I Haven't the Words, So I'll Borrow Someone Elses

Ever since I read the post at Cathy's World that her condition was grave, I have wanted to write something, yet finding the right words was impossible. As each update, and each tribute poured in from around the Internet, I felt inadequate to the task of adding my own small voice to this litany.

I didn't know her, but she was as profound a presence as possible for someone who I haven't met.

I don't know her daughter, yet my concern for her well being and future happiness is deep and sincere.

I don't know any of her friends personally, but I share their grief.

So, rather than stumbling through more bad prose, I'll let a few of the greats speak for me . . .

John Donne

Holy Sonnets, X

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.


W.B. Yeats

SWIFT'S EPITAPH

SWIFT has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

What Yeats said about Swift, can easily be applied to Cathy Seipp, she served human liberty, with soul and wit, no higher praise can be bestowed on a person.

I Remember Seeing That Movie Opening Weekend, and the Audience Back Then Also Found It Comic

The U.S. really is a different and better place now, at least as far as crime is concerned, than it was 15 or 20 years ago. I rented "Falling Down" for Maia a few weeks ago, just so she could get a little of the sense of dread we all lived with in the '80s and '90s and don't anymore. But she thought it was a comedy.

Referencing the above, from Cathy Seipp's most recent post, I can't imagine reading Falling Down as anything but a darkly comic revenge fantasy. It was absurd, then, it's even more so now. That picture was back when Joel Schumacher made good bad movies, rather than the awful bad movies he now makes.

I found it to be the typical Hollywood liberal interpretation of their conception of what kind of seething rage sits in the heart of all white men. I don't think they expected the Michael Douglas character to be received as sympatheticaly as he was.

Hollywood does that from time to time, I'm sure they thought they were making Patton to be a repulsive nearly fascist thug, whereas most Americans just saw a great American.

Alec Baldwin has made his career lately out of playing politically incorrect heavies, and/or comic foils.

Funny how lefty actors always seem to play these kind of roles.

Back to Cathy glad to see her latest post, sorry to hear of her travails, but I expect to see her recovered and posting up a storm in due time (and till she's feeling better, sporadic posting is understandable).

The Post Wherein I Steal From Rich Hall . . .

. . . The world needs more Rich Hall.

The reason this thought came to mind was cause I was thinking of a possible situation that requires the invention of a sniglet.

The initial thought came while reading this Slate article, and was later reinforced by this recent Cathy Seipp post.

What relates these two articles?

Both have a moment where you are reading along and the writer makes an assumption or assertion of fact that you know is blatantly, horrendously, unequivocally false, and yet the "journalist" writing for some major outlet doesn't realize how wrong they are.

Is it the cocoon? Poor editing? Laziness? There Are few journalists left, only hacks?

Back to that Slate article, there's this sentence that brought my reading of the article to a complete halt, "And the outdated-but-fun NES was displaced not by the slightly improved Super NES but by the original PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. Unless you're a hard-core gamer, not every generation has a must-buy console. Sometimes, they're all losers.".

Problem with that sentence, is it's simply not true. And it's magnificently not true. the SNES was a far bigger hit than the N64, the N64 was a relative flop as far as Nintendo systems go. The 2nd golden era of gaming was the SNES/Sega Genesis 16-bit era. Great games, large market shares, and a reawakening of gaming after the debacle at the end of the Atari 2600 era. Chris Suellentrop no doubt went from NES to PS or N64, but that doesn't mean everyone followed his trajectory. The problem with much journalism, across all sections of papers and across the MSM backed section of the blogosphere is that these "journalist" confuse their personal experiences with universal truths.

The fact that everyone they know is just like them, doesn't mean that everyone in the rest of the world is anything like everyone they know.

So what does all this have to do with Rich Hall and sniglets?

That feeling comes up often enough (at least with me) that I think it deserves a sniglet.

I suggest the word,

HACKOPAUSE = the sentence or phrase within an article that stops you dead in your tracks, gives you pause, and forces you to question the validity of all other arguments within.