Wednesday, August 2, 1939

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: An old spite which would yet grow older...

Those who split infinitives to at least partially try to escape conscionable contracts.

Having worked against that sum ourselves, we set this down, too: 1036 days, plus 90 minutes or so.

We thought about that some. Hope you did, too.

If someone were smartin'--to hide their Macheathian activity both from themselves and others, by over-arching the actus with the mens of rationalized mystery, coups you don't see, less'n you turn the Page sidewise, (like us sometimes be, matey), counter clockwise, Coo Co Coo, they might have done this to get there--in response to their mistook impressions from the perceived cutpurse & co.:

Since 1 year = 1,000 years and 1 day = 1/365th of a year (except every U.S. presidential election year, which possess 366, save in the 0 year of each century, except those divisible by 400, such as 2000, the year in question being excepted from this exception, thus not unduly complicating it)--:

Next, pose a "0" (for, so says your scuttlebutt vacuum, having putatively missed the intelligence on the Zeroes) for the slash of Macheath, (that is to say of course a "b" for an "h"), sung and heard "Maggie", Magpie, draw, instead of the skeet, like that you see in Life's Valiant causes turned luce on themselves:

And our unsoothed sot-seer has before eyes now on the little green spiral pad, lid at top: "1/365 = 10365".

Perhaps being not so hot at arith or fogged in memory or both, as aforethought malice usually is, and desiring an outcome commodious to their operands, all unhinged around Lincoln, a blue Lincoln, down the ruder page anyway, they dispose to, instead of this 1/1000th: 10.365; this, 1036.5, thus exhibiting only a Tenth of the scents, forgetting in the bargain, the other 9, not to mention, 13, 14, 15, 16, Commerce, and Supremacy of the clauses, etc. (For, whoever said there was a Sanity Clause in the Bargain? Nevertheless, compact it is.)

Not being particularly given to the memory either, perhaps then our luce one goes on to merely look at the Kalends, desiring that split of infinity, (Ω), to the present, rather than backing to the past, being again cute upon themselves: "He said, 'Move forward, don't stand still and wait.'" (Forgetting Bradford, boy, forgetting Bradford--but too late, got to move as mens of action.)

Thus, with speed, luces eliminate 12 hours, that is from midnight to noon, moreover completely erasing from memory, had they it ever to start, the snowy evening of the frosty woods, both in the new frontier, and in that tear brought on by that old soldier heading down the old dirt road to the farm within sight of the overlook tower--their eyne upon it bleeding by now instead lavender-yellow against the Lark of the meadow, for the teary eyes and quavering lip of the Hawk who nevertheless gave it up in the fateful hour...--Avaunt from here, for the other side of which tower peers toward the Angle, and the field across whence came our fateful lines of the old horseman against them, travelling under the immediate command of the golden-locked after the Longstreet failed to take the little hill from their Warren's good glass.

So, having eliminated this desperate set of hours from the landscape, obliterated instanter, the lit fuses decide to add 90 minutes, or .065, to the equation, perhaps merely for luck, that the next after leap year would bring it to it--what have you, some rash action figuring in the 1/1000^th poetic.

Thus, now on the green pad, our fading minstrel, seeing down the empty dell of rounded time, to which no echo harkened back to the ear lost of memory and arith, hath before the piqued Main afternoon shadows in the smoky candlelight this starry-eyed figure: "1036.565", that is to say, assumed on a midnight dreary, rather than the actual noon swearing by sweven, thus 1:30 p.m., EST, 12:30, CST, one bell, forenoon watch--343 forward of the day downed they anchor aweigh across the Bay from Plymouth, near the spit of Provincetown, the tenth of the Kalends of December, tenth after the Ides of November, even Stephen, days of Julian being counted inclusively--to mark the first turn of the half-hour glass.

In actuality, however, adding back the neglected time, 'twas 1:30 a.m., November 23, 90 minutes after conclusion of second dog watch.

So sorry, well known business man, looks like your suffering fools before your een missed the boat, as always. For, with intelligence in play already before, there were those who saw Quickly once the preemption of tragedy was gainsaid.

Four days short were the four-year cycles obeyed by the pre-Julian Roman calendar.

