Green Swizzle

Hussein called Saddam

Sat on his bottom

Thinking of what to do

As quick as a wink

he began to think

That “This scud’s for you”.

So my boss, Jeremy Meulenberg, called me yesterday to tell me I’m back to work Monday. So that part of my life is back in order. Praise the Lord!

So since my life is quickly becoming quite a whirlwind, I found sufficient time in the eye of the wirl wind to compose. Now, I understand that true Haiku is only part of a bigger piece of work in Japanese literature which is called a waka. But given that I don’t have time to take a waka, because it’s only an eye of a whirlwind, I decided to compose a haiku. Okay, several haikus, which probably amounts to more than a taken waka for which I don’t have time,  because of the whirlwind which is my life. You get the idea.

I want to be intellectual honest here. In true haiku form in Japanese, the sound M and N count as syllables in the language’s meter. But given that I speak English and am confined to its limitations, sound structures, etc.  I will proceed to ignore that particular rule. 

So here’s a whack at it:

Am unemployed.

I don’t like unemployment

It is quite the drag.

_______________

Asthma’s killing me.

Work’s chemicals are no good.

Insufficient funds.

______________

A mid-life crisis…

Nix the hot chicks and fast cars.

Opportunity.

_____________

For what should  I aim?

At thirty-three, this is hard.

I’ll change direction?

__________________

No option’s easy.

All choices require much work

I won’t squander time.

1. I have an asthma-like condition. Cold, smoke, and vast amounts of hazardous fumes will trigger problems for me.
2. I am a painter by trade.
3. I live in the Grand Rapids area of Michigan.
4. I enjoy reading P.G. Wodehouse’s works though I enjoyed his autobiographical stuff the most of all his written material.
5. In my school years between 4^th and 12^th grade I maintained roughly a “D” grade average. I (almost) fail to see why I brought that up.
6. I have 5+ years of college with no degree to show for it.
7. I have perfectionist tendencies.
8. I was within a hand’s breadth of joining the US Marines.
9. I read “How To Read A Book” by Mortimer Adler, got my butt kicked by it, and enjoyed it.
10. I find the way mechanics and medical doctors think fascinating.
11. I am originally from the SF bay area and didn’t leave the state of Ca. EVER until I was 19.
12. I am 99.999999999 etc.% never bored. The .111111111% of the time I am really tired more than bored and just can’t concentrate.
13. I conjugate ideas like Latin students do with verbs. Except I’m not as predictable.
14. I officially studied Biblical Greek, German, and French in school.
15. I am well acquainted with the writing style of dictionary entries. Sometimes I speak like a dictionary.
16. I read The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle three times. Consecutively.
17. I love etymology.
18. I love theology.
19. I am extremely particular about how food tastes. It doesn’t matter who it is that makes whatever-it-is, if there’s something lacking (or there that shouldn’t be), I’ll notice it.
20. I have a profound appreciation for firearms.
21. I love puns and double entendre. Especially when the double entendre is antithetic. Triple entendre is generally forced.
22. I dislike loud and invasive noises.
23. I don’t like being asked how I am because very rarely I’m prepared to answer that question if the asker is being sincere.
24. I enjoy willingly giving my resources to others and making them happy.

 

   25.    But I don’t like high taxation.

Samuel Johnson would benevolently smile at the one who wrote this.

 ”Sesquipedalian Obscurantism”

 ”Sesquipedalian n. One who is inordinately infatuated with polysyllabic obfuscation, preferring never to employ a less complicated syntactic arrangement of descriptive words when there exists a single expressive unit that amalgamates the multiplicity of morphemes comprising the simpler phrase. Among the manifold objectives of multisyllabic, holophrastic verbalism are those of: rendering the author’s meaning indisputably precise yet simultaneously incomprehensible; demonstrating through superior orthography and lexical awareness that the writer is manifestly more erudite than the reader; disempowering intellectual challenge to the proponent’s argument by using logomachinations to divert discussion to the establishment of the opponent’s comprehension of the vocabulary as opposed to addressing the factual import of the treatise which, upon analysis, may well prove amphigorous. The obscurantist sesquipedalian is likely to compound the reader’s difficulties by indulging in glossosynthesis, thus enabling the author to dismiss all opposing views as ultracrepidarious. In other words, a sesquipedalian is one who would call a spade a manuo-pedal excavationary implement.”

Borrowed from the below cited (with due kissing of their royal pinky fingers):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A640207

Well, well. DrollorD, in a concerted effort to ward off Michigan’s face numbing weather, has decided to grow a …um… beard. One time at an annual family get-together, I received two compliments (both from my in-law parents). Both of these were on their own accord, mind you. However, I am fearful that these were out of a pitying spirit (not to cast any accusations of ill-doing on my in-law’s part) in beholding the adventitious hairs upon my face.

Some have tried to assert/accent the ‘natural’ distinction between men and women by saying men are to grow beards. However, one would have to ask, “What then of women’s leg hair? Women surely have naturally growing leg hair, and some women actually have to deal with battles with facial hair.” Ummm …yuck. Do not think I have no pity on women who are in constant danger of hamstringing themselves when they shave their legs. Experientially speaking, I can say that I have shared in women’s pains to some degree. I used to be on swimming teams which would for the sake of ‘shaving’ off vital thousandths of a seconds in league race times would shave off most their body hair -save some choice, needless-to-be-named spots. Yes, those days indeed were cold…

Now, to the more important substance of the post. ‘Beard’ comes down to us from the Old English word of same spelling, affiliated with the German word ‘Bart’ and Dutch “baard”. “Barber” comes to us from the Latin word barba meaning ‘beard’. In an unconfirmed etymological note, I have heard that ‘barba’ also has something to do with the word ‘barbarian.’ But do not cite me as authoritative on that one, lest you and I be drummed up on etymological charges of “hair-acy”.

