You think you had a bad morning….

“The Great Boston Molasses Tragedy, occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

Near Keany Square, at 529 Commercial Street, a huge molasses tank 50 ft (15 m) tall, 90 ft (27 m) in diameter and containing as much as 2,300,000 US gal (8,700,000 L) collapsed. Witnesses stated that as it collapsed, there was a loud rumbling sound like a machine gun as the rivets shot out of the tank, and that the ground shook as if a train were passing by.

The collapse unleashed an immense wave of molasses between 8 and 15 ft (2.5 to 4.5 m) high, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h), and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft² (200 kPa). The molasses wave was of sufficient force to break the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway’s Atlantic Avenue structure and lift a train off the tracks. Nearby, buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet (60 to 90 cm).

Today, the sites of the molasses tank and the North End Paving Company have been turned into a recreational complex, officially named Langone Park, featuring a Little League ballfield, a playground, and bocce courts.“

Oh, Wikipedia, how I love thee. 

More.

I couldn’t have said it better.

I’ve been reading Chesterton recently, an activity that can be absolutely disastrous for anyone who has any pretensions to saying anything, at least according to one view of the situation.  An assessment of and a love of absolutely everything seems to languidly roll off the tongue of that corpulent Christian with the lucidity of a stop sign in the mid-afternoon sun.  I simply don’t know another author so capable of reducing the most convoluted machinations of scientists, philosophers, and maniacs into pockets of dissipating laughing gas while simultaneously aggrandizing a lark or a crumb of Worcestershire cheese to a point that one almost wants to fall down and venerate it.

If I want to tell you that the power of a piece of art is its limits–its frame, or that virtue can yield horror as well as happiness, or that reasonings are without foundation when they lack a faith in reason, Chesterton has swooped in before me.  And if he hasn’t, it won’t be long before I discover that Lewis, Williams, or Hopkins have.

What I want to say is hardly new, and I can hardly hope to say it better than those giants, with their ink-stained hands and feather quill swords, already have.

It may or may not have been Samuel Johnson that declared it useless to write any more heroic couplets since Alexander Pope had perfected them.  In any case, someone did.  The idea is simple: a perfect thing scorns more of its kind.  Once the sonnet is perfected, the sonnet is dead… well, frozen, at least.  Greatness garrotes its imitations.

A Fragment

The following is the beginning to a poem of sorts.  There are quite a few more stanzas to it, and more to follow, but this was the bit I wrote first, so, while perhaps not the best, it’s my favorite section.  The poem might end up being called “Mt. Ida, the Flight”, “Sunder Not”, “The Unity”, or something better that I haven’t thought of yet.  That latter seems likeliest to me.

The Great Reformation

I came to the important and mind-searingly simple realization that in order for this blog to be anything like a success, I would have to allow myself to be much more pithy than I tend to want to be as I’m writing for it. Perhaps the pretentiousness of monikering (I know… it’s not supposed to be a verb. I like it that way.) this site in such a way that every post ought to be a “minor literary work” (Thank you, Merriam-Webster) had gotten into my head a little too deeply. I really felt like in order to put anything up, I would really have to put Something up. Every post, an illumination. Every thought, an invention. This was the space for the minor aristocracy of my mental hierarchy.

But today I decided that my blog needed a little bit of democratization; an egalitarian movement; genuine self-revealing, entertaining pithiness.

So I sat down and thought, “Pithy. Pithy, pithy, pithy. What’s pithy?” and tapped my computer’s keys impotently. It was really rather pathetic.

Anna’s Recital Photos

Anna’s junior recital is coming up, and she asked me to take the pictures for her poster. We ended up in La Mirada park, having more fun with the photo shoot than I could have hoped for. Here are some of the highlights…

Reading Nine Horses by Billy Collins

A Theory of the Mind, Ideas, etc.

This project all started with that modest post back in December entitled “It Occurred to Me…“. Since then, I’ve been on and off obsessed with the fact that I don’t know from whence most of my ideas come. After some brief email correspondence with a couple of friends who were interested in the topic of my post, I formulated the following theory in an attempt to explain the way the mind and the realm of thought generally work. It’s very attractive to me as a theory, and I think I currently hold it or something like it as my opinion on the topic. However, I’ve never heard it suggested by anyone else before, and I don’t take that as a good sign. Then again, I may be saying nothing new and therefore demonstrating my ignorance. It may be nothing but rubbish, but it was certainly fun rubbish to come up with (or come across or be given or whatever). So, whether for entertainment value or for a serious exploration of the way the mind works, I present you with this, my reasonable speculation. Take it for what you will.

Hayden and Melissa Engagement Photos

I had the pleasure of going to a nearby park with the ever wonderful Hayden and Melissa to get some engagement photos taken. Here are two of my favorites…

Stories, the Nature of

This is this post’s second draft. I found my first attempt upon review to be snarky, cynical, and simplistic where I had tried to be witty, and so jettisoned it as primarily feigned material. I’ve boiled the main thoughts down and lopped off the extraneous mockery, leaving me with a list of assertions about the nature of stories that I now present to you bare. Boring, I know, but probably more valuable than the first draft was. Besides, I doubt that I will be able to refrain from opining about them at the end of the list.

[Insert a smooth transition into the list itself here.]

ahem.

– Stories have the interesting characteristic of being both ontologically independent and dependent things simultaneously. Their source, generally speaking, is a single person or group of people, bound by the same cultural and cognitive limitations and biases that any other person or group of people have. Once told or written, however, the story itself becomes accessible to anyone who encounters circumstances that allow interaction with it, whether or not they interact with its author(s). It is therefore entirely independent and entirely dependent upon the storyteller simultaneously.

– An analysis of a story that disregards one of its two natures will necessarily lead to error, as does any inhibition.

Billions: a Confession

The world is bigger than I,

Billions on billions of souls.

Such a cloud and a crowd far outmatch me

If I try setting me against billions.

Thoughts, motives, feelings crowd in me,

Billions on billions of motions,

And I find myself strangely uncrowded

By the billions crowded in billions.