I collect my copy of the free Metro each morning from the lovely man who stands at the Kendall Square T-stop handing them out through wind, rain, and snow, and who always has a smile and a cheerful word for me. Today the paper was chock full of more than the usual number of articles that gave me cause to remember how idiotic and/or vicious the human race can be.

Exhibit A: A letter to the forum (I have helpfully scratched out the writer’s name to protect his privacy, because more people read my blog than the Boston Metro). Is this person fer-serious? The Pope, no matter how senile and sick, and no matter how much trouble he may have communicating at the moment, has not been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years. His cerebral cortex, the part of his brain that makes him so wonderfully weird, has not been destroyed. I won’t go on, because I don’t really want to write about Terry or the Pope, today of all days — but please, Name-Scratched-Out, use your functioning grey matter to come up with a more logical argument for your beliefs.

Exhibit B: This is kind of hard to read. Here’s the first sentence of the article: “Hundreds of volunteers, some of them armed, are expected to take up position along the Mexican border tomorrow and begin patrolling for illegal immigrants.” I don’t think I need to tell you what I think, or feel, about this. I hate that there are people who imagine this is a good idea and somehow right.

….and, Exhibit C: I find it kind of kooky that there are people who don’t think this is a good idea, wayyyyyy late in coming. I’m astounded that you can go to a voting station in this country and be asked to furnish nothing, except your name (if it really is your name), in order to cast your vote. Ross could have gone to twenty different voting stations, this past Election day, armed with the names of twenty different registered voters (as long as he knew where they were supposed to go), and racked up the numbers for whomever he wished. Of course, when the real voters came along (if they ever came along) the game would be up, I suppose, but they would have had no way of tracing Ross, and the whole kerfuffle would have taken forever to sort out.

Anyway, let me lower my blood pressure by sharing with you what must surely be one of the greatest pictures ever taken:

Ah, to have my face eaten by a squishy Asher.

I watched The Fog of War on Sunday evening, after having listened to an interview with its director, Errol Morris, on one of my favorite* NPR programs. I must confess a near perfect ignorance of the nuances of the history of American foreign policy, so I couldn’t possibly offer any sophisticated analysis of McNamara’s commentary. I can say that I was thoroughly fascinated by certain aspects of his personality.

He’s literate in a way that seems to be pretty rare among public figures in this country or my own — in one of the deleted scenes on the DVD he refers to a Kipling poem with disarming sincerity and not a hint of self-conciousness or pretension. Literature, philosophy, ethics, statistics, and war are clearly all important and interwoven parts of his vocabulary. He’s terribly smart in lots of different ways — and he comes across as a very moral thinker, despite some of the decisions he’s been responsible for.

He’s astonishingly emotional, both in the present-day interviews, when he is in his eighties, and in the audio and video clips of his term as Secretary of Defense. He teeters on the edge of tears several times, his voice cracking as he talks about choosing JFK’s burial spot and the warm way LBJ spoke about him when he was awarded the Medal of Freedom. He’s obviously deeply in love with his wife (now dead), and he’s completely fearless about showing his love for the presidents he served. It’s totally human, and yet sort of unthinkable. You just don’t see men — politicians — talking like that over here when they’re not on the campaign trail.

The one thing he’s obviously not is humble, or interested in the appearance of humility. He tells a story about how he fought fiercely to be at the top of his class in first grade, and his face still glows with the memory of it. Whenever he is asked a critical question, in those videos of his younger self, a slow smile spreads across his face before he responds — it’s a smile that says, Ah. Ah, I knew you’d ask me that, because you are an unelightened being. If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t need to pose that question. But I’ll answer it anyway, and I’ll try to bring my answer down to your level of understanding. He’s a cerebral person who devotes a lot of time to thinking hard about what he’s doing, and the overwhelming impression he gives off, in those sepia clips, is that of a man who doesn’t think you can say anything to him that he hasn’t already thought of.

And yet there seems to be a tremendous humility in him of a different kind, a sort of chagrin in the mere fact of his being human, of our being human. He appears to possess a deep sense of shame in the frailty of human goodness.

And then there are those moments when he blames all of the Vietnam War on Lyndon Johnson and refuses to take any responsibility for his role in prolonging it, and then he seems more human than ever.

