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Archive for June, 2004

Today is the Village’s 5th birthday!

( General )

Happy birthday, Village! On this day five years ago, I bought your domain. Content came later: I needed a lot of help from the Villagers, especially Lael Ewy, E.W. Wilder, the estate of Bean Newton, Hezekiah Allen Taylor, and the DuBois sisters for that. Over the years, more villagers have signed on to lend their [...]

Is Language a Deadbeat?

Michel Foucault’s analysis of Rene Magritte Ceci n’est pas une pipe goes far beyond observations of his technique in tromp l’oeil. The paintings circulate, to Foucault, as visually and conceptually loaded calligrams. Like the visual poems of Apollinare, which consist of words arranged to form a picture of the topic described, Magritte [...]

The Sublime Right of Ordinary Folks

In Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, he postulates the ideal political state as the ultimate sovereign, government as prime authority, patriarch, great arbiter. In a Hobbesian state, the government is more, much more, than the sum of its parts. Hobbes justifies his leviathan of a state because of his notion of the “state of nature,” that [...]

Where is the Rest of Him?

How about a National Day of Mourning for Ray Charles?

Let’s pretend for a minute.

“Now today as you prepare to leave your Alma Mater, you go into a world in which, due to our carelessness and apathy, a great many of our freedoms have been lost. It isn’t that an outside enemy has taken them. It’s just that there is something inherent in government which makes it, when it [...]

The Red Clam Explosion

from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland

So I was talking with an old friend of mine the other day when he turned to me and asked “Do you remember that time we spent all night pissing on the bug zapper and stank up the whole neighborhood?”

And even though my brain said it never happened, I could have [...]

The Bush Administration Is Ruining My Life

Because every time I try to sit down and get any serious work done, I end up writing yet another broadside against the President Regent and his Band of Merry Robber Barons. I truly can’t help it: the vitriol just flows out of me, and, in all seriousness, it is beginning to tire me [...]