From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2006 April 16-30
Sunday, April 30, 2006 1:11 AM
Saturday Night
to Sunday Morning
Saturday, April 29, 2006 2:00 PM
In Memoriam
Harvard mathematician
George Mackey
The five Log24 entries ending at
7:00 PM on March 14, 2006,
the last day of Mackey's life:
Saturday, April 29, 2006 4:00 AM
Not Harvard Bound
"Some of America’s most promising youth are seeking an even
higher education."
-- Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity
Amen.
Friday, April 28, 2006 12:00 PM
Exercise
Review the concepts of integritas, consonantia,
and claritas in Aquinas:
"For in respect to beauty three things are essential: first of all,
integrity or completeness, since beings deprived of wholeness are on
this score ugly; and [secondly] a certain required design, or patterned
structure; and finally a certain splendor, inasmuch as things are
called beautiful which have a certain 'blaze of being' about them...."
-- Summa Theologiae Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, I, q. 39, a. 8, as
translated by William T. Noon, S.J., in Joyce and Aquinas, Yale
University Press, 1957
Review the following three publications cited in a
note of April 28, 1985 (21 years ago today):
(1) Cameron, P. J.,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
Cambridge University Press, 1976.
(2) Conwell, G. M.,
The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group,
Ann. of Math. 11 (1910) 60-76.
(3) Curtis, R. T.,
A new combinatorial approach to M24,
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 79 (1976)
25-42.
Discuss how the sextet parallelism in (1) illustrates integritas,
how the Conwell correspondence in (2) illustrates consonantia,
and how the Miracle Octad Generator in (3) illustrates claritas.
Friday, April 28, 2006 2:19 AM
Poetry Month, continued
A partial answer:
Yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery evening number was 432.
Poets and others who seek meaning in random numbers may, if they wish,
consult page 432 of The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. They may also, having
studied the Log24 entries of Holy Saturday (April 15, 2006), consult
page 432 of A Flag For Sunrise.
Those who prefer the dictionary method of interpreting random numbers
may consult page 432 of Webster's New World Dictionary, College
Edition of 1960. This page has a special meaning for those aware
that Aslan's
How is "home to the deepest magic Narnia has ever known." (Everything2.com)
Thursday, April 27, 2006 7:08 PM
Excerpt
The Blue Buildings
in the Summer Air
by Wallace Stevens
(Collected Poems, p. 216)
Look
down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.
Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.
It must be where you think it is, in the light
On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.
It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.
It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.
Thursday, April 27, 2006 4:08 PM
Charmed
From today's online
Harvard Crimson:
From an Amazon.com review
of McCafferty's latest book:
"Charmed Thirds
was a HUGE disappointment! The main character I once loved has turned
into someone vulgar and annoying. Far from the intelligent young woman
she was in the first two books, she is now a cliche: a drunken,
promiscuous, directionless bubblehead of a college coed."
See also the previous entry, Charm,
which quotes Thomas Pynchon --
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
-- Gravity's Rainbow
-- and an
entry of April 8
that contains the following
"kind of cross" --
3 PM
Good
Friday
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 3:09 PM
Also in today's Times:
"'Lestat,' the maiden Broadway production of Warner Brothers Theater
Ventures, is the third vampire musical to open in the last few years,
and it seems unlikely to break the solemn curse that has plagued the
genre. Directed by Robert Jess Roth from a book by Linda Woolverton,
the show admittedly has higher aspirations and (marginally) higher
production values than the kitschy 'Dance of the Vampires' (2002) and
the leaden 'Dracula: The Musical' (2004), both major-league flops." --
Ben Brantley
Related material:
See Log24,
St.
Patrick's Day 2004:
"I faced myself that day with
the nonplused apprehension
of someone who has
come across a vampire
and has no crucifix in hand."
-- Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect,"
in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
-- Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity's Rainbow
Inner Truth,
Hexagram 61
See also
Transylvania
Bible School.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 2:00 PM
Plagiarist or Fraud?
The weekly Harvard Independent points out
that Kaavya Viswanathan's recent novel may have been
ghostwritten.
Therefore the ghostwriter, rather than the purported author, may have
committed the original plagiarism. Viswanathan maintains that she
herself wrote the novel, and said that "any phrasing similarities...
were completely unintentional and unconscious." (Harvard
Crimson, April 24) (The use of ghostwriters is not generally
called plagiarism, although one definition says
plagiarism is "passing off someone else's work as your own." This
would of course make all recent U.S. presidents guilty of the crime.)
Related material:
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 7:35 AM
Monday, April 24, 2006 10:00 PM
Monday, April 24, 2006 12:00 PM
From the novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life,
excerpt in USA Today:
"If our incoming student body is capable only of immersing
themselves in book learning, then I'm not doing my job."
-- The Harvard Dean of Admissions
From The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr.,
1918:
Student body. A needless and awkward
expression, meaning no more than the simple word students.
They. A common inaccuracy is the use of
the plural pronoun when the antecedent is a distributive expression
such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man,
which, though implying more than one person, requires the pronoun to be
in the singular. Similar to this, but with even less
justification, is
the use of the plural pronoun with the antecedent anybody, any one,
somebody, some one,
the intention being either to avoid the awkward "he or she," or to
avoid committing oneself to either. Some bashful speakers even
say, "A
friend of mine told me that they, etc."
