Maybe there is hope, but hie, hie!

Maybe there is hope.  

I promised Fred that I'd wow him with productivity today, beginning with dealing with financial misdeeds, my favorite thing.  So I filed "cow udder balm" under The Castafiore's "operatic make-up products" (for which The Troupe reimburses us biannually).  So I managed to reroute the deposit of my automatic PCIP premium payment to my dear friend President Obama's "Hit List Necessities" (drone maintenance, mainly, and hostess gifts) -- with occasional faulty landings in the National Debt Fund morass.

Buddy the Freakishly Large Kitten, who, at age 2 is having another growth spurt (damn Maine Coons!), complete with a reappearance of his affinity for chewing wires, woke me.  He'd overheard the "productivity" comment and was going to be my aide in seeing it through.

Trouble was, I couldn't straighten my right leg, and who the heck knew where the left one even was?  My right arm was also misplaced, though I could definitively testify that the hand at the end of that arm was swollen and vcry cold.

"Pain pill," thought I, "and a cat with thumbs and whatever other attributes are necessary to the making of a good italian roast in my newly cracked cafetière, and once made, poured over the precise -- in measure as in temperature -- jigger of milk into my ugly green mug and brought to my thirsty lips... and not spilling a God-damned drop because I did manage to mop our wing of the Manor's West Extension yesterday, before falling into a coma."

And, again, as many times before in this blog, I long for a Pensieve.  ["The Pensieve is primarily a device for storing memories outside of one's own head."]  How many other bloggers do you know who long for a Pensieve?  Oh, hush up, Fresca.  (I miss Fresca.  We've never met, yet I miss her!)  Some people are just good people without the requirement of hoops, psychometrics, and disclosure of voting history.

See?  Now, YOU, too, wish for me a Pensieve.  And coffee, and such cats as are necessary to that coffee's procurement, and two 7.5/325 Endocet.  A veritable Peace Train of things.

Aha!  Never mistrust this mind, no matter how far gone, how medicated, how self-pitying, how covered with what appear to be moss-and-lichen twigs -- the lichen we attribute to my funkalicious osteomyelitis and ill-advised skinny dips in the moat during the off-season;  the moss can only be due to my crusty celadon-green Naturalism.  (Naturalism, where the Tea Party was meant to end up, those Baggers!)

But as Brother Yusuf Islam's vintage Peace Train now took over my brain, and its humming eradicated the harmonics of my pain and the displacement of my limbs, and the cats miraculously did manage to hoist my ugly green mug and precise coffee demands to my bedside table -- and after a mere 20 minutes of waiting for the meds to kick in... I grabbed the laptop to see how the world was.  And Peace Train went from thought impediment to badly gurgled half-tones to a full-voiced joyful rendition.  Feel free to join in:


Now I've been happy lately, 
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, 
something good has begun

Oh I've been smiling lately, 
dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be, 
some day it's going to come

Cause out on the edge of darkness, 
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, 
come take me home again

Now I've been smiling lately, 
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, 
something good has begun

Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy  roller

Everyone jump upon the peace train
Come on now peace train

Get your bags together, 
go bring your good friends too
Cause it's getting nearer, 
it soon will be with you

Now come and join the living, 
it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, 
soon it will all be true

Now I've been crying lately, 
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, 
why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness, 
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, 
come take me home again


Why are you singing, all belly-free and without an inhibition in sight, much less on your shoulder?
Because even before I could locate the information necessary to determining whether the world had made it overnight, my eyes spied the title of an editorial:  "America’s Retreat From the Death Penalty."

Your voice is further buoyed by the small fact that it isn't a signed guest op-ed, or even a signed regular old tired op-eder.  It's a full-fledged New York Times editorial board piece.

There's not a brilliant bit in it.  There's no new information.  There's just the recognition that the whims and moods of America, as determined by its sorta-elected judiciary, have always determined the death penalty policies of this country.  But if you talk to Most People, Most People believe that there is a standardized, measurable, referable, repeatable standard that we keep in the Judiciary Closet -- something like units of measure that are convertible to any bloody, murderous circumstance.

