Diary (May 26, 2020)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Tuesday May 25, 2020.

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Diary

Song of the Day for Howard Kranz

Twenty-second in a series of songs for Howard and me to cover, or be inspired by, or something.

You Can Make It If You Try

"You Can Make It If You Try" by Sly and the Family Stone

You can make it if you try
You can make it if you try
Push a little harder
Think a little deeper
Don't let the plastic bring you down

All together now
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
You can make it if you try
You can make it if you try

Time's still creeping
Especially when you're sleeping
Wake up and go for what you know

All together now
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
You can make it if you try
You can make it if you try

You'll get what's due you
And everything coming to you
You got to move if you want to be ahead

All together now
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
You can make it if you try
You can make it if you try

• You Can Make It If You Try @ YouTube
• You Can Make It If You Try @ Wikipedia
• Lyrics
• Post @ Facebook

The Middle of the Beast

You Americans are very lucky. You live in the middle of the beast.

You are fighting the most important fight of all, in the center of the battle.

If I had my wish, I would go back with you to North Amerika to fight there.

I envy you.

—Ernesto "Che" Guevara referring to the importance of metropolitan resistance, cited in J. Rubin’s Do It!)

TO_DO: verify citation.

• https://sabrinasoyer.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/jerry-rubin-do-it-scenarios-of-revolution.pdf

Rich hominids

A Roman Feast by Roberto Bompiani (late 1800s).

“Rich people” is an appropriate, emotionally neutral term. That’s how journalism should be, and in most cases I want journalism: not polemic, not comedy.

But in this case I want polemic and comedy, so let’s call them “Rich humans” – or better yet, “Rich hominids”.

Speaking of rich, here’s something else – I just learned this the other day –

Our modern diva derives from the Latin dives, “divine, godlike” (cognate of ancient “Zeus” and modern “deity”), and is embodied in the Roman personal name Divus, “rich”. Here is an excerpt from an interesting blog post on the subject by scholar Peter Kruschwitz:

One of the recurring features of the Latin inscriptions (of Cologne just as much as everywhere else, of course) is mention of gods or other spirits – dei, deae, divi, divini .

This reminded him (and me) of a question he had asked a few weeks earlier, and which I had shamefully delayed to answer: is there a link, etymologically, between divus (‘godlike’) and divinus (‘divine’) on the one hand and dives (‘rich’) on the other?

Or, as my son had put it in a Skype conversation, just to puzzle his already perplexed father a little further … suntne divini divites ?

The answer is … probably yes, actually. Divus , as Latin deus , is related to an Indo-European root that signifies ‘heaven’ or ‘sky’ (incidentally, the same root that survives in the English word ‘Tuesday’ and German ‘Dienstag’).

Dives , in turn, has been explained in relevant etymological dictionaries as an adjective that denotes the (pecuniary) power of someone upon whom the gods do smile – in a similar way in which fortuna-tus may refer to someone who has been blessed, financially, by Fortuna.

Morphologically, the word formation appears to follow a simple logic: a dives being someone whose influence (and affluence) is based on the approval of the divi just as an eques (‘knight’, ‘horseman’) is someone whose might is based on the power of equi (‘horses’).

The Petrified Muse is the blog of Peter Kruschwitz, Professor of Ancient Cultural History (Antike Kulturgeschichte) at the University of Vienna and Fellow of the Pontifical Academy for Latin (Pontificia Academia Latinitatis).

• https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2014/05/08/the-divine-riches-of-the-latin-language/
• Comment

Green art media

["Just playing Mr. Super Anal, here: For 100% drive-your-family-crazy ‘green’, anything involving paper would be ruled out, and coloring in water colors may have ‘suspicious’ sources."]

I hear you; indeed I thought about the colors in “watercolors” before I posted, and decided to let it go. Not sure where they get those colors, but if they are Legal Department Approved “Non-toxic”, then probably no cadmium – only coal tar derivatives, food coloring, I suppose.

Okay new plan:

Green is not just what you avoid using.

It’s what you actively do to remedy problems.

Litter. Garbage. These are your Active Measures green media.

I once went through a phase for a few weeks (this was in Minneapolis) where I obsessed about picking up pencils that I found on the street, and giving them new life, I thought about documenting them on a website, a kind of monument to lost pencils.

Well, that phase passed, but then I found a small brightly colored plastic monkey with a broken arm in the street, and I thought, I will obsessively collect found broken toys for a while, give them new life, maybe train the monkey to take over some of the pencil-documenting scutwork for me. But no other toys presented themselves (I’m pretty sure the monkey is recuperating in one of my memento creches), so that phase passed.

Have a look at “Wasteland”, an art gallery in the Twin Cities. The owner makes art from found waste objects, some quite charming – long-stemmed roses constructed from broken red tail-light cowlings.

• Comment @ Boing Boing

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Karl Jones (nonfiction)