Pronunciation wars

An old John Prine song goes "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes." Substitute hole in arm with store for farm and that would be me. Several times a month it seems, I go there, shell out money, and go home with a couple hundred pounds of critter food. Each time it occurs to me that the animals on our farm need to get a damn job...

The Spousal Unit has her own problems with that store and she is engaged in a protracted war with it. It is a war over pronunciation and pronunciation wars, like wars of religion, ask and give no quarter.

She take particular umbrage over their pronunciation of the word "caprine" as in pertaining to goats. They pronounce it capreen like marine rather than caprine like alpine. Although she is trained in anthropology and linguistics, she does not celebrate this as an example of social diversity but rather seems to see it as a grave moral flaw. She does not tire of pointing out that we don't pronounce the word canine as caneen or feline as feleen.

When she asks for a brand of goat food with the word caprine in it, she receives blank stares when pronounced her way and eager assistance when pronounced their way. Each such incident only further provokes her wrath. Her goal seems to be to wear them down like water on a rock until the proper pronunciation is recognized.

This could be yet another long war. And before you misunderestimate it, don't forget that the Hatfield-McCoy feud (in which I may have had a distant cousin on the Hatfield side) is sometimes said to have begun over a dispute about a pig. It's hard to tell where a war over goats could go.

THE NEXT STEP. Proposed bills to address climate change are dead. Here's a look at what may be next.

YOU'VE HEARD OF PEAK OIL. What about peak water?

URGENT FLYING DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Moment to moment

Random picture of a Vermont llama.

El Cabrero has often expressed a fondness for the Stoics, an ancient Greco-Roman school of philosophy the leading exponents of which included a slave, Epictetus, and an emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

This isn't the first time this classic line by Epictetus shows up here, but I think it's worth repeating and committing to memory:

Some things are in our control and others not.

The clear implication is that we would do better to focus on the former rather than the latter. Among other things, doing so might help keep people from feeling overwhelmed and needlessly wasting energy.

Laurence Gonzales, author of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, shares a soft spot for the Stoics and notes that many people who have endured extreme situations took a leaf from their notebook:

They deal with what is within their power from moment to moment, hour to hour, day by day. They leave the rest behind.

HOW LOW WILL IT GO? Here's Krugman on the depth of the recession.

THAT'S WHERE THE MONEY IS. Here's another call for cutting over the top Pentagon spending.

BEATING A DEAD HORSE. A group representing what El Cabrero thinks of as the Taliban/wahabi/jihad version of Christianity is attempting to ignite a culture war in WV, but the so far the results have been underwhelming.

URGENT FLYING DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The flower sermon

The theme at Goat Rope lately is Buddhism, Zen and otherwise, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. The series started Monday and El Cabrero is not sure how long it will last, although I can safely say that it will be impermanent.

The form of Buddhism popularly known as Zen is often traced to a wandering Indian monk named Bodhidharma (from bodhi as in awakening and dharma as in teachings or simply the nature of things) who by tradition arrived at the famous Shaolin Temple in Henan China around the year 520. Zen, whatever else you can say about it (which is both a lot and nothing at all), is kind of based on direct experience and insight.

But legends (and that's all we've got) take the story back nearly 1000 years to the time of the historic Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha. He was said to have once wordlessly held up a flower. Among the multitude who witnessed the event, only one person, Mahakasyapa, smiled and got the point. A direct line of "the transmission of the lamp" was established of which Bodhidharma was the 28th Patriarch, although he is also regarded as the First Patriarch of Chinese Zen or Chan.

The emphasis on direct insight remained a major characteristic of Zen. While its traditional practices included rituals, meditation and scriptures (called sutras), there was always a strong iconoclastic and irreverent streak with in aimed at jolting people out of conventional ruts.

According to tradition, if one asked a Zen master an earnest question, one might be thrown out of a window, smacked on the head, or given a bizarre, non-linear answer. Or he might just put his sandals on his head...

Bodhidharma set the gold standard for strange behaviour. About which more next week.

HOMELESSNESS is on the rise again. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recommends that housing vouchers and other measures should be included in economic recovery legislation.

PULLING OUT THE STOPS. Big business groups are going to spend big bucks to kill the Employee Free Choice Act. Here's hoping they waste their money.

MORE ON THE WV SUPREME JOKE here.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING HOW PTEROSAURS TOOK OFF, click here.

URGENT SHRUNKEN HEAD UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Howling ghosts

It is the official position of Goat Rope that the coolest album of the 1990s was Counting Crows' "August and Everything After." And one of the coolest songs was "Mr. Jones."

One line from that song expresses a wish of mine: "I wanna be Bob Dylan..." Or at least I'd like to be able to use words as well or as wildly as he can. As I heard Arlo Guthrie say in a concert once, Dylan seems to fish for songs upstream from everybody else, which is why he catches so many of them.

Here's a random sample of a Dylan line, from "Visions of Johanna:"

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.

I have no idea what that means but I wish that just once in my life I could come up with a sentence that cool.

ANOTHER CASUALTY of the recession for many Americans may be access to higher education.

STATE OF THE STATES: not good.

MORE PARTING SHOTS FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: easing rules on mountaintop removal mining.

GOING GREEN. The stimulus package being developed for next year includes a green component.

URGENT TOOTHLESS FLYING DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED