Wal-Mart

It was pretty scuzzy weather thanks to a rather slow-moving warm front.  The pilot in me knew this, and also knew that if you didn't mind getting wet, then the air is pretty stable during warm fronts, and therefore the flying really isn't that bad, if you have your IFR qualifications up to date (but I don't, says the poor blogger) and don't mind not seeing where you're going.

It was not, however, a good day to be outside if you're a parent of a two year old who seems to have some sort of divining rod for the slightest bit of damp mud or any puddles within a five-mile radius.  He only has so many clothes, you see, and we refuse to do more than two loads of laundry per day.

Sunday Quote 60610

A rather longish passage from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which fits in very well, I think, with this recent blog post by Seth Godin.

I apologize for the delay, here's another Sunday Quote!

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch.  But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.  Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose.  There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about.  Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous.  And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect.  Most of the machinery of modern language is labor-saving machinery; and it saves mental labor very much more than it ought.  Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.  Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains.  We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.  It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.  If you say, " The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull.  But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think.  The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.  There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp 116-17


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