This post should be coupled with the one I wrote late last night.
While following the market yesterday, I updated my Twitter account after a particularly precipitous mid-afternoon drop in the DJIA:
The DJIA trend line just kinda disappeared off the bottom of the chart there into Here Be Monsters territory about 30 minutes ago.
I meant “here be dragons” but you get the idea. Anyway, a reader sent in this chart that captures what many were feeling after the market closed.
~ Service ~
When you are a knight in service, if your overlord is in financial straits because of major expenses, he may have no choice but to ask you for a loan from your regular salary for some years. Regardless of the amount, great or small, once you have agreed it is not the attitude of a warrior to complain to anyone about what hardship and trouble it is, even in casual conversation with your wife and children.
Let me explain. From olden times, and even now, it has been an established rule of warrior houses for vassals to get together and help out when their overlord is in difficulty, and for an overlord to use his power to help out vassals in difficulties. When an overlord has financial troubles, this affects the public domains. Even things an overlord is supposed to do, as proper to the baronial office, are generally canceled; for the vassals, it is distressing and dismaying to see their overlord barely able to make do.
Ordinary life goes on, but when there is an unexpected border disturbance – as may happen any day – and orders come down to go there on standard military service, when it comes to making preparations the first thing needed is money. When a young overlord is stuck and has no way to raise money no matter how clever he is, and meanwhile the other barons are making preparations for imminent deployment on a fixed date, even if your contingent is poorly prepared you have to show up.
In a time of peace, a martial procession before the eyes of all classes is considered a fine spectacle. Since it is a show, if the trappings of the men and horses of your establishment are inferior to the others, that would been unseemly, so it would be the disgrace of a lifetime for the overlord and commander. Considering how serious this can be, the knights of the establishment, both major and minor, newcomers and old-timers alike, are obliged to give up part of their salaries, according to their means.
Therefore, during the period of years when your income is reduced, you must be thoughtful about economizing in every way, reducing the numbers of personnel and horses, wearing paper and cotton clothing in winter and hemp clothing in summer, eating unpolished rice and miso soup with bran morning and night. Draw the water and split the firewood yourself; have your wife do the cooking. Endure the hardship to the best of your ability, focusing on the intention to set the overlord’s finances in order somehow; this should be the fundamental motivation of service.
Furthermore, during that period of hardship, it may happen that you are given special duties and therefore have emergency expenses for supplies. You should meet those expenses yourself, without asking to borrow money, even if you have to pawn your spare sword and your wife’s jewelry box. This is taking care to prevent others from talking; becuase even if the overlord doesn’t hear of it, the senior officials of the establishment may look down on you, thinking that you are being importunate in a manner unbecoming to a Samurai because you have had your salary reduced.
- Bushido Shoshinshu, by Taira Shigesuke (1639-1730), as translated by Thomas Cleary.
(image from Flickr user Elizabeth Thomsen)
Boston Globe readers will make well to note a killer piece submitted today by humorist extraordinaire John Hodgman, a man I profoundly respect as a fairly new entry to the ranks of Massachusetts’ great deadpan comics (that is, Steven Wright, Stacey Robarge, and that’s about it). It’s a great little number, which starts out eccentric, waxes historical, and ends a little cute, although not so introspective as to be cheesy.
In the west, the state is as straight and uncomplicated as a flag, its little valleys sheltering what passes for our farm belt. The center gives way to the semicircle of former paper mill towns and textile mill towns crowding up to the capital. And then we are on the eastern shores, ragged and tangled in history, the Maine-like hump of the North Shore stretching down and curving up into the weird withered arm of Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims landed and started the whole thing.
The effect is such that, if you look at a map of Massachusetts and squint your eyes, you might imagine you are looking at the nation itself, only with no Texas, and a horribly deformed Florida. You might be tempted to believe that the whole country shaped itself in Massachusetts’s honor. Certainly many in Massachusetts have believed so.
It’s a must-read for those of us from our proud, isolationist, arrogant little state.
p.s. – who knew Hodgman’s dad was from Fitchburg? Makes me proud.
The Sting
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Cool Hand Luke
The Verdict
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
I hear he was the Stage Manager in a production of Our Town recently as well. That would have been something to behold.