It's true!  Once a decade or so, depending, we fight and tousle, then we remember the Judiciary Closet, where we have stored our imaginary Standards of Legal Measurement, and we all finally gather at the corner pub (or Applebees, if there be no corner pub in what used to pass for your neighborhood) to salute the good King Edwards of the 13th and 14th centuries:

When the Roman Empire passed into history about six hundred years after the time of Christ, Europe then drifted into the Dark Ages. For six or seven hundred years mankind generally made little progress with regard to standardizing measurement. Sometime after the Magna Charta was signed in the Thirteenth Century, King Edward I of England took a step forward. He ordered a permanent measuring stick made of iron to serve as a master standard yardstick for the entire kingdom. This master yardstick was called the "iron ulna", after the bone of the forearm, and it was standardized as the length of a yard, very close to the length of our present-day yard. King Edward realized that constancy and permanence were the key to any standard. He also decreed that the foot measure should be one-third the length of the yard, and the inch one thirty-sixth. King Edward II, in 1324, reverted back to the seed concept of the ancients and passed a statute that "three barleycorns, round and dry," make an inch. 

What?  Oh, I forgot to tell you.  The "Dark Ages" is just code for "hie, hie -- hie unto your metaphors!"  In case you're having trouble following, and who wouldn't, unless she had the assistance of Amazing Felines, Pharmaceuticals, and superb Italian Roast, the standardization of measurement based on what is purely arbitrary has links to both power and the most boring of everyday stuff (barley corns and ulnae), and on these standardizations we build domes, skyscrapers, knickknack shelves, and our opinions about the death penalty.  That last item means, you poor caffeine-deprived, bed-ridden sufferer, life itself.  Toss in the Pyramids and Chichen Itza, as well as most preserved Mayan architecture, and you'll agree with me -- we are some lucky sons-of-bitches, to have such divine wonders born of arbitrary forearms and the relative humidity of a seed.

Before I die, and I do believe this is going to be my year, finally, I'd love to see the Mayan "ruins." I don't know, though, whether they've been rendered handicapped accessible.  How it would suck to make it to the bottom of all that brilliance, only to find no wheelchair ramp.

I feel a  "We the People" Petition coming on.  I'm sure that  "We the People" Petitions cover USAmerican civil rights beyond the borders as well as within.

Anyway, we have stashed away, thanks to people like Napoleon, Jefferson, and Galileo's pendulum, brass bars as arbiters of the standards dissent that falls upon We the People from time to time.  Carry the metaphor over to the Judiciary Closet, and you'll see the main reason we fail at even discussing the Death Penalty with any reasonableness whatsoever.

That's why I stopped discussing it, unless bullied into it.  I mean, I once wore the tiara of DP Abolitionist for a small but brave-hearted Amnesty International group (we even managed to free a Prisoner of Conscience, upon which occasion we drank wine from wax cups).

But somehow, overnight, the editorial board of the New York Times realized that Right is Right, and published this, of which I'll give you a salivary striptease:

America’s Retreat From the Death Penalty 

When the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, it said there were two social purposes for imposing capital punishment for the most egregious crimes: deterrence and retribution. In recent months, these justifications for a cruel and uncivilized punishment have been seriously undermined by a growing group of judges, prosecutors, scholars and others involved in criminal justice, conservatives and liberals alike. 

A distinguished committee of scholars convened by the National Research Council found that there is no useful evidence to determine if the death penalty deters serious crimes. Many first-rate scholars have tried to prove the theory of deterrence, but that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” the committee said. 

A host of other respected experts have also concluded that life imprisonment is a far more practical form of retribution, because the death penalty process is too expensive, too time-consuming and unfairly applied. 

