Damn! Fell right into the weasel-apology trap from the sidelights. Let me try again.
I'm sorry that I offended some people here with what was an unnecessary and ill-informed comment.
Let's say you're right, and the social worker was just relaying an opinion on the law. Well, that opinion was incorrect. Nowhere in FL law does it say that hospitals are required to ignore durable power of attorney documents for same sex couples.
Fair enough. Being outside the US and (thankfully) unfamiliar with hospital procedures even here in the UK, I have no idea about the true legal situation. John Chu's comment at #10 was very helpful too. It looks to me now that you are right that the social worker was certainly unjustified and probably malign in not disputing the hospital policy (if such it was).
But I fully agree that even if this were hospital policy or even state law it would be indefensible on multiple grounds, starting with simple humanity.
I'm sorry if I offended anyone with an ill-informed comment.
Linkmeister@5: agreed that the story is horrific, but my reading was that the social worker wasn't the one refusing to let her in, but was just telling her that this was how the laws were in Florida and he couldn't do anything about it. I may have read that wrong, though, and you could reasonably argue that he ought to have stayed and fought for her rights in any case.
As for the video, a great reply when he was asked at the polling station whether he believed in LGBT equality. But Americans may be able to help me here: why was he being asked in the first place? I assume this was just over-enthusiastic canvassing - I hope it wasn't anything more sinister than that.
The first sign of a creeping madness? No, dear friend, rest safe in the assurance that it is not that.
Yeah, in retrospect I guess all the creeping was the first sign of a creeping madness.
[creeps away]
Oh, when I was a Shoggoth
the days were clean and bright,
and far from dark R'lyeh
we'd tango half the night.
But now the stars are turning,
and horrors ride the waves;
and Great Cthulhu's come to town,
and Shoggoths now are slaves.
(dlbowman's wonderful #3 has apparently inspired me to sympathise with Shoggoths. Could this be the first sign of a creeping madness?)
abi@311: Thanks.
I'm glad you like it, because I suspect it tends more towards your account of Hadrian (as in the main post) than mine. I've tended to think of him as a vain, frivolous emperor who liked to prove his aristocratic credentials rather more than he was interested in taking seriously the government of the empire.[*] And for some reason I seem to have decided that this was A Bad Thing.[**]
But having written the poem, I sympathise a bit more with your version. Funny how that happens. I have to teach on Hadrian in a few weeks, and I'll see if I incorporate some of the lessons.
[*] Rather like the young Henry VIII, it occurs to me.
[**] Mainly class prejudice, I suspect.
Anima vagula blandula
The soul of Hadrian yet lingered on
despite the body's final dying sigh:
for years it wandered paths at Tivoli,
before retreating to the Pantheon;
it flitted east to west along the Wall,
and set out to inspect the Rhine again;
it watched the whole of Antoninus' reign,
and tried to warn young Marcus of the Fall.
But all too often, to the Nile it found
itself returning, useless as it knew
its efforts were to bring the dead to life.
"Antinous", it called, and those around
who heard it knew the name it answered to:
an emperor who loved, but not his wife.
Evan@34: So far, though, ripping out the clashing headers and stilted phrasing of the original has scratched my itch.
Yeah, much happier with the rewritten version, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who was pained by the headers.
David Harmon@23: (Even without detailed examination, I have little doubt this crew can improve it!)
Of course, if you really want it to go viral, and want to make use of core ML competencies, it needs to be rewritten as light verse.
(Hides.)
I'm a little bit bothered by the section on myths: the headers for 2 and 3 are myths, but the other headers are all rebuttals.[*] If you do the exercise (which I do automatically) of reading the headers only, it begins to look as though it is either a myth that "vets' healthcare is safe and sound", or else a truth that "we can't afford healthcare". Obviously this is all made clear in the text, but it seems to be asking to be misread.
My feeling is that if you are going to have headers at all, then you should make sure they are all of the same type. I'm not sure I've explained that very well, but the layout just feels slightly clunky to me. Probably there are people here with actual experience in technical writing who can explain or correct me on this.
Sorry that this isn't a comment on the healthcare issue as such.
[*] 8 is somewhere in between, and might possibly have been a better model for the whole thing.
Michael Roberts@35 - thanks!
Bill Greenwell once won an Oldie competition for up-to-date proverbs with:
"You can't put a jack in a SCART socket."
That one has stuck to the point that I have started genuinely using it.
