hollygrahm

( Federalist # 1: Hamilton outlines the purpose of the essays to follow )

The Federalist Papers were 85 essays written between October 1787 and May 1788 by a collective author called Publius.  Publius was comprised of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison.  Their aim was to convince New York to ratify the Constitution.

 

I'm reading them because a co-worker proposed that we read them together this summer and discuss them.  I've never been in a book club, but I love the idea and so jumped at the chance.

 

The notes I post under the Federalist Papers tag are mainly for my own reference and amusement, but feel free to read them if you'd like.  Comments are welcome but not really expected.

 

For the purpose of clarity, I'm going to break my notes into two sections:

* First, a summary of the author's argument.  Paraphrasing and direct quotations in this section will be in blue, and snarky comments of my own will be in black.

* Then I'll add any additional thoughts which apply to the whole essay, or otherwise fail to tie in directly with the items in the summary.  Again, direct quotations will be in blue.

* Vanity compels me to point out that the spelling and capitalization errors in the direct quotations are those of the original authors.  Of course, they're not errors so much as the style of the time.  In any case, I'm mentioning this now -- and only once -- rather than peppering my notes with sic.  Errors outside of quotation marks are entirely my own, and I encourage you to believe I committed them on purpose to see if you were paying attention.

 

I will not be including a bibliography with every post.  Instead, I'll put it at the end of this post alone.  I do not reference every one of these books for every essay; if you have a question about any particular point I can direct you to which book it came from.

---

Jay, John; Madison, James; and Hamilton, Alexander, The Federalist Papers.  Ed. Fairfield, Roy P.  Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.  ISBN 0801826071.

Jay, John; Madison, James; and Hamilton, Alexander, The Federalist Papers.  New York:  Buccaneer Books, Inc., 1992.  ISBN 0899666957.

Ed. Pole, J.R., The American Constitution:  For and Against.  NY:  Hill and Wang, 1987.  ISBN 0809024667.

If there really are 50 ways to leave your lover, why does she only tell him one of them?

Slip out the back, make a new plan, drop off the key, et al are just variations of the same method.  The whole song could be summarized with one simple imperative:  Just leave.

We all know what's missing from most books that teach English:  a strong political message.  Fortunately one author has sought to fill that gap.  English For Workers, by Eli B. Jacobson, was published in 1928, and the title page is quick to reassure the reader that the book was composed and printed by union labor.

Aiming to teach English by providing subject matter based "on the experiences and aspirations of the workers", Jacobson gives us chapters titled The Class Struggle (Use of Prepositions), The Role of Scabs (Use of progressive present tense; use of "do"; indirect object), and A Tramp on the Bowery (Seasons of the year).
( censored )

( I do get the most interesting catalogs. )

The book I'm reading is full of footnotes, some of them quite long and at least one of them highly amusing.

In one section, the author is talking about learning science, and he mentions "the use of globes and of the orrery*".  The footnote reads:

As this book may fall into the hands of persons who do not know what an orrery is, it is for their information I add this note, as the name gives no idea of the uses of the thing.  The orrery has its name from the person who invented it.  (hollygrahm's note:  Are you still reading?)  It is a machinery of clock-work, representing the universe in miniature, and in which the revolution of the earth round itself and round the sun, the revolution of the moon round the earth, the revolution of the planets round the sun, their relative distances from the sun, as the centre of the whole system, their relative distances from each other, and their different magnitudes, are represented as they really exist in what we call the heavens.

Diagram that, bitches!

I don't know which is funniest:  the super-long sentence at end, the fact that it takes him an age to get to the actual definition, or the idea of Thomas Paine sitting up at night, worrying that his essays might fall into the hands of someone with an inadequate vocabulary.

---

Paine, Thomas, Age of Reason.  New York:  Prometheus Books, 1984 (orig. 1794).  ISBN 0879752734.

A couple of weekends ago I bought a two-volume, 1937 Webster's Dictionary for $2.