These, they would seem thus, to have been what were to be the last days, the missing days remitted, of our lives, in the year before the year of Numa--which despite all general efforts to bring it, never has yet been thus far, having already been ages ago.

August rains humid in the dogdays, Sirius.

The instant Cat's Paw on the dog's foot is obvious.

Best now, time to confess it, before it's too late. Bosch awaits those who don't. So, too, doth Poe upon Sullivan's Isle of glass and good fortune, matey.

Cough it up now, double-quick, lest the jaws of Life compel it next; well ere before yesterday then you'll be coughin' the blood of your criminations in your coffin.

Ye best believe it, for there are some who still know that each grave of the subaltern opposition require for it but a hundred head, including your'n unless you cease in your desire to arrest.

1940 Life 7 Oct. 79/1 (caption) They [sc. A. B. Kent and A. H. C. C. Johnson]+are best known for these immortal lines which have even been translated into Yiddish. They are basically a swing version of John Peel: Pepsi-Cola hits the spot! Twelve full ounces, that's a lot, Twice as much for a nickel too--Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you! 1949 N. Streatfeild Painted Garden xiv. 156 He gave her a pepsi-cola.

"...And the ump has called off the game, Peewee. The pitcher has to resign from baseball, banished for life. Well that's the moral to this lesson, sports fans. Never throw a greased popper at the plate while the ump is looking."

Question: Who could've become in 1956, had things gone on as more than mere rumor had it in October, 1955, the youngest elected President ever, the new Alexander? Or, had it so happened, would things have wound up much the same by 1960 four years after an even younger Vice-President had won the stage in re-run victory?

N V can ruin a man's heart--you see. Ultimately, whatever will be will be, with or without human agency attempting interference with the mystery, you see.

Remind us one day to tell you of the Key-Ice ritual and its cross-overs.

/\Well, Look, you've got to know...

9-9.

Nor should it escape notice that C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died the same day, the one of natural causes, the other by deliberate overdose of L.S.D., albeit after three years suffering from throat cancer. Said Huxley at the California Medical School in San Francisco in 1961: "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."

Let us hope not. But first, matey, ye got to give up all those pills and booze, ye dig? That's right, all of 'em, even the ones for the pain...

And don't be forgettin' this one neither ye salty tanger: Edward Teach, Thatch, or Thach, thought to be his Christian name, also known as Blackbeard the Pirate, died the same day in 1718, despite pardon from the Governor, shot five times and had his throat sliced open when caught by Lt. Robert Maynard, Captain of the Pearl, in an inlet in North Carolina.

But that was then, not 1963, ye drunk doper.

Children we were; innocent, we shall stay, despite your machinations to the contrary notwithsztanding.

Three words: Musta'd Plaster. Aluminum. Nay, four, five: Static electricity. That's about it.

875 B.C.; that's where we come out in our math, assuming each of the 1,036.065 days allowed were 2.74 years, or, stated another way, each year of the 2.8383 allowed had been a thousand years. But that was 876-75 B.C., and Time ended there, too, only from the manipulation by human agency. So...

And So The House Put Its Foot Down On Spending

Political analysts may give you another, more complex explanation of it, but to our mind the reason the House voted yesterday not take up the newest spending-lending bill, and also the reason the Senate pruned it so vigorously, is simply that some of the boys have begun to follow the day-by-day reports of the Treasury of the United States.

Hark ye to the Hon. Coffee, a Democrat from Nebraska, who rose in the debate yesterday to declare that

The Hon. Coffee, you see, has taken it in at last that deficits aren't things that happen to you all of a sudden at the end of a fiscal year, but are accumulated as the year goes on. He has finally got onto the essential nature of the New Deal's "investments" and spending for prosperity, and he has discovered that they are merely euphemisms for putting out more than you take in.

Only, the Hon. Coffee is a fiscal year behind. It isn't $10,000,000 a day. That was last time. This fiscal year so far, it has been $16,500,000 a day, Sundays included.

But That Yardstick Still Has A Long Way To Grow

The TVA yardstick seems in process of growing to be an inch or two longer. If, that is, that Congress passes the legislation which the Authority has decided to ask for--legislation to allow it to pay Tennessee $1,225,000 annually in compensation for taxes lost through the sale of private, taxable utilities to non-taxable agencies.