She was cynical and precise, as if butter would not only melt in her mouth but would probably go on to clarify.
(I've been wanting to do something with that for ages.)
French has achever, "to complete"/"to kill".
Either intense cynicism in coining a euphemism for killing, or interesting warning about how important it is to strive and seek and never give up: "he that is not busy being born is busy dying".
Which reminds me of Cicero's announcement concerning the Catilinarian conspirators: Vixerunt = they have lived = they have been executed (on account of the perfect tense connoting a completed action in the past). To kill someone is in a sense to complete their life.
The efficere comment is spot on, I think, as are the comments about "put out". I also vaguely remember a piece of comic writing which pointed out that the English verb "to get" (with various prepositions) could replace every verb in the English language. No doubt someone can remind me or correct me.
Following this here tangent, this was the product of some creative discussion when I was university (and had seen the first line only as graffiti in a faculty bathroom):
A handsome young man of Stoke Poges,
in Venice composed apologias
for those aristocrats
who, though fond of their cats,
were accused of mistreating their Doges.
I'm not aware of any other rhymes for Stoke Poges, although no doubt the denizens of Making Light will now provide me with another 30 or so. And probably another ten limericks, at that.
(This is under no circumstances to be understood as a challenge.)
Tim Walters@105: have you seen the numbers TPM is reporting for Kentucky? 51% McCain to 48% Obama, with 8% reporting. That's no basis for calling the state, but if early results from Kentucky are as close as that...
Actually, I reckon that spam was relevant to the resolution of online disagreements after all:
We will all be on the same page
in another tenner, and then,
we won't have this misconceiving.
One side or the other will win.
I know which side I am doing it for.
Foxy Brown is with me for sure.
This disconnection is temporary:
one side or the other will win.
I'm sad that my intermittent visits here now mean I only post on obituary threads, but I wanted to say something, even if it's all been said very well already. I guess unusually (here, at least) I've only read Disch as a poet and poetry critic, and he seemed to me very good indeed. I don't think much of major/minor poet discussions, but he was (for me) clearly a real poet, and I was almost always convinced of his ability to discriminate in that respect in regard to the work of others. I had a lot of sympathy for his critical positions.
I didn't know about his blog, and reading it now it is difficult to see anything but increasing unhappiness; and it's a shame (although perhaps not surprising) that he made enemies as well as gathering admirers. But all the tributes here have made me want to seek out the rest of his work, and that seems to me the right response.
Damn. As other people have said, it's distressing that he should have found this to be his best option.
Thanks, Patrick, for the link to some of the poetry. Does anyone know which is the most comprehensive (and/or up-to-date) collection of the poetry? I'm guessing it's Yes, Let's.
I got hassled for drawing an escalator in a subway station in San Francisco.
Leigh at #117 is not alone - buried in this article in Saturday's Guardian Review is the observation that the journalist was stopped by a security guard from drawing the footbridge at King's Cross station.
As it happens, the print version of the article was illustrated by a photograph of the bridge.
(Also, see the "I was assualted by this man..." particle, unless everyone has seen it already and thought it too obvious to mention.)
(The gendarmes were young men who were given uniforms and guns, but no salaries; the only income they had was from fees/fines they could levy and bribes. There's a small problem in this plan.)
I see what you are saying here, but perhaps you have the wrong plan in mind. If (say) you have an interest in imposing random (small- or large-scale) terror on a population as cheaply as possible, this seems an excellent plan. It's just that we are tied to our modern expectations of fairness and democracy and legal oversight.
A system of widespread corruption is arguably very efficient at keeping dictators in power. It's largely how the Roman empire worked. The worrying thing for me in Patrick's post is the evidence of what some people will do unbribed.
I was a Poli Sci major in college, and did my senior thesis involved finding problems with polling data.
When I was in college, there were plenty of students running
projects intended to test their ability to gather opinion-poll data,
and I participated in some of them (not neglecting to complain about
badly-phrased questions). The one I still remember ended with the
pollster informing me that I had "a bad attitude to debt", based on my
being generally unwilling to get into it.[*]
Based on that, I figured people who run surveys have generally got
the bad questions out of their system in college. This lasted until the
bookstore survey which asked a question of the form "Do you prefer to
do this or do you prefer to do that?", followed by options for only
"yes" and "no".
I'm glad I don't get phone-polled. I would argue with the pollsters every time.
[*] OK, she may have meant "negative attitude", but she showed no sign of recognising that there was a difference.
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