"The anti [Obergefell] forces will get Thomas and probably Alito. Roberts was strongly against at the time but..."

"...has been careful to treat it as legitimate precedent since. Gorsuch usually sides with religious litigants but also wrote Bostock, the most important gay rights decision in years, and Roberts raised eyebrows by joining him. Most people who know Barrett and Kavanaugh believe them to have zero appetite for reopening this issue. Trump isn't pushing for it. Granting cert takes four votes, overturning a case five. I don't see [Kim] Davis getting up even to three on the question of whether to overturn Obergefell. Each time I write a version of this prediction I get called rude names, as if I were consciously misleading people for some fell purpose. But as someone with real rights of my own at stake, I'm just trying to give you my honest reading. We'll probably know within three months whether the Court will hear Davis's case and if so on what question presented. Save your anger till then."

Walter Olson, quoted by Ilya Somin, in "Why the Supreme Court is Highly Unlikely to Overturn Obergefell in the Kim Davis Case/My Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson explains" (Reason).

Should we "save [our] anger" if we don't want Obergefell overruled? Even if that's unlikely, now might be a good time to demonstrate how much it would hurt, before things escalate.

Meanwhile, I'm interested in Olson's dipping into the archaic to write "I get called rude names, as if I were consciously misleading people for some fell purpose." Fell! Why not "evil" or "nefarious"?

One answer is that he was influenced by the last syllable of "Obergefell." I don't think one would do that consciously. 

I'd guess Olson felt motivated to sound deeply literary. Some historical examples of the adjectival "fell" from the OED):

1747 I will risque all consequences, said the fell wretch. S. Richardson, Clarissa

1812 And earth from fellest foemen purge. Lord Byron, Childe Harold

1813 His fell design. W. Scott, Rokeby

1847 Even the fell Furies are appeased. R. W. Emerson, Poems

"That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss."

Said the NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker on yesterday's episode of "The Daily." Context:

[Biden is] saying, in essence, you can't have this debate anymore because this debate, it undermines my chances exactly, and therefore I want you to shut up. This question is over. Knock it off move on. And I think he's daring them. He's daring his doubters and naysayers to come after him or to shut up. You want to take me on? Take me on. Right? That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss. So all eyes right now are on Congressional Democrats to see where they fall this week. Do the floodgates open and they end up abandoning him in large numbers or do they decide to give up on that notion?

First, the "old saying" is in fact a famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." I wrote about it back in 2019:

Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh, but I must be entitled to have another go at it.

Because there's a new New Yorker article : "The Case Against Travel." 

The new article — subtitled — "It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best" — is by the philosopher Agnes Callard.

A few of my old efforts: 

• "What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?" 

• "'Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us...'" 

• "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?'" 

• "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..." 

• "'I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters...'" 

• "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

I'll take a few excerpts from Callard, and certainly some of this is new (and all of it is well expressed):

"Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe—both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism..."

"... today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own. This new movement should prioritize humans above machines and reimagine human relationships with nature and with technology, while still advancing what this technology can do at its best. Artificial intelligence will, unquestionably, help us make miraculous, lifesaving discoveries. The danger lies in outsourcing our humanity to this technology without discipline, especially as it eclipses us in apperception. We need a human renaissance in the age of intelligent machines.... Today’s elementary-school children... deserve a modern technological and informational environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy, and the respectful exchange of ideas.... No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon...."

Writes Adrienne LaFrance, in "IN DEFENSE OF HUMANITY/We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence" (The Atlantic).

Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?

Was Louisa May Alcott a trans man?

Peyton Thomas — host of "Jo’s Boys: A Little Women Podcast" — looks at the evidence in a NYT op-ed.

Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And: 

"Things were bad financially then, but now it's really under water."

Writes a commenter at WaPo, reacting to "Hong Kong’s landmark Jumbo floating restaurant sinks at sea": "Even before the pandemic, the restaurant, which served Cantonese fare, was accumulating debt. But Hong Kong’s early move to ban tourists hit Jumbo Kingdom and other attractions hard."

ADDED: I was curious about the origin of the term "under water" (or "underwater") to refer to negative equity, and I surprised to see that the earliest example in the OED is from Madison, Wisconsin's own Capital Times (and as recent at 1975):

Every foreclosure of an underwater real estate mortgage..is greeted with cheers. Evidence that the economy is doing less to help itself is taken as a guarantee that the Fed will do more.

