For those of you who came looking for your weekly trivia blast, sorry. I’m on something of a blogging sabbatical for the next several weeks. This has a lot to do with an already-heavy litigation calendar I need to get caught up, and with an imminent planned trip abroad.
But also it’s because, having tackled most major issues that have been on my mind recently, there isn’t much aggravating me or causing me to comment. In relatively recent memory, I’ve written recently about a) the insincerity of both parties in cutting the budget as it needs to be cut, b) logical and critical thinking, c) constitutional law, and d) the utter illogic of our intervention in Libya. Right now there doesn’t seem to be much more ground for me to cover. I’m sure that sooner or later I’ll come across something so important I just have to say something about it but for now I’m happy to say nothing at all.
I’ll be back, oh yes I will, but not for a couple of weeks. Until then, I’ll be posting infrequently if at all.
You will be missed!
Enjoy your trip! Selfishly, I hope you find something to irritate you enough to post something.
There seems to be a lot of that going around.
Hurry back.
And here are two brief puzzles, for anyone who’s interested:
1. Rearrange these words in the correct order:
Yes, the dead stead.
2. Baseball trivia:
In what way is Nemo Leibold neither fish nor fowl?
Good ones, both.
1. Stead yes the dead = “Steady as the dead”? Except I’ve never heard that second phrase anywhere before. Am I even on the right track here?
2. Nemo Leibold? I admit, I had to look him up. Good player for his era. Most famous for being one of the three honest players on the 1919 Chicago Black Sox (slumped badly in the pivotal World Series, so bribing him turned out not to be necessary). No help there for either fish or fowl that I can see, unless being a “fair” player is a pun on the “foul” ball played by his teammates. When he was traded to the Cleveland Spiders, they re-named the team the Cleveland Naps after the manager before they became the Cleveland Indians. But none of those mascots are either fish or birds so I’m out in the woods here too.
1. No, look further afield. (Hint: as in the old Atlantic puzzler, punctuation is only there to obfuscate.)
2. You started on the right track, but then went off course.
Hints:
1. These words are used in a particular way in a specific set of literary works.
2. Leibold’s position of the Black Sox was similar to that of Stevens on the Supreme Court.
Since no one’s playing anymore, I might as well finish this.
1. They are the last words of James Joyce’s major works.
Dubliners:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Portrait of the Artist:
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
Ulysses:
and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Finnegans Wake:
a way a lone a last a loved a long the
2. Of the eight starting position players on the Black Sox, five were expelled from baseball and two are in the Hall of Fame. Nemo Liebold is the only one between those two extremes. The hint was that Stevens was the only (and thus far the last) Protestant on the Supremer Court, the rest being either Catholics or Jews.