Pre-4th hash

I am still not a hundred percent healthy. Without going into the gory details, what I’ve got goes away, but it takes forever. I look forward to normality. I’ve also been busy doing some writing, and then there were houseguests for a while, and I’ve gotten my old Dell back into the working mix (nothing against Little Elvis, of course, but you can’t have too many working computers), and I won a quarter playing golf Sunday (big money among my foursome), and there’s general symptoms from the annual summer withdrawal from forensics… I’ve really let Nostrum go by the boards, but a little hiatus never hurt anyone, I guess. Anyhow, another week or so and I should be the cheerful Menick the VCA has come to know and love. Or something like that.

So I wrote up my initial comments on the LD rezzes, and next thing I knew they were soliciting my votes. Things move fast these days. I had hoped to get some dialogue going with the Legion of Doom on it, so I sent my thoughts to them. My assumption was, hey, these are mostly coaches, and the last I heard 2 or 3 of them actually used their email, so maybe they’d have thoughts too. I guess they’re all on vacation or something. I did get some backchannels, but no discussion. Either they acclaim by tacit agreement or are so stupefied by my misunderstanding of things that they threw their computers into the river and swore off debate until the end of the Cheney Bush presidency. Oh, well. There was also some discussion of the rezzes on WTF. There is a movement afoot to accept the hate crime rez for its intent rather than for what it says; call me an Originalist and tuck me in with Nino and Clarence, but that is not the nature of the English language; for comparison purposes, consult Humpty Dumpty in your Lewis Carroll cuttings. Words do not mean what I wish them to mean, in other words, not even if we all wish them to be that. It is a constant issue in editing, whether a word that has a certain meaning, and is misused regularly, should take on the misuse as a usable meaning. Momentarily, for instance, is a word that used to mean for a moment; now it means in a moment. You can’t make the dictionary dictatorial, because language is a living thing. On the other hand, you can’t just derive meaning from random albeit near-miss usages. Someone suggested that the NFL be buzzed for a possible fix. That would work for me. I so want to argue hate crimes, to a great degree because I have no idea what my opinion is on the subject. I just haven’t studied it in any depth, which ordinarily doesn’t prohibit strong opinionage, but let’s at least pretend to have marginally open minds, sports fans. I’ve noticed a couple of yabbos chiming in with comments about the rezzes here (one of said yabbos having serious spellcheck issues), but that’s about it. WTF people seem to be about where I am on most of them, I think. Which stands to reason when the list is fundamentally sound.

Meanwhile it looks as if every school in the region is going to have a new coach next year. Must be something in the water; I’ll have to remember to steer clear of it. At the point where it’s just me and O’C at the helm, it will be the end of life on (northeast) earth as we know it.

And I realize that this is not a political blog, but last night I was setting up my machine to record the Bernini show, and there was Bush and Putin standing in front of a bunch of reporters in Kennebunkport looking about as comfortable together as two meatballs in an eel souflle. Bush kept bobbing front side to side (we hit debaters over the head for that) and Putin looked as if he'd eaten the debate ziti for lunch that day. The world is in your hands, guys...