I couldn't find an explanation of why this figurative use became standard, but perhaps water metaphors are common in discussions of money. We speak of sinking or staying afloat. There's "liquidity."

Is "solvent" a water image? I see that "solvent," meaning "Able to pay all one's debts or liabilities," goes back to the 1600s:

1653 H. Cogan tr. F. M. Pinto Voy. & Adventures lxxviii. 315 Certain Chineses, who were not men solvent, but became bankrupts.
1664 Addit. to Life Mede in Mede Wks. (1672) p. xxxvi Mr. Mede began..to refuse.., and objected, How shall I be able to be solvent in convenient time?

"Solvent" is the present participle of the Latin word "solvĕre," which means to explain or clear up or answer. But "solvent" has also meant "Dissolving; causing solution" or a substance that turns other substances to liquid. This is the same entry, so it's the same word.

Interestingly, "solvent" itself has a figurative use. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Silence is a solvent that destroys personality" (1841).

AND: Here's Emerson's essay, "Intellect":

"The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy."

"It is nature's joke.... Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask whence it is. It takes the laws of the world, whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws, that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth, and death. There revolve to give bound and period to his being, on all sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which impose new restraints on the young inhabitant. We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which blows around us, and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word, — these eat up the hours."

From "Prudence" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, stumbled across this morning after Emerson and comedy happened to pop up in one post, the previous post. It was just a haphazard sequence, not any connection between Emerson and comedy. So I went looking, on the theory that there was none. 

"I thought Robin hated me. He had a habit of making a ton of jokes on set. At 18, I found that incredibly irritating."

"He wouldn’t stop and I wouldn’t laugh at anything he did.... There was this scene in the film ['Dead Poets Society'] when he makes me spontaneously make up a poem in front of the class. He made this joke at the end of it, saying that he found me intimidating. I thought it was a joke. As I get older, I realize there is something intimidating about young people’s earnestness, their intensity. It is intimidating – to be the person they think you are. Robin was that for me."

Said Ethan Hawke, quoted in "Ethan Hawke on Richard Linklater Transcendentalism Project, Politicization of Pandemic in U.S." (Variety). Robin = Robin Williams. 

I clicked on that because I was interested in Richard Linklater's "transcendentalism project." It seems that Linklater is writing a screenplay about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their friends. As Hawke puts it: "They were the first leaders of the abolition movement; they were vegetarians; they fought for women’s rights. Rick is obsessed with how their ideas are still very radical. This could be a super cool movie and Rick is writing it right now." But Variety adds that Linklater "has been working on a movie about Transcendentalism since 1999, according to an interview in The New Yorker in 2014."

From the New Yorker article:

"In the words of the popular American yoga teacher Shiva Rea, namaste is 'the consummate Indian greeting,' a 'sacred hello' that means 'I bow to the divinity within you from the divinity within me.'"

"Deepak Chopra... says namaste means 'the spirit in me honors the spirit in you' and 'the divine in me honors the divine in you.'... When you bow to another, you are honoring something sacred in them. You are acknowledging that they are worthy of respect and dignity.... Some claim that the greeting has been infused with a religious meaning that doesn’t exist in Indian culture....  Most Indian religions agree that there is something divine in all individuals.... Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, the influential philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, in dialogue with a number of other thinkers, invented a form of spiritual practice that encouraged Americans to actively address the divine soul in others every time they spoke.... One need not be a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a yoga teacher, to say namaste.... What matters most [is]... Do you truly recognize them as a fellow human being worthy of dignity, bonded in shared suffering and capacity for transcendence?"

From "Why 'namaste' is the perfect greeting during the pandemic/An ancient Indian contactless 'hello' is replacing the handshake. It's not just safer but it affirms our inter-connectedness with one another" by Jeremy David Engels (The World).

I thought the recommendation was going to hinge on the social distancing of bowing as opposed to a handshake or a hug, but it was about spiritual connection. That took me by surprise, and of course, I am delighted that it fits the "divinity" theme established on the blog (and the podcast) today.

Why did "toxic" and "viral" replace "poisonous" and "contagious"?

Ngram reveals a language mystery:







Possible answers:

1. "Toxic" and "viral" are shorter, more exciting words than "poisonous" and "contagious." Something dull about the "-ous" ending."

