In the chaos that is my mind at this hour —

Brain damage such as stroke can take away the symbolic processing ability known as language. I wonder: does the most obvious kind of sign-language, pointing and miming, go with it? And do Deaf signers so afflicted lose more or less of the naïve sign-language than the hearing do? In one sense these questions have no meaningful answer, because every stroke is different; but there must be interesting correlations.

Does stroke ever take away the ability to process conditional or relative clauses?

I see that in Yahoo’s Chinese translation my name is “安東 Sherwood”, i.e. Anton becomes ‘peace+east’ (which in Japanese is pronounced antō, unfortunately).

Each member of the California State Bar Association (which is a state entity) has a number, and the Bar’s website lets you search by number or by name. Barrister No. 1 was William Harrison Waste, admitted in June 1894. The highest number is 237747, belonging to Rex John Phillips, admitted in September 2005. You might ask, how long has it taken for the roster to double? Easy: look up barrister #118874, Andrew Henry Milinkevich, admitted in July 1985.

Thirty-odd years ago I read Alvin’s Secret Code by Clifford B. Hicks (1963), which begins when a puzzling telegram falls into the hands of two boys. The only sentence in it that makes any kind of sense to them is “Ivan hiding message oak,” so they look in a hollow oak tree but find nothing. They take the telegram to a retired spy, who explains that it is in a commercial code which, as luck would have it, he devised; “Ivan hiding message oak” means “Jones arriving Blanksville Wednesday.”

Now I learn from Kahn’s The Code-Breakers that, in the jargon of the Russian Communist underground, dubok ‘little oak’ meant a hiding-place for messages. Hmmm.

A friend asked me why Ron Paul voted against a hurricane relief bill; was there something poisonous in it, or did he think it would be ineffective? I replied that I would expect Dr Paul to vote against any such bill on Constitutional grounds; and appended a link to the story, familiar to some of you, of how Davy Crockett was turned away from the Dark Side (or, as you may prefer, toward it).

Google’s first example of the story happens to be on Ron Paul’s own website. Rereading, I found that the text of that copy appears to be somewhat corrupt; so I looked for others. Indeed, the full story is substantially longer and more instructive. Copies at: Lew Rockwell; Patrick Henry On-Line (Martin Lindstedt); SlimPickins; Return of the Gods; TRIM (John Birch Society) (broken links removed 2020)

Later: Walter Williams collects some quotations from other early politicians on the same theme.

2020: The story is repeated at hushmoney.org, Healing and Revival, Constitution Society, Foundation for Economic Education; and debunked at Jim’s Corner.

Watching Pillow on patrol, guarding the hearth against MLO (mouse-like objects), stirs a tickle in my mind: About thirty years ago was there a long-running ad campaign, for some luxury good, that featured a black panther? Or have I imagined it, mutating the Blackglama “what becomes a legend most” campaign in which black fur was itself the product?

(Do I still have any issues of Scientific American from that period?)

You don’t need me to tell you that the case of Maher Arar (cited by Charlie Stross) has gloomy implications. So instead I’ll remark that I’m pleased to see in the article the phrase “a Qaeda member.” If any American paper were so pedantic as to agree with me that the definite article in Al Qaeda ought to be dropped in such phrases just because we’d do so with an English phrase like The Brotherhood, I guess the New York Times would be it.

I’ve also coined the mongrel noun Qaedista but never had occasion to use it.