❮❮prevnext❯❯

Kate lives on Fifth Street. For some god-awful reason, "Fifth" was Monticello Middle School's favorite euphemism for the F-word, circa 1988 or so. Saying you saw some classmates mom "on Fifty-Fifth Street" was the height of merriment, implying she was a streetwalker. (in retrospect there may have been some racist overtones in that, some of Cleveland's tougher neighborhoods fell around that area, given Cleveland's numeric street naming scheme.)

At some point our instrumental music directory Ms. Beale (great, great teacher. Her raging against DRGC, the dirty rotten gum chewers, remains in my mind to this day.) showed us the perfectly legitimate music theory conceptualization tool The Circle of Fifths, and we thought it was hilarious.

---

Quote Fest of the Moment
Three quotes from John Ruskin:

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

The first quote I saw in the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The other two I found while Googling. I think the final one overstates the case. I think it caught my eye because the first sentence seems to be in praise of my "humanist spiritual mission" of sharing and recording interesting thoughts on this website, but then I realized I don't feel quite the grandeur he goes on to describe.

---

Lateral Thinking of the Moment

--I think I counted about 13 laterals in this ESPN video of Trinity (TX) scoring a touchdown. It looked more like a playground game.