2. The metaphorical usage is running up the numbers for "toxic" and "viral" — as, for example, people speak of things going "viral" in social media and call personal character traits — like masculinity — "toxic." You could say "My tweet was contagious" and "Your political opinions are poisonous," but we don't. Perhaps because "poisonous" and "contagious" feel more literal — connected to poison and contagion. That doesn't need to be. Shakespeare wrote: "You might condemn us/As poisonous of your honour." Emerson wrote: "All vigour is contagious, and when we see creation we also begin to create." But somehow it is. That doesn't explain why.

"New York Times columnist accused of eugenics over piece on Jewish intelligence/Bret Stephens faces backlash after suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people."

Yikes, the heat on Bret Stephens has zoomed up since I blogged about his genius-of-Jews column at 5 a.m. yesterday morning.

The Guardian says:

The rightwing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens...

Eh. I don't think the right wing deserves responsibility for whatever it is Bret Stephens is.

... has sparked furious controversy online for a column praising Ashkenazi Jews for their scientific accomplishments, which critics say amounts to embracing eugenics.

In a column titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius and using a picture of Albert Einstein, Stephens stepped in the eugenics minefield by claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other people and think differently.... [There were] furious accusations that Stephens was using the same genetics arguments that informed Nazism and white supremacist thinking.

The Guardian is simply collecting tweets. An editorial director at Vice says, "It’s hard to read this column as expressing anything other than a belief in the genetic and cultural inferiority of non-Ashkenazi Jews"; a NYT contributor says, "I don’t think eugenicists should be op-ed columnists"; a "journalist" says, "A Jew endorsing the idea that certain races are inherently superior to other, lesser races, what could possibly go wrong?"; a writer called it "eugenics propaganda" and urged subscribers to cancel.

This is what you get on Twitter: hot takes. There, Stephens is a eugenicist. I do see this mild-mannered correction:

"For Marianne Williamson and Donald Trump, religion is all about themselves/The conviction that you can shape the world with your mind is an American tradition."

By Tara Isabella Burton (in WaPo). This is a fantastic article, full of detail and useful connections spanning American history. Excerpt:

But Williamson has more in common with President Trump than she — and indeed many voters — might admit, and it’s not just that both have used personal celebrity as a springboard into politics. At their core, both are also prime representatives of one of the most important and formative spiritual trends in American life: the notion that we can transform our material circumstances through faith in our personal willpower. Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and Williamson’s woo-inflected belief in the power of “self-actualization” both come from the quintessentially American conviction that the quickest and surest route to Ultimate Reality can be found within ourselves....

Trump... has spoken openly about his family’s long and close relationship with Norman Vincent Peale, a 20th-century writer well-known for his best-selling 1952 book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” While Peale was formally a Christian — he was the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York for more than 50 years — his writings were suffused with the idea that you can transmute and augment yourself through sheer mental exertion. “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” he wrote. “Never permit it to fade.” By thinking it, his readers would make it true....

Waves of what you might call “intuitional religion” have been washing across the American religious landscape since the First Great Awakening of the 18th century... New Thought, which flourished in the mid-1800s, was heavily shaped by the Transcendentalist philosophers of the previous generation, writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that the human self was the closest thing we have to a reflection of the divine. For these thinkers, organized religion — indeed, every mainstream institution — inhibited people from trusting their divinely sanctioned intuition, which they saw as the most direct path to truth....

"What’s done is done," "What will be will be" — these "tautophrases" "preserve and burnish the established order."

"When God informs Moses, 'I am that I am,' he is telling the prophet, 'Look, get off my back, I’m God.'... 'Boys will be boys' and 'A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do' excuse mischief and usually worse, reinforcing the dominant masculine code....  'You do you is the ultimate self-­referential slogan for the ultimate self-­referential presidency,' [a Wall Street Journal writer 'fumed.'] 'It’s the Be yourself piety of our age turned into a political license by Mr. Obama to do as he pleases.' According to The Journal, Obama’s millennial affectations and his age-­inappropriate preening provide context for the rise of ISIS, our crummy foreign policy, immigration amnesty’s wrong turn. 'You do you,' taken to its extreme, provides justification for every global bad actor.... Might as well do you. Perform the impersonation of your best self. Maybe you’ll get it right this time."

From a 2015 column in the NYT "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture" by Colson Whitehead. I'm reading this because I've been studying the phrase "You do you," and I am only just now noticing that he's the author of a novel I happened to write about yesterday, "Underground Railroad."

