I know it's totally normal for toddlers to be fearful, but it's just so sad. One day you have this joyful child bouncing through your house like a rubber ball, and the next day he staggers to the breakfast table all haggard with worry, like an extra on the set of A Clockwork Orange. You can practically see the fears lounging around in his psyche, helping themselves to another bowl of cereal while they plan their latest attack: "Okay, you — yes you, Unshakeable Terror of Drains — you're up today." I can hardly stand it.

"What's 'drown'?" Ben suddenly thought to ask one night, and a million terrible thoughts unspooled immediately in my mind. I remembered that, like, 20-page section on drowning in the book The Perfect Storm, which describes, in shattering detail, how long you can keep yourself from inhaling underwater, and then how it might feel as your lungs fill up with the sea. Nah. I thought about Titanic — those countless good people rolling off the tilted deck and into the dark water, like potatoes into a stew pot. Nah.

How do you balance the requirements of honesty with the risk of a life-long terror of water? Because believe me — we're bathing infrequently enough as it is. "It's like swimming," I finally said, "only, um, the water makes you too tired." Michael overheard this and raised his eyebrows at me. "Nice one," he teased, "really clear and honest."

My friend Barbara laughed when I told her about my equally lame explanation of "war." "Ah," she said, "you went with 'The mean guys who can't share.' We went with 'Greedy guys who don't know how to use their words.' Similar approaches."

- posted by Don Porges @ 4/26/2005 03:49:00 PM |

Florida resident Rogers Cadenhead, who describes himself on his Web site as the author of several technology books, said on his site that he registered six domain names earlier this month based on names he thought the new pope might pick.

Cadenhead said he was considering his options for the site but if the Pope's people were to approach him to discuss taking over the site he might make a few requests of the Vatican including "one of those hats" and "world peace".

- posted by Don Porges @ 4/21/2005 03:18:00 PM |

Why the hell do all the authorities who put signs on road surfaces in the USA make the completely false assumption that you are going to read the words in the order in which your front bumper arrives at them? It is madness; psycholinguistic bunk. That is not what happens for me. I can't believe anyone has a different reaction. As soon as you see the block of words, you instinctively read them all, from the top. Look at this, which is painted on a road surface on my campus:

ONLY LANE B I K E

What do you see? ONLY LANE BIKE, right? It's the same with XING PED; it's the same with AHEAD STOP; it's the same with CLEAR KEEP. The way they lay them out, backwards them read you. Impeded is comprehension. Am I the only person in the whole United flaming States smart enough to have noticed this and to have realized what the problem is and what the solution would be?

With this in my head, I came upon a situation today that may explain things.

- posted by Don Porges @ 4/18/2005 01:14:00 AM |

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

- posted by Don Porges @ 4/17/2005 10:29:00 PM |

Powerline, we must begin to understand, has no fucking idea what they're talking about at any given moment. Once upon a time, some GOP operative sent by the Ghost of Nixon got something right for them in the Free Republic comments section, and ever since then the homo-erotically named bloggers over there have thought his success their own and tried to get a bunch of other Important Stories About Treasonous Democrats right too. But they don't. Reading their site is like watching a blind child in a dog park -- you keep trying to warn him not to step in the piles of shit, but you're never able to get there quite quick enough. They want to make a point on Carter and end up calling him a traitor -- ooh, all over your shoe! They want to attack the AP but end up proving themselves utterly ignorant of how cameras work -- damn, you got it on your sock! They try to accuse Democrats of faking the Schiavo memo until an aide to current Republican Senator and Bush's former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez -- Agh, it's all over you!

- posted by Don Porges @ 4/08/2005 11:38:00 AM |

And at one central Dublin outlet of Paddy Power, Seamus Hegarty spent a cool, calculating 20 minutes before putting his 10 euro note on a 25-1 shot: Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico.

"The money I lose on this I'll make back on the British election," predicted Hegarty, 49, who says he simply had to place a bet on someone so that he could maximize his enjoyment of watching events unfold from the Vatican.

- posted by Don Porges @ 4/04/2005 08:11:00 PM |