In my view of life, the concept of honor has had little place.  The truly moral actions dictated by a sense of honor generally can be reasoned to by other ethical routes.  And the actions recommended by honor alone are, by my lights, often morally suspect.  However,  DJT's abandoning the Kurds, good and faithful allies, to death and possible ethnic cleansing, I think, I feel, has stained my country's honor.

ElecTORal College, I Hardly know Ye

It has seemed to me that the accent in "pastoral" and "electoral" has shifted quite rapidly, from PAStoral to pasTORal and from eLECtoral to elecTORal.   But recognizing that my perception of rapidity may be wrong, I consulted a couple online dictionaries, not for what they thought was "correct," but for what they thought people were saying.  Dictionary.com lists only the first version of each word.  Merriam-Webster lists both pronunciations for each word, but gives pasTORal second and labels elecTORal nonstandard.  I take this to mean that the pronunciations that sound right to me are older and were current in the general population whenever these dictionaries were last updated.

So probably there are many folks around who changed the way they pronounce these words.  Is language change so insensible to you that you just didn't notice?  Did you change because you deliberately change to whatever you most hear?  Or did you just give up for fear of being odd or unintelligible?   As I may soon have to do.  But can I really make myself say "Beethoven's PasTORal Symphony?"

Leonard Cohen's Prince Of Asturias Speech - No Overdubbing

Newest Translations

Far up the cold mountain, a sloping stone path.
Among the white colds, family dwellings.
Stop the carriage, loving evening in the maple wood.
Frosty leaves, redder than flowers of the second month.
     --Du Mu

THE FESTIVAL OF PURE BRIGHTNESS


Almost hopelessly turned around in driving rain
the traveller on the road for Tomb Sweeping Day
still asks politely the way to the nearest inn
and the shepherd boy points toward Peach Blossom Village.
     --Du Mu




DRUNKEN SLEEP


Autumn rain and well-made wine.
Cold house among falling leaves.
The hermit, who mostly sleeps,
pours and drains another cup.
     --Du Mu

Passover in Indonesia

Several years ago, my family and I attended a Passover Seder in Indonesia hosted by a Jewish couple doing post-grad research there.  The hosts were unable to find many of the traditional items for the Seder and gave interesting explanations of the meaning of each and of how they had settled on substitutes. We're non-theists, and so had no religious qualms about being there.  But there were also a number of Indonesian Muslims who came.  At the time, I admired their tolerance and their interest in other traditions.  But now I wonder if they attended at some risk to themselves.  Perhaps the risk was minimal, given that we were in Yogyakarta, one of the most liberal areas of the country.  But I would guess that the danger could have been considerable in a more religiously conservative area, like Aceh.

Why is the figurative sense of "to dunk on" used with the same meaning as "to dump on?"  The latter means something like "to heap opprobrium on."  A figurative use of the former in the context of debate perhaps ought to mean something like "to decisively score a point with verbal acumen." Maybe something like a Hitchslap.

I have managed to read the greater part of the Qur'an, tedious though it is. The bulk of it is taken up with many, many repetitions of a few ideas: 1. God is all-powerful and all-knowing and there's only one of him--and you can't fudge this principle by having this singular being appear in different manifestations, for example, as his own son ( although you'd think that, being omnipotent, he could if he wanted to). 2. The Qur'an is the record of God speaking through Mohammed. 3. If you believe 1 & 2 and do a few things attendant on that belief you will be rewarded in the afterlife and if you don't, you will be punished horribly. Actually, the threatening-horrible-punishment theme is a very large part of the the Qur'an. Now, it is true that there is the occasional pleasant-sounding bit, like the one about there being no compulsion in religion, but these are generally quite isolated islets in the sea of numbers 1, 2, and 3. They could be compiled into a little pamphlet of 3 or 4 pages. And if you read closely, it turns out that most of the nice bits can be construed to apply to only other Muslims.