The punishment is supposed to be reserved for the very worst criminals, but dozens of studies in state after state have shown that the process for deciding who should be sent to death row is arbitrary and discriminatory. [Please click HERE for the remainder of the op-ed]

I almost feel that scoping out the rest of the world and what was done in it while I slept is unnecessary.  Over the cliff or not, who cares?  Aleppo, more dead, less, whatever!  Mitch McConnell grew a chin?  It was covered by his health plan and will help him govern more effectively. Hillary Clinton has faked yet another illness? (What do you expect from an hysterical female?  She probably couldn't hold an aspirin between her knees long enough to earn the Presidential Fitness Award.)

None of it matters.

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace trainOh peace train take this country, come take me home again

I know, I'm being a gullible rube again.  Leave me to it, at least for the afternoon.  Let me be capricious in my generalizations of a Bunch O'Words, if it makes me happy.  Words matter.






Upcoming Scheduled Executions in the U.S.

All scheduled execution dates cited are tentative. A number of circumstances exist that can change the date.
To write a letter to stop any of the scheduled executions, please use this directory of government officials to direct your letters.


January
1/16/2013 Robert Gleason Jr. -- Virginia
1/16/2013 Ronald Post -- Ohio
1/29/2013 Kimberly McCarthy -- Texas
February
2/20/2013 Britt Ripkowski  -- Texas
2/21/2013 Carl Henry Blue -- Texas
March
3/6/2013 Frederick Treesh -- Ohio
3/21/2013 Michael Dean "Spider" Gonzalez -- Texas
April
4/10/2013 Rigoberto Avila -- Texas
4/16/2013 Ronnie Threadgill -- Texas
May
5/1/2013 Steven Smith -- Ohio
July
7/31/2013 Douglas Feldman -- Texas
August
8/7/2013 Billy Slagle -- Ohio
September
9/25/2013 Harry Mitts, Jr. -- Ohio
November
11/14/2013 Ronald Phillips -- Ohio
January
1/16/2014 Dennis McGuire -- Ohio
March
3/19/2014 Gregory Lott -- Ohio
May
5/28/2014 Arthur Tyler -- Ohio
October
10/14/2014 Raymond Tibbetts -- Ohio
January
1/7/2015 Warren Henness -- Ohio

How my mind works

Ever since the day I deleted, on purpose and quite efficiently, two good chapters of my doctoral thesis, along with two bad ones, I've been loathe to dispose of any piece of writing.  Let me qualify that just a little:  I've been loathe to dispose of any piece of writing that warranted an initial "save" on the computer.  Of course, saving a text doesn't always mean the text is worth anything -- it may have been a text interrupted, or a passage awaiting proper citation, or an enticing poster announcing ManorFest schedules and entry fees.  It may be something inane to me but valuable to someone else. * [see below]

Let's see what might happen, shall we, if I employ my usual artlessness in a blog post dedicated to the goings-on of The Castafiore, as she has been somewhat neglected of late:


La Bonne et Belle Bianca, The Castafiore, has laryngitis. 


That means, for those of you not tuned in to the minutiae of life here at Marlinspike Hall, ancestral home of the Haddock clan -- well represented in the current generation by The Captain -- That means, mes chers, mes petits choux, that no one, c'est-à-dire, personne, is going to be screaming, errrr, singing, à très haute voix:

ah!  je ris de me voir...
si belle dans ce miroir!

D'habitude, elle crie si fort que je risque de devenir sourde, ou dingue/dingo... folle... cinglée...  farfelue...
détraquée...  maboule... loufe... faible...  marteau... insensée... azimutée... loufoque... délirante... toquée... déséquilibrée...

[Not unlike the possum who loves bright, dangly Shiny Things,

I am momentarily caught off guard by this profusion of crazy words,

and in my embarassment, seek to draw my readers' eyes away

from this linguistic glitter by the insertion of cold, hard grammar...]

Remember, please, that dingo is, of course, invariable -- when used as French adjectival slang, that is.
Not, I repeat, not when referencing the wild dog of Australia, and certainly not in relation to the tragic event that introduced many of us to the canine dingo:  the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain thirty years ago at Uluru, and her mother's famous declaration that "a dingo ate my baby."


