Wit & Whim

I ran harder and farther than I have for quite some time yesterday. As a natural result thereof, I bear more resemblance to a seventy year-old man in my movements than I should like. Be that as it may, I will run tomorrow morning, and as often as I must to ensure that my suits fit forever. I am in desperate need of some totally fluffy light reading. I spend my days on campus with some Tome or other dealing with Pre-Colonial Africa or the Spanish American War, and while much of it is fascinating, there is only so much a body can take. Add to that that I was insane enough using pleasure reading time to read Dalrymple and Sowell, I need something that requires no mental taxation. I am trying to figure out how I am going to do this German presentation. I have ideas as far as exercises and games go, but I am not sure what kind of theme I could incorporate into my topic. I am expressing probability with the future perfect. So: Er wird sicherlich Pizza gegessen haben--He certainly ate Pizza. ...

What willed God? This exclamation comes in response to seeing great beauty, or to hearing good news. It is, of course, high praise. I like the phrase better, however, when it is taken out of the context of fate. While there is obviously an inherent recognition of divine goodness in the original, it is within the larger text of man as the plaything of God--all the moves have been made and the game is over; you are just figuring out how it went. The word الله is a difficult one. While it may be the transliterated Aramaic word for God, it has become deeply associated with Islam in particular. Arabic is a language where references to god are ubiquitous, as might be expected from a culture so thoroughly dominated by religion. The issue is that, when I ask what God has willed, I do so with the same words that others use to attribute a specific work to another entity, who most certainly is not God. There is room for confusion here, and I am not so green to suggest that the only import in my u...

Reading the title alone is enough to raise an eyebrow as our well honed prejudices kick in. For those familiar with Dalrymple's previous work, the squirming is perhaps moderately ameliorated by the knowledge of the depth of his analysis. Yet we cringe, nonetheless. In Praise of Prejudice is a challenge to examine the way we think and how we form our pictures of the world. Dalrymple does a masterful job of bringing the reader to the necessary realization that it is impossible to go through life in the total absence of prejudgements. The very act of automatically tying a concept or idea to a word or set of words--a phenomenon we discussed in pedagogy--is an act of judgement, id est, personal allocation of value. Every time we use the same concept, we are merely instantly accessing a previously made judgement. To be free from all prejudice is to be a helpless infant. To believe that one is free from prejudice after one has developed object permanence is to be a buffoon, or at the very...