Throughout the years of my life Easter has been hammered as something special by those near and dear to me. In my childhood, it was the day that you go looking for eggs that some genetically disturbed rabbit desultorily deposited throughout whoever’s property, with an occasional basket or two chocked-full of enamel-eating anti-dental devices (a.k.a. candy). More recently in my life’s history, it has been the day which a majority of Christians allegedly celebrate Christ’s resurrection from the dead, with perhaps a dash of the genetically disturbed rabbit interspersed hither and thither.

Since then has come light. By the grace of God, I learned in His Word that Christ’s resurrection wasn’t just an isolated event that for some odd reason meant something to Christians making salvation merely available to all, and now it’s up to men to somehow assent to this doctrine. What was accomplished in Christ’s death and resurrection was the effectual cause of Christians’ faith and hope in God. So it’s not up to me to come up with some sort of adequate faith to save myself from God’s just wrath in hell. This has been effectually caused by Christ’s work for me and other of His people. His people will believe in Him, because He died for them.

So this doctrine of Christ’s resurrection isn’t a mere cardio-pulminary-resussitative nicety that happen one day. This was the playing out of the very cause of Christians faith and hope in God, without which we’d eat and drink for tomorrow we’ll die.

By the way, as in the history of all holidays, the singled out day far obscures the doctrine it’s allegedly celebrating. So, can the holiday. Fifty-two Lord’s Days set aside by God Himself are plenty adequate for Christian special days. Which brings me to another point: Observation of the Sabbath in the Christian’s life is caused by Christ’s death and resurrection.

So, stick with what He has commanded and obey that, rather than trying to go ape with holidays.

This one caught me off guard. Graft as in what one does with plants in bringing a piece from a different plant comes from the Greek word graphein ”to write” which was turned into graphium which is a stylus for writing.  The name comes from a resemblence  of one of the pieces to the point of a stylus.

Many moons ago I was amongst the academically enslaved and with great trepidation checked myself into a Public Speaking class. In the course we had to run, we had to do 4 or 5 informative speeches in the class. I was of a strange sort back then, being governed by a passion for odd subject matter. Amongst my speeches’ subjects upon which I wrote were: The Afrikaaners, and the Vikings (the latter picked much to the disappointment of another fellow classmate, in that we weren’t allowed to duplicate subject matter: he gave a groan of disappointment and voiced some words consistent with the sentiment).

In the class there was a man who was of a more curious savor than myself. He used to be a garbage man, and somehow in his hucking about of ill-smelling receptacles managed to separate his pectoral muscles from his ribcage. He then had a surgery to restore his chest back to its robust self. Well, this surgery was about which he chose to speak.

In the process of his speech, he covered the grisly details of his surgery (about which I can tell you little, in that my mind seeking to protect itself from such intrusive thoughts has jettisoned most of the memory). I was well composed before the speech, and through its gruesome course, it had began to take its toll on me (Okay, it levied exorbitant taxes on my composure). I started to feel exceedingly faint and clammy as the speaker pressed on throwing out his subject matter carelessly as he would one of those man handled garbage cans specifically pertaining to his employment. I even started to lay my head down a bit. When I thought I had finally sucked up the worst of it, he had one final rhetorical garbage can to fling at me: Pictures of the above said matter. Well, my composure and consciousness has enough of this rhetorical garbage receptacle flinging Donkey Kong, and decided to go to somewhere safer.

When I woke up, quite bedewed with sweat, I looked up, and saw above me all of my formally seated fellow classmates around me staring down at my recovering corpse. The teacher was visibly embarrassed and apologetic about the whole thing saying that it was the first time this had ever happened, etc., then I was carted in a wheelchair off to the nurses office. Soon after the incident, the teacher admonished us, the body academic to choose our speech content more wisely, that there would be no further problems of the sort.

I was contemplating responding to a blog commenter that responded to something I commented, and I came across a word in the original post: “Fanatical”

Belonging to a temple. Frantic. Fanatic. Inspired.

According to RHCDRE a fanatic is: A person with extreme and uncritical enthysiasm or zeal, as in religion, politics, etc.

I was at work one day, thinking in my usual disconnected way about life, and my mind leveled its sights on the word disaster. Now, I took a year of Greek back in college, so I know enough to spot a Hellenistic word root when I see one. Thus went my mind: -aster means star in Greek. Dis- from or some sort of negative aspect. Then it dawned on me: The word’s got to be tied somehow to astrology. Those coves in days of yore were a superstitious lot. An issuance from the stars? Fate? Well, maybe it’s not quite as important as Aquinas table thumping incident around King Louis, but it did make me “ahah!” a bit. So, I made remark to my coworker Dave about it (he forbearing my abstrusity, indulged me) and when I got home I checked my dictionary’s etymology on “disaster.” In an obsolete usage it meant “an unfavorable aspect of a star or planet” -The Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition, btw. So I guess I was onto something there.

So, I was changing my oil in my mini-van today, had everything all nice and in order, filter was replaced, and all that. I poured in the 4 qts to replenish and I checked the dip stick and figured out that I was the dipstick. I forgot to put the oilpan plug/ screw back in. So I blew 4 qts of oil. Well…all the junk’s out of the pan.

Here’s a word that has lost some of its original sense. This word has pagan connotations.

Random House College Revised Edition says of an augur:

1.one of a body of ancient Roman officials charged with observing and interpreting omens for guidance in public affairs.

2. any soothsayer; prophet

I think the policy was to check to see if all would go well for whatever they were doing before doing anything of importance. Now the sense behind inaugurate is to kick an event off with ceremony.

Hail All.

IT has indeed been a while. Here’s another whack at it.