It's unfortunate that I tend to burst out laughing at that phrase, as delivered by a shrill Meryl Streep in the movie A Cry in the Dark. I confess to having mimicked Streep with nary a thought in my pointy head for the real actors, and their actual drama.  By the time Elaine performs her mimicry on a Seinfeld episode, I was likely inured to the tragic origins of the line.



Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, by the way, recently has requested what will be a fourth inquest about the death of her daughter, part of her search for justice being to have the death certificate reflect that Azaria was killed by the primitive canine. 


It is so little to ask, and coming from someone who lost... incalculably.  Convicted of murder (and her husband of being an accessory to it), she spent a tangible three and a half years in prison for a loss too great for reckoning.  She just wants to amend what stands as malicious fantasy with a truth.









And... scene!  My mind does work, but it does its work mysteriously.  How did any of the above possibly relate to the Dear Castafiore? 

Well, the first thought thought is not the first thought recorded, of course.

As I pondered La Bonne et Belle Bianca, and delighted in my good fortune at escaping her rehersal of Gounod's Faust, with her assigned aria, Air des Bijoux, a stray neuron misfired and I flashed on the Benes character, herself reacting to an obnoxious, repetitive voice -- the woman worried about her lost fiancé.  Thus was the deadly dingo incident planted in my fertile brow.   And somehow, that videoclip made me think of the inane, insane craziness that The Castafiore so often inspires in me on a lazy Sunday afternoon -- but even as I indulged my fantasy with an exercise in Synonyms for "Crazy" in French, I sought to reestablish the facts of the case... a travesty wherein what was called evidence of blood was a mixture of milkshake and copper dust, where a Mother's failure to behave as a proper Mother should was an indicting evil.

One day, I'll have to do a hundred focused words or so on the deadening dichotomy of Mary the Virgin/Whore and other unfortunate idées reçues.


*  [What I write] may be something inane to me but valuable to someone else... Such proved to be the rambling introduction I made to a blog entry about CRPS clinical trials.  Of course, the clinical trials themselves are of import, but in a fit of gregarious excess, I also jotted down some historical references about the ManorMaze and the family responsable for its very existence, the Mimnermuses:

I'm going to steal a moment away from ManorFest activities to update the blog on CRPS clinical trials that are currently accepting new volunteers.

I could use the rest. We opened ManorMaze to the public this year and, let me tell you, if you have the bad luck to draw Rescue Duty, your dogs are gonna bark.

Written records testify that Marlinspike Hall's Manor Maze dates back as far as 1067. Cretan Manor Jardinier Ajax Mimnermus transplanted the first thousand English Boxwood in a highly original serpentine pattern that twisted and turned over a particularly hilly, 25-acres bit of Haddock ancestral land. Twenty-two generations later, the Mimnermus Family still holds the prestigious position of JardinierOfficiel to the Marlinspike Manor Maze. A proud and loyal clan, they guard our horticultural secrets with ferocity. Both little red-headed, freckled Xenophon and his more swarthy third cousin Clinias are currently in training: One will assume the mantle of Jardinier Officiel; The other will be offered a lifetime position on the Landscape Crew. Everyone wins!

Anyway, you can imagine how huge and complex this labyrinth is today, as one Mimnermus after another has judiciously added plantings, making the maze both more elegant and more challenging to exit. (Though sometimes, I'd swear that it has a life all its own, its paths shifting in the night like sand in a storm -- but I can't prove anything.)

CRPS renders ManorMaze Rescue Duty very tiring, and my wheelchair has lost its charge more than once, over the years, leaving me to call for my own rescue. It's a restful place in which to be trapped, though, as our Illustrious Gardeners have created little enclaves of delight within -- squares dedicated to aromatherapy, curlicued paths lined with delicious mint and sweet clovers!

