Joseph LeConte, co-founder of the Sierra Club.
You know, various things that catch our eyes will go here. They may, or may not, be related to upcoming debates. Possibly, there will be a bevy of silly video here. But, they are all things that we hope you’ll like because we are quite excited to share them with you.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 Check out NPR’s Fresh Air interviewing a novelist who tries her hand at answering the question of the existence of (a) god(s). A great way to get warmed up for next week’s debate, BIHR: god is a construct of Man!
Thursday, December 10, 2009 Wednesday, December 2, 2009 This article discusses a modified instrument created by Geoff Smith that he calls the ‘fluid piano.’ Smith’s piano allows the musician to shift the notes that he plays to encompass notes found in eastern music.
Here is a video of the instrument and inventor. What do you think about having a fluid piano? Does it have a place in western orchestras? Does its versatility give the instrument higher aesthetic value?
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
No, this isn’t a sequel to The Producers. Just a pinchie about the National Socialist Party. Many people assume that they were Christians, as had been most of the anti-Semites leading up to this time. But in fact, the National Socialists were secular, and Hitler had plans for establishing his own religion.
This made Christmas an interesting feat - check out this blog article on how the National Socialists still celebrated the holiday
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 I give you, fellow literati, a short excerpt of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.
Love,
Sister Faulkner