There is something a little quaint in the spectacle of the Federal Government's abolishing sources of tax revenue, and then dishing out the jack to fill up the hole. But it doesn't make the yardstick a little more accurate as a measure of the cost of electric power, for the private utilities must of course count their taxes when they start figuring in costs.

Still, the yardstick remains a good deal short of 36 inches. We have said before that its length was about 27 inches. Maybe this will stretch it to 36. But the fact still remains that out of the $520,600,000 originally estimated as the cost of the project, only $190,000,000 was set down in the creation of power facilities, while $330,600,000 was charged to flood control. Yet army engineers estimated that quite adequate flood control facilities could be built for $74,709,000. And according to Mr. Wendell Willkie, the sum of $330,600,000 came to 250 times the annual loss from floods in the whole Tennessee Basin!

The Croats Prepare to Repeat Slovaks' Folly

It is curious how the little peoples of Central Europe rushed into the embrace of the Nazi constrictor. The Slovaks did it out of blind hatred of the Czechs, and, at present are bitterly rueing their folly. And now it is the Croats. They are going to have all their autonomy demands granted pronto by the Yugoslavian state, they say, or they'll secede. No, they couldn't stand alone, admittedly. There would have to be a protectorate. And that protectorate would be Nazi? They confess as much, and justify it by saying that the Nazis bring "order."

What lies behind this is an old virulent hatred between Croat and Serb. The former probably have some ground for protest against the way the Serbs have dominated the Yugoslavian Government. But essentially the quarrel has much older roots. The two peoples have been politically separated and at each other's throats ever since the seventh century. Yet, racially they are the same and use the same language and customs. The only real differences between them are these: the Croats belong mainly to the Roman Catholic Church, the Serbs to a separate branch of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Serbs use a somewhat different alphabet from that used by the Croats in writing the language.

Nevertheless, the whole heritage of hatred, over matters that are now totally obscure, goes on. Seven centuries ago, it played a large part in betraying these people into the hands of the Turk. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in getting them under the Austro-Hungarian yoke. But they apparently learn nothing from experience.

Uncle Sam Shows Us How To Do Business

Nobody, we take it, hopes any longer to make sense out of the Administration's cotton policies. The old feat of riding a horse off in two different directions is now seen to be no stunt at all to Harassed Henry Wallace's feat of throwing away foreign markets with one hand and buying them back with the other.

Worst mistake ever made by the Administration was its cotton loans. Cotton Ed Smith, we believe, first thought up the scheme, but the Administration went for it whole-hog. The genius of it, you see, was to keep U.S. prices above world prices. But the noxious by-result was to prevent the disposal of crops either at home or abroad. Instead, it all (11,500,000 bales of it) piled up in Federal warehouses.

A nibble was taken at that vast stock last week, however. France and Switzerland agreed to buy 75,000 bales of loan cotton at--U.S. prices? Nope. At cost to the Government? Nope. At world prices? Nope.

--At world prices less what it had cost the Government to carry the cotton, which figures out at about $5 a bale. And that, messires, is the first time in any transaction that carrying charges have been deducted from the net price of goods.

One Big Union Would Be Fine, If Only--

One group of people in the building industry who might reasonably be expected to like Johnny Lewis's one big union for all the labor of that industry is--the contractors. Maybe that sounds a little odd. But in fact, the proposition is rational enough.

As matters stand now, the AFL has each craft organized into separate unions. The carpenters have a union, the bricklayers, the electricians, and so on. What is more, the line of jurisdiction among the unions has never been clearly drawn. Often several unions have claimed the right to organize a given group.

The result has been a mess. One tiny group of workmen have been able to tie up a whole job for months, though most of the union men on it wanted to work. And jurisdictional strikes have gone on interminably. That sort of thing has cost the contractors plenty of money, especially in the areas where the building trades take organization seriously.

So the idea of one union with which they can deal as a whole ought reasonably to appeal to them--or at least to those who accept labor unions as a fact of life, and do not still dream of getting rid of them altogether.

But the fact probably is that it doesn't. One reason is that the CIO has made it quite plain, in the case of the automobile industry, that contracts with it aren't worth anything. And moreover, the evidence all shows that the entry of the CIO into the field doesn't really mean anything except that the building industry is now in for confusion worse confounded--for a great multiplication of jurisdictional strikes.