by liberal japonicus
A little early, but we have a school party, and I am thinking about this guy this morning:
The Premier League was forced to distance itself from its own chairman after an embarrassing rant in which he accused Fifa and Uefa of "stealing" the game from Britain and told his Middle Eastern hosts they had their "heads in the sand" over proposed alcohol restrictions at the Qatar World Cup in 2022.
Sir Dave Richards, the Premier League chairman and a Football Association vice-chairman, rounded off a damaging day for English football's international reputation by falling into what was variously described as a hotel swimming pool or fountain on his way to dinner.
Talk about your bad days here.
Who F'ing cares?
Posted by: avedis | March 14, 2012 at 10:06 PM
Only those f'ing foreigners. Splitters.
Posted by: Ugh | March 14, 2012 at 10:23 PM
As I write this I'm trying to sort out kernel object sharing for processes launched from the scheduler using credentials other than the currently logged-in user (if any) on windows vista / win 7 / server 2008.
Session 0 isolation is not my friend. Not at the moment, anyway.
Other than that, I'm having a great day.
Posted by: russell | March 14, 2012 at 11:35 PM
I remain unemployed for . . . how many months has it been now? More than two years, anyway. Applied everywhere I could possibly use my skills. Now starting on places where no skills are required. Will lose the house this year unless something changes.
Yeah, I know, me and everyone else.
Posted by: John M. Burt | March 15, 2012 at 12:32 AM
John, that sucks. I was going to write about how I left for work this morning on the new road bike I got last weekend only to get drenched by a thunderstorm, but that seems like pretty small beer right now.
Posted by: Phil | March 15, 2012 at 07:48 AM
I was going to gripe about getting snowed on in March in Washington state, but at least I have a job. I sure hope you get some good luck, John.
Posted by: Laura Koerbeer | March 15, 2012 at 09:47 AM
John,
There outta' be a law that everybody who wants a job gets a job. Best.
Posted by: bobbyp | March 15, 2012 at 08:15 PM
I harp, like Harpo, deconstructing the furniture of every thread to produce my own music.
You can lead a hobby horse (as Ugh wrote over at Taking It Outside referring to various individual quirks of commenters here at the mother ship ;)) to water but can you get him drunk?
Walker Percy.
Bad days are one thing, but what to do about a normal day, say any old Wednesday (today is Friday, but why bring God into it) at 3:00 pm in the afternoon when the existential enormities induce a certain despairing immobility.
When he was a child, Percy's grandfather and father, in fairly quick succession as the crow flies, committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, his mother drove off a country bridge.
Probably all on normal Wednesdays.
Walker, a devotee of science, achieved his medical degree and, while dissecting corpses at Columbia during WWII (he was also undergoing psychoanalysis), contracted tuberculosis.
Off to the sanitarium in upstate New York (the sickness unto health) for a three-year lie down where he read Camus and Kierkagaard, the Catholic writers, the Russian novelists and decided science had little to say about the queerness (in the old sense) of life and those abstracted moments on any old Wednesday afternoon wherein a person could just as well either decide to get up out of the chair in the backyard and mobilize to go inside to bake a pie or walk to the gun cabinet and blow his or her brains out.
In Percy's case of overcoming immobilization, Catholicism, writing, and marriage were ways through the thicket for the pilgrim, while maintaining that one could still need a scientist to diagnose a cancerous kidney duct or plot a landing on Mars to the nearest centimeter.
He had little use for the religious jiggerypokery and its cousin scientism, cast like swine before pearls in our horsesh*t culture.
Then, short version, his essays and the novels, exploring the nature of despair and palpating, like a doctor with a friendly bedside manner, the modern American soul.
Mainly, his novels worry over Camus' fundamental question, which was whether or not to commit suicide.
Percy said once, "I would like to think of starting where Faulkner left off, of starting with a Quentin Compson who didn't commit suicide. Suicide is easy. Quentin Compson alive is something else."
Back to Camus filtered through Percy -- if one decides to live then one is now free. You can do anything and go anywhere.
Now what? Become a wayfarer. Travel both of Frost's paths through the woods or head back to the house and watch ESPN.
Two random mentions. My favorite interview with Percy is the one he conducted with himself to end the posthumously-published book of essays "Signposts In a Strange Land", in which he begins by asking himself "Will you consent to an interview?", to which he answers, "No."
The interview proceeds, probably out of sheer curiosity, but ends when the interviewee, Percy, asks the interviewer, Percy, "Do you understand?", to which the latter replies "No".
Thus, those Wednesdays.
Also, while reading a couple of essays on Percy, I came across this too, as related by his lifelong friend, the Civil War historian Shelby Foote -- Percy visited Germany as a very young man in 1934 and came away "tremendously impressed", an observation which, if you've read Percy, is testimony to the queerness of life.
Came across this, too:
http://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=2604
Obviously, the individual who wrote this last entry has baked a lot of pies, so what the hell.
Honk.
Posted by: Countme-In | March 16, 2012 at 10:19 AM
What a great comment. Thank you.
if one decides to live then one is now free. You can do anything and go anywhere.
Freedom. The paralyzing anxiety of limitless choice.
It's enough to give a body permanent vertigo.
Yeah, I know, me and everyone else.
Here is a wish for better times for you, John M.
Posted by: russell | March 16, 2012 at 02:37 PM