[Thank the Good Lord, however, that my chair has never lost power in The Marsh installed by Xenophon's paternal grandmother, Nausicaa, who loved the dramatic tension of taming a wild landscape. For The Marsh, she took as her inspiration Tolkien's Dead Marshes of Middle Earth. Being a patriotic soul, Tête-de-Hergéenne through and through, she wanted to memorialize those lands that served as battlefield during the Sixth Uprising, and modeled her marsh on his Mere of Dead Faces that border one of the entrances to Mordor. Years ahead of her time, she achieved the underwater lighting effect by solar cells and advanced the field of horticultural photovoltaics by decades. Captain Haddock's great uncle had the forsight to underwrite her studies in Moscow with Aleksandr Stoletov -- where it is our good fortune that she witnessed the creation of the very first solar cell and was able to make such an apt application of the invention!]

You are probably thinking that a history so momentous would have its own dedicated documentary support of photographic, journalistic, and epistolary evidence.  And you would be, of course, correct.  Captain Haddock's first Mother-In-Law crested the wave of Nouveau Scrapbooking and stored most everything in Marlinspike Hall's only turret, where she was, errr, housed in the early 1950s.  Her digs were eventually turned into The Computer Turret for reasons just technical enough to escape me. 

I did my usually doodling and dallying in a blog post about... Well, it was actually about Fresca, and her blog, l'astronave... but as I frequently record where I am when writing, as well as why I am where I am, I was compelled to share a little about the conditions in The Computer Turret that evening:

Excuse me, this computer -- a new, or at least, different one -- is blinking and hooting at me. Sputtering, even.


Part of me keeps thinking "This isn't very wise, Retired Educator! Better you should close the plush velvet curtains of The Computer Turret, though they are impervious to not much, so as to better shield this shy, blinking, hooting instrument from the needling horizontal rain with which the Lord has blessed us, than to continue to risk disc failure by pecking away on damp keys and dipping the world's longest extension cord into the stray puddles gracing the uneven slate flagstone."


Yes, we DO have a turret!


Only the one, though.


It was a medieval design flaw, very common, but normally disguised as a soot-spewing chimney by the gaggle of ensuing sub-contractors unleashed by the inevitable Industrial Revolutions. The original Manor Residents had Castle Pretensions. Anyway, Captain Haddock's first mother-in-law, whose living conditions he seems to have delighted in complicating, was housed up here back in the 50s. After her departure, highly fêted, it kind of became a design nightmare and went through incarnations that might shock even Niecy Nash. [I confess that I sometimes wander around Marlinspike Hall with a blindfold on, stopping suddenly and yelling: "Take your blindfold off and OPEN YOUR EYES!"


Yes, I did recently break a leg. Your point?

You probably shuddered with premonition that night, Dear Reader.  Perhaps, in your own blog or journal you wrote of your fear -- perhaps you lit a candle on our behalf, or placed a sporting bet on when, exactly, The Computer Turret would be engulfed in flames. 

For just a few short weeks later, the electrical short that had been smoldering behind "the plush, velvet curtains" turned into a sufficiently maintained blaze to destroy everything but its rock base -- panelling, curtains, computers, and, yes, all the archival material about the ManorMaze.  Oh, and an inimitable collection of Milanese Osso Bucco recipes. 

Yeah, so publishing what may seem extraneous to you, or even to me, in this blog can, indeed, serve a separate and sometimes higher purpose.  In this instance, I do harbor a bit of regret, because our Manor insurance company at the time,  BCBS -- Bull Crap Bull Skeet of Tête-de-Hergé -- refused to cover the costs of the inferno, citing my own reportage in this blog as evidence of irresponsible usage and dangerous conditions.   Dickwads.

And yet, isn't it grand that some of the invaluable history of The Manor was preserved by my seemingly mindless and circuitous writings?

That, in short, Dear Reader, is how my mind works.

Now... as I said, initially, Bianca has laryngitis.  I am thinking slippery elm tea and a pristine broth...