Daily Office: Tuesday
¶ Matins: The damned thing is: he’s right. “The offence seems to be not what I did but the fact that it became public.” Max Mosley on his forays into Sade-en lusts.
¶ Tierce: The state of play in neuroscience: we still learn most of what we know from brain failure. Frontotemporal dementia, for example, teaches art.
¶ Sext: I knew about the subway reefs, but not that they’d make such a big splash. (“Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars,” by Ian Urbina.)
By the way, we’re having a gorgeous day here.
¶ Compline: Jason Kottke actually got in to Momofuku Ko.
Oremus…
§ Matins. But the fact that it became public is the offense. As I’ve been suggesting for weeks now (in the Morning Reads), it’s Boccaccio 101. If you’re the son of a widely-despised Fascist politico, you really can’t afford to be caught with your whips rampant. Aunt Debo could have, would have, and, I’m sure, did have told him that.
Too Bade.
§ Tierce. It is a commonplace observation that “ethical concerns” preclude “experimentation” on the brains of healthy human beings. That’s just as well, at least for the time being, given the fact that we don’t yet know much about maneuvering on the molecular level of neuromechanics. What, though, if we were living in a period that was complacent about slavery? The ancient Greeks — sworn, medically, to “do no harm” — might have refrained from treating slaves as guinea pigs, but what about their opulent neighbors, in Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia?
For the matter of that, what’s going on today, in the world’s darker corners, that we have yet to hear about?
§ Sext. The animation is a tad disappointing, but give it a shot if you’ve got a moment. The story goes to show that, even if the retired subway cars, donated by the MTA, are free, they nonetheless come with the hex of New York’s real estate madness.
It’s a bit cool, but not too cold to open the windows and the balcony door. The balcony! This year, I am going to take care of it. I let it go last year, for the first time ever, because I was so busy avoiding a stroke while blogging 24/7. But I’ve already bought two pots of ivy and a generic houseplant of the dracaena family (I should say).
§ Compline. You’d think that if yours was one of the very few weddings covered in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, the mere sight of the magazine whan that Aprille with his shoures sote &c would jog your memory of connubial obligations. Guess not. Not if you were married in March.