A message on the spine proclaims This dictionary is not published by the original publishers of Webster's Dictionary or by their successors, which I find amusing although I have several dictionaries that make that disclaimer.

I fell in love with this particular tome because of a few entries in the addenda section, volume one:

television, n. vision at a distance, specifically, views of places, or of objects and persons, still or in motion, transmitted and reproduced by a recently invented device, in connection with radio, which turns light rays into electrical waves, and re-converts these electrical waves into visible light rays, which form pictures, thus enabling one, through a receiving station, to see, as in the 'movies', representations of the scenes and persons at the transmitting station.

I mean, just count those commas!  And the single quotes around movies -- how irresistible is that?

heterosexuality, n. morbid sexual passion of the male for the female, or of the female for the male.

Morbid?  Really?  As in morbid, a. diseased; sickly; not sound and healthful?  All right, then.

Before you ask, homosexuality is neither in the main dictionary nor its addenda.  But while scanning the pages for that word, one trips upon this little beauty:

honorificabilitudinitatibus, n. honorableness; state of being honorable.

I dare you to use that in a sentence at work tomorrow.

But the best little gem, the one that made my whole week, was this:

groceteria, n. a cheap grocery store in which the customers wait upon themselves and pay the cashier when leaving.

*logosquee*

---

Webster, Noah, Webster's Universal Dictionary of the English Language.  New York:  The World Syndicate Publishing Company, 1937.  Predates ISBN.

I got this one last weekend:

Have you ever imagined a world where there are no hypothetical situations?

Dear Mr. Feynman --

When you were alive, did anyone tell you what an asshat you were?

Did anyone ever tell you that recounting your adventures in bar-hopping made you dull and obnoxious?

Did anyone remark that you didn't have to accept the damn Nobel Prize if you were so annoyed about the fame and kudos it brought you?

Did you ever stop to think that sneaking onto a university campus to talk to the physics students, thereby avoiding the unworthy masses of humanities students was insulting, rude, snobbish, and ungrateful?

Well, I'm telling you now.

---

Feynman, Richard P., Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1985.  ISBN 0393316041.

Feynman, Richard P., The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.  Massachusetts:  Perseus Books, 1999.  ISBN 0738201081.

World-famous crackhead Amy Winehouse gave part of a concert in St. Lucia this weekend.  It didn't go well, but that's not the interesting part.

What's interesting is how the same event sparked two completely different articles.  I present:

Amy would like to express her disappointment that weather forced the abandonment of her show at the St Lucia Jazz Festival last night.

vs.

At one point Winehouse sat down on a speaker at the front of the stage and seemed to be staring into space, until she was prompted by her backing vocalist to get back up and continue.

Both articles mention the same salient points:  that Amy forgot the words and explained to the audience, "sorry, I'm bored", that the weather was not ideal, that she was unsteady on her feet, that her spokesman blamed technical difficulties and spoke eloquently of Amy's disappointment about being forced to cut it short.

But one article is clearly giving more credence to the it's-not-her-fault position, while the other is definitely implying that she's not fit to be let out in public.

So remember, kids:  it's not in the facts, but the spin.

Also, has anyone -- anyone in the history of ever -- pronounced it po-tah-to?

This is Vienna.



I'm told it's a kitten, but I can't confirm that. It won't stand still long enough for me to get a good look.

Clement Freud will be missed by people in England, Scotland, India, the US, Australia, Ireland, Canada, Hong Kong...

D'you suppose what Jeremiah was saying was "quit drinking my wine"?

Just one quick Excel tip today --

Say you've got a formula or a constant and you want to repeat it in all the cells below.  You need a fill-down, (or fill-up, as the case may be) and there are several ways to accomplish this:

1.  You can select the populated cell and highlight the cells below it, then go to the Edit menu and select Fill, then Down.

2.  You can copy/ paste to the empty cells.

3.  You can select the populated cell and double-click on the little square in the lower right-hand corner.

4.  You can impress your friends with the method no one knows about.

4a. First, select the cells you want to fill.