Related material in today's Harvard Crimson:
Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy.
Also of interest:
This "may be the only chick-lit novel with a subplot that involves
solving a famous math theorem."
-- Marilyn
Bailey, Fort Worth Star-Telegram 4/17/06
Sunday, April 23, 2006 11:07 AM
Hollywood Easter
Part 8
Sweet Little Sixteen
She's got the grown-up blues
Tight dresses and lipstick
She's sportin' high-heel shoes
Oh but tomorrow morning
She'll have to change her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again
-- Chuck Berry, 1958
|
Back in
Sunday School Class:
"Send magazines!"--
Flora Poste in
Cold Comfort Farm
The Student Body
in today's
New York Times:
"... a spate of sex magazines...
emerge on elite campuses...."
"We are all Paris Hilton now."
-- Ana Marie Cox,
Sweet 16 and Spoiled Rotten,
in TIME Magazine,
the April 24 Opus Dei issue
"Or perhaps not."
-- Flora Poste in
Cold Comfort Farm
Revisited
Sunday, April 23, 2006 1:29 AM
Dark Lady
Today is
Shakespeare's birthday.
In his honor, a death
from
April 9:
George C. Minden, 85, Dies;
Led a Cold War of Words.
"Mr.
Minden was president of the International Literary Center, an
organization financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which tried
to win influential friends by giving them reading material unavailable
in their own countries. The material ranged from dictionaries, medical
texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogs and
Parisian fashion magazines."
"Send magazines!"
--
Kate
Beckinsale
as Flora Poste
Saturday, April 22, 2006 2:02 PM
Friday, April 21, 2006 2:02 PM
Department of Defense
(Found in Translation continued,
Lust und Freud continued, and
Here's Donny continued)
"When a person has uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, they may project
these onto other people, assigning the thoughts or feelings that they
need to repress to a convenient alternative target....
Projection is one of Freud's original defense mechanisms."
-- ChangingMinds.org
Thursday, April 20, 2006 11:07 PM
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 11:30 PM
Headline in tonight's
online New York Times:
Here's Donny!
In His Defense,
a Show Is Born
"Tonight
is Karaoke night at one of our local sports bars. This is the evening
when yours truly, your friendly neighborhood pornographer, becomes your
next hope for American Idol success...."
3.
From Log24 on Good Friday:
"Little Red Ridin' Hood,
You sure are lookin' good..."
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 2:00 AM
Piedra y Luz
This morning's New York Times tells of Philip
J. Hyde, wilderness photographer, who died on March 30. The
following, taken from the website Sister Earth, is in his honor.
Cierra los ojos y oye
cantar la luz:
El mediodía anida en tu tímpano
Cierra los ojos y
ábrelos:
No hay nadie ni siquiera tú mismo
Lo que no es piedra es luz
Close your eyes and hear the
song of the light:
Noon takes shelter in your inner ear
Close your eyes and open them:
There is nobody not even yourself
Whatever is not stone is light
(From "Piedra Nativa," by Octavio Paz, quoted in the
Sierra Club book Baja California and the Geography of Hope, by
Joseph Wood Krutch and Eliot Porter.)
Monday, April 17, 2006 2:00 PM
Sub Specie Aeternitatis
"Pynchon's mind is the steel trap
of American literature."
-- Lorrie Moore, from a page linked to
in "Eternal," an entry of April
12
Related material:
Pat the Bunny.
Monday, April 17, 2006 4:30 AM
A Hollywood Easter
Part I:
Good Friday morning
Hollywood turns to divine
inspiration
Updated 4/14/2006 9:55 AM ET
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES -- In God, Hollywood is trusting
it will find big profits.
Inspired by box-office smashes such as The
Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe,
studios are not only casting an eye to more religious-themed stories,
but they're also marketing movies more aggressively than ever to
churchgoers.
Part II:
Good Friday afternoon
Log24, 3 PM Good Friday, 2006.
Part III:
Easter in Hollywood
Latest "Scary" spoof leads box office
Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:02 PM ET
By Dean Goodman
LOS
ANGELES (Reuters) - The joke may be wearing a little thin for critics
but the fourth installment of the "Scary Movie" spoof franchise managed
to open atop the weekend box office in North America with sizable
ticket sales.
According to studio estimates issued on Sunday,
"Scary Movie 4" earned $41.0 million in the three days beginning April
14, setting a new record for the Easter weekend.
Part IV: Now
Blog search for SubSpecies23.
Sunday, April 16, 2006 4:00 PM
Easter Conundrum:
Three Days, Three Nights?
One of Christianity's many internal contradictions is as follows:
Jesus supposedly said he would be in the tomb for "three days and three
nights," yet most Christians accept without question the story that he
died on a Friday afternoon and rose on the following Sunday morning.
I was surprised to find this afternoon that at least one subdivision of
the Jesus cult has found an ingenious way around this difficulty.
The
United Church of God (an offshoot of the sect founded by Herbert W.
Armstrong) argues that Jesus died on a Wednesday afternoon (just before
Passover) and rose on a Saturday afternoon. I do not recommend
any of
the subdivisions of the Jesus cult, but this one has at least managed
to construct an intelligent argument.
For details, see The Good Friday - Easter Sunday Question.
