T+59 -- January 4, 2019

Notes From All Over

AGW: wow, if this is AGW -- bring it on. A great day today here in north Texas, and tomorrow's forecast to be 70 degrees; loving every minute of it. Just think, without AGW, it would be 69.75 degrees. 

Syria: This is pretty funny. The tea leaves suggest the mainstream media and leaders around the world agree with Trump's decision to pull the US out of Syria. Even Pocahontas agrees it was the right thing to do. General Mattis is starting to look a bit like a spoiled general officer who did not get his way.

SecDef? An interesting choice is making the rounds.

National emergency: I wonder what judge would rule against a president declaring a national emergency to close the border/build the wall? And if so, how the US Supreme Court would rule? Makes one wonder if a governor can unilaterally declare, on a whim, an emergency and request federal aid?

War Powers Act? I bet there are a dozen White House lawyers studying that act as well as the US Constitution. What if the government says the US is being attacked by organized foreign agencies? It's well known the hordes are being organized and paid. From wiki: it is generally agreed that the commander-in-chief role gives the President power to repel attacks against the United States. What constitutes an "attack"?

Redundant: that's the British term for non-essential personnel working for non-essential bureaucracies. Makes one wonder why they are on the payroll in the first place. So far, we've got trash in some national parks and that's about it. What's the budget for the non-essential bureaucracies?

Best line of the day: after Occasional-Cortex posts video of her dancing, Scott Adams asks when Beto in  a V-neck sweater will share his own dancing video but then, most cleverly, Scott Adams says Elizabeth Warner will risk rain if she dances. If you miss the joke, let me know. 

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Word for the Day

Caparison.

Quick! Without looking it up, guess the definition (unless, of course, you are from Albuquerque and then you already know the answer). 

Caparison Guitars here.

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The Literary Page

Wow, wow wow ... the second of two volumes, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 2: 1956 - 1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, c. 2018, is now available in the local library. Wow. The foreword is by Sylvia's daughter, Frieda Hughes, s/2018.

From the "feel" of the book, I think I am the first to one to have touched this particular book, except, of course, for the librarian and a few others along the supply chain.

The preface, of course, is by the editors, also s/2018.

The introduction is fourteen pages long. The letters themselves take up 969 tightly-printed pages. The index is a full 55 pages in small pitch.

Most precious, perhaps, are the mother-baby pictures of Sylvia and Frieda.

There are two photos which include Ted Hughes. Ted always reminds me of Hugh Hefner for some reason. Hughes seems to have been very, very tall; I doubt Hefner was quite that tall.

Volume 1 in this two-volume set: 1940 - 1956, early days of her marriage.

Volume II: 1956 - 1963. The first letter was written the day after Plath's twenty-fourth birthday, 27 October 1956; the last letter was dated 4 February 1963, a week before Plath's death at the age of 30 ,about seven years of letters, numbering 575, to 108 recipients.

There are sixteen letters written to Ted Hughes shortly before their marriage and honeymoon, while fourteen later letters to her psychiatrist chart the disintegration of that marriage in "harrowing detail," according to the editors.

Later: I've read the introduction, preface, foreword; the chronology, etc. I've read many of the letters, skimmed through the rest. I read, perhaps, the most important of her letters to her psychiatrist when her marriage was dissolving. I continued to read the letters but as I got closer to the end of 1962, I could not read any more. I did not read her last letters; not of her letters in late 1962 or any of her letters in 1963. She died February 11, 1963.

The British winter of 1963 was the coldest on record up to that time.  JFK would be assassinated later that year.