ADDED: At English Language and Usage, back in 2015, they discussed that NYT column, and somebody wrote:

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, famously.

I think Emerson was talking to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Holmes was attacking Plato, hence the riposte. The physical attack was metaphorical. Holmes and Emerson were jousting in the world of words, and Emerson got off a bon mot for the ages.

I'm talking about that this morning because James Woods got kicked off Twitter:

James Woods, one of the few conservative stars in Hollywood, has been locked out of his Twitter account for over a week now for “abusive behavior,” once again demonstrating the double standard the tech giant holds when it comes to enforcing rules.

Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll,” according to his girlfriend Sara Miller....

The tweet was apparently in reference to the Mueller report, which found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson and has been used in various forms in movies and TV shows like The Wire....

"You best not miss" is the form of words used on "The Wire" (video here), and on "The Wire" the physical attack is not metaphorical, but with a real gun with bullets. But Woods was using the physical attack metaphorically. The idea — which deserves to be expressed — is — I think — that there was a coup attempt on Trump and it didn't work, therefore those who attempted it are in desperate trouble.

This isn't a true threat, just rough political discourse. It's not much like Emerson, because Emerson was speaking in a context where it was clear that only ideas were at stake. Holmes couldn't physically threaten the long-dead Plato. I think it's also clear that Woods was talking about political power and legal troubles, though the legal troubles are bad enough that they could lead to a physical impact on a human being — that is, a prison term. But there is a problem with Twitter's clipped language and vast dissemination. Among the thousands or millions of readers of a post like "If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll" are confused, paranoid, angry people who might hear a message to go out and kill somebody.

I'm checking the #HangThemAll at Twitter, and I see this:

James woods was banned for saying #HangThemAll about treasonous leaders on the left and was banned from Twitter, but @kathygriffin isn't banned for this: pic.twitter.com/tT1x4eeVnJ

— The JP McGlone (@JPMcGlone) May 4, 2019

Yes, and that's the problem. Twitter needs to apply its standard from a neutral viewpoint.

The ceremony — as Naruhito accedes to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Today, in Japan:



"I swear that I will reflect deeply on the course followed by his majesty, the emperor emeritus, and bear in mind the path trodden by past emperors, and will devote myself to self-improvement."

I'd like to know more about the devotion to "self-improvement." What is the Japanese word and what is the significance of the concept in Japanese culture? The "self-improvement" of the new leader is not an idea that has any prominence when an American takes a political office. Imagine a candidate for President offering to devote himself to self-improvement. Self-improvement? That sounds like an indulgence, a lack of interest in meeting responsibilities. I won't lamely speculate on the possible lack of actual work for the Japanese emperor. I'm going to assume there's a very interesting and government-related concept here that is puzzlingly represented by the English term "self-improvement."

From the Wikipedia article on the Chrysanthemum Throne:

Japan is the oldest continuing hereditary monarchy in the world. In much the same sense as the British Crown, the Chrysanthemum Throne is an abstract metonymic concept that represents the monarch and the legal authority for the existence of the government....

And an image of the literal throne:



Here's the Wikipedia article on "Self-help or self-improvement." From the "History" subsection:

"A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape."

Wrote Wendell Berry, quoted by Etienne in last night's "Winter Road Café," after Bunk said "Hey, this photo..."



"... appears to be a bike path, not a road."

I love the Berry quote, and thanks to Etienne for bringing it to us. It perfectly explains why I, using that photograph and needing a title for the "café," could not bring myself to use the word "path," even though I knew for sure — what you were left guessing* — that it is the thing most people call a "bike path."**

___________________

* Danno observed that if it's not a bike path, it's got "a very wide stripe!"

** Actually, around here, the official term for a thing like that is "bike trail." So you may want to discuss the path/trail distinction or bring out evocative poetic quotes with "trail." There must be many, "trail" being an even more powerful word in the legend of America. The Chisholm Trail, the Appalachian Trail, etc. And yet "trail" refers to dragging something along behind you. The oldest meaning is the trail of a long robe. On the landscape, then, the "trail" is what those who've gone before have left behind. And "trail" has only meant "path" since the early 1800s. "Path" has referred to "A way or track formed by the continued treading of pedestrians or animals" for as long as we can find a language called English — the period the OED calls "early OE" (600-950). That's profound. And — here's where I change my mind and decide that "path" is more powerful than "trail" — the word "pathfinder" has special resonance (from the OED):

1840 J. F. Cooper (title) The pathfinder.
1860 W. Whitman Leaves of Grass (new ed.) 425 The path-finder, penetrating inland, weary and long....
1847 R. W. Emerson Poems 169 Sharpest-sighted god.., Path-finder, road-builder, Mediator, royal giver.
1898 W. James Coll. Ess. & Rev. (1920) 408 Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express.

