SmokeSound

This is what an Orange Flash looks like just before it runs into a Royal Canadian Mounty in Blue. Well, OK!, maybe he wasn't exactly a Mounty, and neither was the Orange Streak precisely a blinding flash of pumpkin, but there they are--Carl and Denny--bringing light and levity to what otherwise might erroneously be thought of as a game of inches, grinches, and grinding out. There is a bright yellow baseball out there somewhere, probably doing a kind of jumping bean dance, trying to avoid a long, lonely lob toward first, probably on the bounce. People do peculiar things when muscle mass converts to belly dancing material--buying little convertibles, combing their ear hair over to the other side, showing irresistible charm toward young thangs, and paying keen attention to testosterone commercials--but not Carl.  Carls invested in a pumpkin shirt. It works!  People tend to loose their place in sentences, reverse the logic of their own arguments, and forget to close the...

I will tell you what bugs me, from time-to-time, now and then, sometimes, you know.  It is this: it is the use of the word, evolution, to mean a change of mind.  Not that an idea can change, over time:  just my thinking. I admit, right from the beginning, that language is protean:  it changes shape, and that is a good thing.  A word does not have to mean what it used to mean.  If we insisted on that, we would probably either just grunt at each other, or learn Latin and say the Mass in a language only a few actually understood.  It is a good thing that we invent new words, and use old words to say something new.  On the other hand, if--as Humpty Dumpty said in Alice, Through the Looking Glass:   "When I use a word, it means what I intend it to mean; no more and no less"--then we cannot be sure whether we are communicating, of just reciting sounds to each other.  A language is an agreed-upon, or at least, a mutually useful way of comm...

In spite of years and years of earnest pleading from high school and college teachers that Dante's trilogy, The Divine Comedy, which trio encompasses, The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, was a masterpiece, I could never bring myself to the state of rapture that all of them had for what was certain to happen when I came to my eternal reward, which reward was almost certain not to get past The Inferno. Once upon a dim and distant past, I did read The Inferno which, it seemed to me, to be a recitation of what was going to happen to Dante Alighieri's enemies when they died, beginning with the lightest savagery Dante could imagine, and funneling down, something like fire in a toilet bowl, to where Satan lay, not in fire, because Dante ran out of fire, but (as I recall) in ice. I have very little confidence that I shall spend eternity singing second tenor in a heavenly choir, forever and ever, nor that when I die I shall find myself in high school, young an...