, say, Mr. Chutney. I am more phi than he is. (He, on the other hand, is more fly than I, but again, I digress.) And here's the question. What comes first? Does beauty precede phi? That is, have we determined a hierarchy of beauty over time, and then measured that beauty and found that the closer it is to phi, the more beauteous it is, by some sheer happenstance? Or did phi come first, and did the idea of beauty always have to be the closest to phi for us to appreciate it?

One must next dig into the parentheses above and ask, what about cultures where facial structures are different from the Caucasian, in isolation from the Caucasian? Say, Japanese faces in 1300, when there is no Western contamination. Does their mode of beauty conform to phi? If it does, does that mean that there's a structural/structuralist concept of beauty that transcends culture? If it did/does, then it would actually give credence to the idea that the ratio precedes the reality.

Maybe you can answer all of this. I can't. But I like thinking about it.