4 great American names, clustered in the great English Dictionary.

There is no word "trailfinder," though there is — we must give "trail" its due — "trail-blazer." But "trail-blazer" only arrives on the scene in the 20th century, and its earilest recorded usage cannot compare to the quadrumvirate of James Fennimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James:

1908 Daily Chron. 19 May 3/2 Mrs. Hubbard's journey..with a small party of ‘trail blazers’ native to the ways of Labrador....
1957 V. Packard Hidden Persuaders xxi. 233 Tide, the merchandisers' journal, admonished America's merchandisers to pay attention to this trail-blazing development as it might be ‘tomorrow's marketing target.’

The "trail-blazing development" was a planned suburban community in Miramar, Florida:

What does it mean to buy a "packaged" home in a "packaged" community? For many (but apparently not all) of the Miramar families it means they simply had to bring their suitcases, nothing more. No fuss with moving vans, or shopping for food, or waiting for your new neighbors to make friendly overtures. The homes are completely furnished, even down to linens, china, silver, and a refrigerator full of food. And you pay for it all, even the refrigerator full of food, on the installment plan.

"One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases."

That's Barack Obama, sounding like he's been reading Scott Adams's book.*

Obama was getting interviewed by Prince Harry... so it was When Harry Met Barack.

Obama bounced from his observation that we live in "entirely different realities" to groping for a solution. He got as far as articulating "the question":

“The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn’t lead to a Balkanization of society and allows ways of finding common ground.”

Harness this technology? Is that a euphemism for censorship?

Diversity without Balkanization, common ground with multiplicity... It's much easier to articulate that abstraction than to do anything to get there. I myself like the middle ground, but I think few people do. Most people go to one side or the other, and I think that's basically how human society works. There's a tendency toward dualism.
_______________________

* One of the main ideas in Scott Adams's book "Win Bigly" is "Two Movies on One Screen... the phenomenon in which observers can see the same information and interpret it as supporting two entirely different stories." For example:

When the presidential election of 2016 was over, reality split into two movies. Trump supporters believed that they had elected a competent populist to “drain the swamp” and make America great again. Their preferred media sources agreed. But anti-Trumpers had been force-fed, by both the mainstream media and Clinton’s campaign, a fire hose of persuasion that said Trump was the next Hitler. In effect, the Trump supporters and the anti-Trumpers woke up in different movies. One movie is a disaster movie and the other is an inspirational story.

The fascinating thing about this situation is each of us can operate in the world and do the things we need to do to survive. You and I can both go shopping, both drive cars, both have jobs and friends. Living in completely different realities is our normal way of living....

ADDED: I'm using the word "dualism" not in sense of mind and body, but simply "The condition or state of being dual or consisting of two parts; twofold division; duality." That's the OED, which points me to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote:

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

"Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us, either, but as a goal around which to build the other elements of one’s life."

"Don’t have children, the thinking goes, because they’ll hinder your ability to travel. Work for yourself and create passive income, so you can jaunt off to exotic locales whenever you want. In a relatively safe and prosperous time, in a society that lacks many built-in challenges and hardships, travel has become the way to have an adventure, to demonstrate a kind of bravery — a cosmopolitan courage where one ventures into unfamiliar territory and undergoes a rite of passage to become an enlightened global citizen. Travel is thus seen as both a tool of personal development and an almost altruistic moral good. In short, as the old religious sources of guidance and identity have fallen away, a kind of 'cult of travel' has developed in their place."

From "Against the Cult of Travel, or What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Hobbit," by Brett and Kate McKay.  Much more at the link, including this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Harridan or catastrophe?

If there is to be a Word of the Day this morning on the blog, it will be either "harridan" — "Carly makes it harder for Hillary to claim she must be flat and bland lest people see her as a screeching harridan" — or "catastrophe" — "It just irritates the heck out of me.  Unknown catastrophe. We know that an unknown catastrophe some years ago brought about by climate change destroyed all the water on Mars."