*Re: “favorite” — Lately I have been having to consciously decide, every time I come to write a word that has both a British and an American spelling, which one I want to use. All through college and during most of my graduate school career I allowed myself the luxury of spelling the way I’ve always spelled, when in Rome be damned — but now that I’m a working stiff (and an editorial working stiff, at that) I need to toe the party line most of the time. And I don’t really want to spell the same word two different ways depending on where I’m sitting; that’s not what spelling’s about for me.

Which, I suppose, suggests that spelling is, in fact, “about” something for me. I have a philosophy of spelling. Huh. Well, there’s a thrilling entry just waiting to be written. And by god I’m the wastrel to write it.

We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?

Read this article the other morning, and found it rather catty. Do a thousand mediocre memoirs diminish the one that’s genuinely great? My old teacher Rey Buono told me once that you had to appreciate bad art, because without it no good art could exist.

But maybe I just feel that way because I have a boundless interest in memoirs, in the catalogues of lives, in the arcs of love affairs and the shadows of childhood. I do prefer it if they’re well-written, of course.

(How this blog fits into all of that is another day’s tapping.)

There’s a truck that I sometimes see on my walks back from Central Square, painted pink and covered in painted doodles of… beetles, I think (I don’t have a terribly good visual memory, and I haven’t taken a picture of it). I do remember that on the back it’s emblazoned with the slogan “Art is Cheap.”

This weekend we made art to hang on the kitchen wall that cost about thirty dollars, and thusly does it look.

Three small square canvases, covered in acrylic, patterned after the creative stylings of a certain highly artistic medical student I happen to know. It wasn’t the only painting going on this weekend, either. There was also the matter of the Easter eggs Jo insisted on dipping and crayoning last night after I introduced her to the only movie I will never get tired of watching.

I wish I was feeling less queasy (I think the Thai food I had for lunch is interacting strangely with the latte I drank immediately afterwards), because it’s just been a wonderful weekend, sunny and gorgeous, and I’d love to tell you more about adventures in Lahori cooking (Lahore is my grandfather’s city), discovering that you can west coast swing to some surprising music, and the woman at the antique store with the astonishing snort.

But I’m too tired, so take a gander at this beautiful face instead, and meet me here tomorrow.

(I don’t think Jo’s excitement about Hedwig matched my own deep love, but I can live with that.)

This is my favorite photograph of The Gates — the fact that it was foggy and still that day made it turn out more interesting on film than it actually looked being there, I think. If you click on the thumbnail you’ll find a few more pictures. I’m testing out this photo sharing service that Sarah uses, and I don’t know how I feel about it yet.

I don’t think I can improve on that paper title. (You can’t actually read the paper without being a Science magazine subscriber, but there are two little video clips that are heart-stoppingly neat.)

Octopus afoot

Ross and I have been talking a lot about words lately, so here are some favorites that have come up in the last couple of days:

Spoonerism: This is when you transpose the wounds in a pair of swords. The name comes from a Reverend Spilliam Wooner, who apparently did this a lot. He must have been fairy vunny.

Copacetic: Satisfactory; just fine; five by five. This is a word that is particularly dear to Ross’s heart, because a couple of years ago he used it in a conversation and I was absolutely convinced that he had made it up. But completely certain. I had never heard it before, and it didn’t sound anything like what it was apparently supposed to mean, which was enough for me to declare it ridiculous and nonexistent. I don’t think I’ll ever be allowed to live this down.

Autological and Heterological. You won’t find these two in the dictionary, I think because they were made up in order to create a paradox that isn’t really a paradox. Autological words are words that describe themselves (like polysyllabic, memorizable, recherche) and heterological words ones that do not describe themselves (green, woeful, drunk, etc.). And the paradox is intended to be one of set theory, much like the one about the barber who only shaves men who don’t shave themselves, to wit:

Is the word “heterological” heterological? If so, it has to be autological. And if not, then it has to be heterological. And so forth.

Apparently the dichotomy between autological and heterological is a false one, so this isn’t really a paradox — but they’re still awfully cool words.

I have to stop now, because the television is on and The Hollow Men, whom I’m watching for the first time, are doing a sketch about putting cellphones up their arses.

And it’s making this entry seem awfully recherche.