Take it easy, Paul.
Amidst the campaign suspensions, market collapse, and debate dodging, people are still finding time in the judiciary to interpret the parts of our world that don’t involve politics and Wall Street:
Chalk one up to those of us trying to toss out the RIAA’s “Making Available” theroy (the theory that simply making copyrighted material accessable online violates US copyright laws).
Chalk one down to those of us trying to protect the free speech of minors. I don’t have the knowledge to comment on this professionally, but I find the ruling that dismisses the lawsuit two eighth graders filed over their suspension for comments made about their principal on MySpace as missing the point. Free speech is restricted on school grounds, true, but can you say this took place on school grounds? Are we interpreting anything that can be accessed from school as happening on school grounds? Anyone else think it’s a little odd that the case rests on the interpretation of two cases that occured inside of a school? Did the defendant school district persuade the judge to interpret the MySpace claims as taking place “inside” of school – somewhat plausable especially if they could prove that the student actually wrote those things while at school – or are we fit to redraw the boundaries of a “school district” just because the speech here is vulgar?
Any news agency that wants to use “In Loco Parentis goes Loco” as a headline to this story has my blessing.
Wish I could say I took this photo, but I didn’t. The photo’s from erin m.
I also wish the gigs I used to have would give me over 100 days to build a stage. I think the most we ever snagged was 40.
Here’s my unrequested, voluntary submission to Taylor’s Vote Better campaign:
In the (little to no) free time I have here in school, I’ve been reading up on my game theory. I’m not being a gunner; I just find it something that’s intellectually stimulating without being so exam-pertinent and doused in Latin and legalese. I can rationalize this as valid education, too. In my experience, good lawyers use skills learned in law school to apply the facts to the law and advise clients to the best of their ability given their prudence and knowledge. Great lawyers use law, naturally, but also postulate on predictable outcomes and rival tactics by mixing in game theory (and poker playing) in their methods. The big caveat to this being that game theory is more or less formed on the presumption that people will act rationally, and as anyone who opens a law textbook will tell you, some of these people ain’t so rational.
But living in DC exposes me to a great deal of politics (as does turning on a television or opening a newspaper), and I can’t help but think about that through the lens of game theory, too. I’ve been frustrated about this election – and perhaps this is the spillover emotion from 2004 that will no doubt materialize every four years or so, or perhaps this is residual stress from school, or perhaps I just have a hard time with how we are framing our political discourse. I think we might need a little objective theory.
Being from Massachusetts, I cannot mention this guy without thinking “who put the bomp… in the bomp… shabomp… shabomp…“
Nor can I forget “Bilbo Baggins.”
And then I think of Star Trek. This is no disrespect to one of the greatest shows of all time. All three of these things are never far from my conscience.
Nimoy was on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” this weekend, and had an amusing little anecdote about the Presidential election. The group were trading stories about encounters at Sci-Fi conventions, when Mr. Nimoy busts out this little chestnut:
Well, we [the Star Trek franchise] appeal to a wide spectrum of an audience, and as a matter of fact about a year and a half ago I was at a political event, and one of our current campaigners for President of the United States saw me as he approached the podium, and he gave me the vulcan signal. It was not John McCain.
Taylor, feel free to use that in your next installment of “Vote Better.”
(I used to have this tacked up on my office wall - not directly related to the article, but still funny)
Daniel Reynolds is a 3L at the University of Minnesota Law School who recently wrote an article in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology on the history of the RIAA’s litigation tactics and suggestions for alternatives to the RIAA’s current plan to mitigate the rise of illegal downloading. (more…)
Cashing In – Minor Threat
(you might have already seen this in Wired or BoingBoing – apologies if that’s true)
Here’s a dirty little secret from the music industry that will surprise almost noone but still turn a stomach or two: large-market firms pay huge sums of money to have singers namedrop brands in their songs. I can’t say personally if this is true, but if ad agencies are to be believed, every brand-drop you hear in songs post-Kodachrome isn’t just an artist trying to capture the zeitgeist of our consumer-driven culture. It’s straight-up, full-on paid advertisment.