UPDATE: "Harridan" wins, as I guessed it would, since people are attracted to women, even "a decayed strumpet," as Samuel Johnson defined the word in his famous dictionary. I'm flattered that you chose it, not because I am a decayed strumpet, but because I came up with the word myself, and "catastrophe" was a quoted word (from Rush Limbaugh, who was himself quoting someone, a NASA scientist).

The OED defines "harridan" as "A haggard old woman; a vixen; ‘a decayed strumpet’ (Johnson): usually a term of vituperation." The OED's historical quotes include:

a1745 Swift Misc. Poems (1807) 57 The nymphs with whom you first began, Are each become a harridan.
1860 R. W. Emerson Considerations in Conduct of Life (London ed.) 241 This identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in one house, and a harridan in the other.

The Emerson is the one that seems to need more context. Who was this woman? And yet the Swift poem is so wonderful — rhyming "blab it" with "habit" —  I want to copy it here:

Copy of the Birth-Day Verses on Mr. Ford

COME, be content, since out it must,
For Stella has betray'd her trust;
And, whispering, charged me not to say
That Mr. Ford was born to-day;
Or, if at last I needs must blab it,
According to my usual habit,

A 10-point list of Easter news.

1. "An Easter Bunny character first hopped up in the 8th century with the English monk Bede's The Reckoning of Time..."

A little girl found a bird that was close to death and prayed to Eostra [the Germanic goddess of spring and fertility] for help. Eostra appeared, crossing a rainbow bridge — the snow melting before her feet. Seeing the bird was badly wounded, she turned it into a hare, and told the little girl that from now on, the hare would come back once a year bearing rainbow colored eggs.

2. In Norway, "Each year, nearly every TV and radio channel produce a crime series for Easter. The milk company prints crime stories on their cartons. In order to cash in on this national pastime, publishers churn out series of books known as 'Easter-Thrillers' or 'Påskekrim.'"

3. The Archbishop of York said: "God is creator of the Cosmos and that includes the Palace of Westminster and the White House. There are followers of Jesus Christ in all the main political parties in the UK. It is not for me to tell their fellow church members how to vote next month, but I will encourage them to use their vote."

4. Police in Tahlequah City, Okahoma nabbed a stuffed rabbit carrying $30,000 of meth: "We’ve intercepted narcotics in the mail before... The Easter Bunny I thought was a strange touch."

5. "When Obama spotted 5-year-old Donovan Frazier distraught after losing his egg roll in 2013, the president gave him a hug and advised him to 'shake it off.'"

6. Pope Francis said: Easter is "so beautiful, and so ugly because of the rain."

He had just celebrated Mass in rain-whipped St. Peter's Square for tens of thousands of people, who huddled under umbrellas or braved the downpour in thin, plastic rain-slickers.

7. In 1926, Time Magazine considered the proposal to fix the date of the moveable feast that is Easter. Was Easter not more about commerce than religion?

People have stepped from decorating their altars to decking their bodies, until the Easter Sunday “parade” of fashionables and fops gets more notice in the lay press than does the sanctity of the holiday. This display of clothes and flowers and jewels and carriages, wily merchandisers have gloated over. None the less they have peered with squinted eye at the fluctuating date of the festival, even as they touted a robe as “hot from N’ York, lady,” or “new from Paris, madame.”

8. "Do You Really Need Jesus for Easter?" asks Steve Neumann at The Atheist's Life at The Daily Beast.

[T]here simply is no supernatural realm for a God to occupy. Nature is all there is.

America's native philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson... wrote “Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him.” Achieving that isn’t easy—if those impressions were too feeble 175 years ago, they’re almost undetectable now that we’re surrounded by a shell of concrete and steel, covered by a blanket of wireless radio waves....

“Time and nature yield us many gifts,” continued Emerson, “but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.”

9. David D. Ireland of Christ Church in northern New Jersey indulges in the kind of golf meditation that used to drive me crazy when I went to church in northern New Jersey half a century ago:

Easter is God’s mulligan to humanity. In golf, a mulligan is a stroke that is replayed from the spot of the prior stroke without any penalty. Your error has been forgiven. You may take the shot again. This Easter make a commitment to meet Jesus for the first time … again. Easter reminds you to keep trying to live the God-kind of life.

10. "For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."