Log24

Enquiring minds want to know . . .

See Horses in this journal then listen to Reba.

Suggested by the previous post —

“Everybody, here comes the life of the party
Everybody, here comes the life of the party, yeah, she is.”

Songwriters: Ben Hayslip / Rhett Akins / Jason Sellers

See as well Life of the Party  in this  journal.

Synchronologists  may consult posts of March 2015.

* ” This was Language herself , as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding
out of the molten quicksilver  of the first star called Mercury on Earth,
but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.” ―  C.S. Lewis,  That Hideous Strength .

"Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" — Bat Out of Hell  album, Oct. 1977

Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles , 18.5.9.5. e,  p. 1181 :

Pour mettre la joie à son comble, j’ajoute que le dénommé Saavedra
semble avoir disparu de la circulation sans plus laisser aucune trace….
Du coup, l’histoire prend des allures de sombre intrigue policière.

Man of La Mancha :  

"Who knows where madness lies?"

An author quoted here at 10 PM ET Monday, Nov. 24, 2014 :

And then there is author Dan McGirt :

A post from March 28, 2014 —

March 28 was reportedly the date of death for a public figure:

Edwin Kagin, Atheist Who Battled Religion
in Public Sphere, Dies at 73.

Related material — the link Complex Reflection from March 28,
and a post on “The Sunset Limited.”

The “Sunset” post was suggested by the contrast between Kagin’s
views and those in  a book by his son Stephen, a minister.

The title is a reference to a post of a year ago today.

From a page linked to in that post—

"It was a time when American celebrities
still resembled girls and boys next door
and when chart-toppers were manufactured
to appeal to listeners of all ages."

See also a Saturday Evening  Post —

“Let’s give ‘em somethin’ to talk about,
A little mystery to figure out”

– Scarlett Johansson singing on
Saturday Night Live, April 21, 2007

For Reba

"Earl Eugene Scruggs was born on Jan. 6, 1924,
in Flint Hill, near Shelby, N.C.,
to George Elam Scruggs, a farmer and bookkeeper,
and the former Georgia Lula Ruppe,
who played the pump organ in church.
He attended high school in Boiling Springs, N.C."

— Today's online New York Times—

At Heaven’s Gate

Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, RSS at 23:59 EDT:
Peter Woit's weblog Not Even Wrong—

"Lisa Randall’s new book is about to come out, it’s entitled
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking
Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World."

Angels & Demons  (the film)—

As she enters the lab she reacts in horror
as she sees an eyeball lying on the floor…

Click images for some backstory —

Woit on Randall—

"She has taken on the role of a public face of physics,
 and has written a book which is in part a very general defense
 of science and the materialist, rationalist world-view
 that modern science is based on."

See also yesterday's "The Stone" column in The New York Times—

"What Is Naturalism?"

I prefer philosophy enacted by Reba.

* A reference to Dan Brown, not Marianne Williamson

"Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter…."

Related material: Appalachian Spring at Harvard and Reba.com.

"Even before Thales fell into the well, and the ancient Greeks laid the foundation
for Western philosophy, humans were engaged in the search for wisdom…."

— Introducing "The Stone," NY Times, May 16, 2010, quoted here this morning

Some have Wisdom thrust upon them.
Context— Happy Birthday Reba, 2009, and "I'll Follow a Star."

Ross Douthat in The New York Times of July 19—

"The Roots of White Anxiety"—

"…while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or 'Red America.'"

So much the worse for the elite schools.

For a more adult approach to the 2008 ACM Awards,
see "Happy May 18, Reba."

"Democrats– in conclusion– Democrats in America
were put on earth to do one thing— Drag the
ignorant hillbilly half of this country into the next
century, which in their case is the 19th."

— Bill Maher on Friday

Happy Palm Sunday
to Appalachia and
Happy Birthday, Reba

Let me tell you about a place called Lebanon– Lebanon, Virginia.”

— Last night’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention

“The lunatic,   the lover,   and the poet   are of imagination   all compact.”   — Shakespeare For further details, see the sons and daughters of Bluefield, Pikeville, and Asheville.

The headline for Edward Rothstein’s “Connections” column in The New York Times of Monday, March 26, 2007, was “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.”

Continuing yesterday’s lottery meditation, let us examine today’s New York results in the light of Rothstein’s essay.  The literary “ring” structure he describes is not immediately apparent in Friday’s numbers, although the mid-day number, 002– which in the I Ching signifies yin, the feminine, receptive principle– might be interpreted as referring to a ring of sorts.

Illustration from
an entry of
March 2, 2004

For the evening number, 085, see the list of page numbers in last year’s Log24 entry (cited here last night) for today’s date, March 30.  Page 85, in the source cited here a year ago, begins…

“A random selection from Hopkins’s journal shows how the sun acts as a focus….”

See also last night’s picture:

 

 Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas

 

Image of Lewis from Into the Wardrobe

“What on earth   is a concrete   universal?” — Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left.

Update of 4:23 PM:

The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell.  The emphasis is on Heaven.  A mysterious visitor to this website, “United States,” seems to be seeking equal time for Hell.  And so…

Also on Saint Cecilia’s Day
(Release date: 11/22/2005)…

Bright Music
Illustrated



Reba #1’s
Reba McEntire
Album Length Compact Disc

For Reba,
a very bright star,
the symbol of Venus
always shines:

Dedication added on
Oct. 4, 2004, 2:25 PM:

To Richard Avedon, who died
on Oct. 1, 2004.  He said that
 “All photographs are accurate.
None of them is the truth.”

On originality– See
the comments.
_______________________

Originality Prize

A bag of Fritos to John Kerry…

“Kerry contributed most of the night’s fairly original phrases, including the suggestion that invading Iraq in retaliation to Sept. 11 was like Franklin Roosevelt invading Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor.”

— Noel Holston at Newsday.com

Log24.net illustration following Whoopi Goldberg’s “bush” remarks and John Mellencamp’s “bandito” song at a Kerry fundraiser last summer:

Log24.net two years ago on this date:

… y el no estar del todo en una acción
y es el Cantar de los Cantares
y es el amor que te ama

Scoop

This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:

• The Footprints of God, a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
• Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.

At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection.  Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental.  My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.

A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos.  Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito.  Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.

I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is.  Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:

Related Texts

Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):

"Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. 'This'll put some heart into us,' she said. 'We're setting here like three old sick cats.'  They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips.  Then they began to talk.  They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation."

"In Defense of the Brand":

"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."

Song lyric, Reba McEntire:
 

"I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."

Loren Eiseley, 
Notes of an Alchemist:

I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"

* A significant phrase. See

We Are the Key:
The Shining of December 13,
and
Naturalized Epistemology.

Bright Star

From a Spanish-English dictionary:

lucero m. morning or evening star: any bright star….

 Today is Reba McEntire’s birthday.

” ‘I know what it is you last saw,’ she said; ‘for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against the Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!’

      She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its ray glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood. 

      ‘Yes’, she said, divining his thought, ‘it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-Bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.’ “

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Related material on telepathy:

Shining Forth and Naturalized Epistemology

Related material on rings, and another musical Reba:

Leonard Gillman interview, Part I and Part II

Gillman, a pianist, is co-author of Rings of Continuous Functions.