4b. (optional) From the Edit menu, click on Go To, then choose Special from the dialog box, select Blanks, and hit OK.  You only really need this step if your empty cells are broken up with populated cells in between them.

4c. Type =A2 (assuming your populated cell is in A2, of course).  Don't hit enter yet!

4d. Hold down the ctrl key and hit enter.

That fourth method is more useful than it may appear.  Take a look at this example:



You want to fill cell A3 with Amy Winehouse, and A5 with Air Supply, etc.  If you have thousands of rows, methods one, two, and three would be very tedious indeed.  The ctrl+enter trick will get it done faster.

Sadly, there is no formula in Excel that will go back to the 80s and save you from that embarrassing Air Supply phase you went through.  I've tried =timetravel(1980(delete(AirSupply))), but it didn't work.

As I'm sure you'll recall from my brilliantly-written, life-altering post on data troubleshooting, step 6c is to check for duplicated records.  I have two favorite methods for duplicate-hunting, one of which -- the Excel method -- I'll describe here.*

( It's as easy as one, two, three... four, five, six, seven. )

---

  * We'll discuss the Access method another time.
** Note that you can only concatenate 30 cells (not that you'd ever want to), whereas ampersands just keep going and going and going.

You know those optional commas that appear in lists before and or or?  For example, the third comma in the following sentence:

Hiro, Ando, Peter, and Isaac tried to save the cheerleader.

It's not strictly necessary; it's just as correct to say Hiro, Ando, Peter and Isaac...

Anyway, it's called an Oxford comma (aka Harvard comma, aka serial comma).  Some people love them.  Others hate them.  Either way, isn't it just cool that they have a name?  An Oxford comma is somehow more distinguished and special than an ordinary one.

Likewise, the moniker grocer's apostrophe is awesome.  The apostrophe itself is an abomination, but the name is neat.

I wonder if there are other fun punctuation names out there.

Howdy, neighbor!  Can I borrow a cup of inspiration?

These days I'm trying to write one office-monkey type post every Sunday.  I couldn't think of anything today, though.  So I'm asking you:  Do you have any burning questions about Excel, Word, Access, or the like?  Perhaps there's an if/ then or index/ match formula that's been keeping you up nights?

If so, let me know and I may write about it.  If not, um... nevermind.

During my evening commute the other day, I passed a billboard that showed a photo of a piglet next to a puppy.  The slogan was Why love one and eat the other?  After my initial reaction (they're trying to get me to eat dog?) I decided that they're trying to get me adopt a pig.  A couple of days later I finally noticed the caption at the bottom of the billboard:  Choose vegetarian.  Ah, all clear now.

This is only marginally related to the post I actually want to make.  What I want to post about is this picture I saw in a book recently.  I've been putting off writing about it because I'm not exactly sure what I want to say about it, or how to go about saying it.

I think I'll just share the picture with you and refrain from comment.

( Here it is. )

 

 

( A short list of thoughts on Microsoft SharePoint )

I was having a bad day yesterday.  Foolishly, I sought to cheer myself with a children's story.

I went to the library to get Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  I seemed to remember that the book had an uplifting message -- that the kid learned in the end that his problems weren't all that insurmountable, and that people were basically decent and that hard times would soon pass.

Hah.  Clearly nostalgia has been playing tricks on me again.  In the end (SPOILER ALERT!) the kid is just as miserable as he is in the beginning.  Not only that, but his mom takes sadistic pleasure in robbing the child of the one spark of hope thought that's kept him going all this time.  See, he's been clutching to the idea that if things get unbearable enough, he can escape to Australia and start anew.

So check out the ending:

"It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
My mom says some days are like that.
Even in Australia."

Bitch!  Way to kick the kid while he's down.

I will say, though, that it was highly amusing to hear the librarian muttering to herself as she searched for the title, "is it terrible, horrible, terrible?  Or horrible, horrible, terrible?)

---

Viorst, Judith, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  Canada:  Macmillan Publishing Company, 1972.  ISBN 0689300727.