GROUCHINGS: Dead blogs; Chimera culture

• My grouchiness:

Evil Steve, now on top of Fiat Mihi, has quit blogging. I'm a little tweaked about this.

Selfishly tweaked, because the League of Evil Traditionalists has been a great boon to my traffic. Hopefully the League will be continued in some fashion. Maybe I'll volunteer if no one else does, if he gives up ring maintenance.

Also, I enjoyed those two blogs and I'm sorry to see them go.

Otherwise tweaked, because the main reason they gave, that the blog was too time consuming, is a good reason, but confounds me.

The upside of daydreamery is that temperence is a built-in virtue; I'm too ADD (or whatever you want to call it) to keep interest in anything very long. Thus, it's always a bit tough for me to comprehend when people get really "into" anything for more than a week, or spend enough time on any one thing that it becomes obstructive to Life.

Teachers, for example, almost practice their profession as a religion. Other folks I know have gotten way too into booze - or even positive things, like working out or their career.

Granted, my inability to retain interest carries its own inherent sins, so there is no judging going on here; but I'll never relate to obsession.

So I guarantee gentle readers that while I won't post every day, the blog will be around for years to come.

• The grouchiness of others:

Terry Graham doesn't like Spanish, via the Julian Calendar:

"Like most Americans, I am sick and tired of being force-fed all things in Spanish, and being Hispanified and Latinized as part of my everyday experience. The 11th Commandment, 'Press 1 for English,' makes me want to push the offender’s Doomsday Button and say Adios!"

Amen sistah! Some say Latinos make the U.S. culturally richer. No. A rich culture is one that is self-defined and has reached a high peak of that definition. Would 12 million New Yorkers make Nepal more "culturally rich?" No, just less Nepalese. Here are some other examples:

• Steak is good. Peanut butter is good. Peanut Steak Butter ... not so good.
• Red is nice. Blue is nice. Blue are Red are Purple, not "richer" Blue or Red. They cease to be either.
• Jazz is good. Chant is good. Rockabilly is good. Chantabilly Jazz is something only Andy Warhol could love.

Think about cabbage. Broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, kale, and collard greens are all examples of humanity refining the raw cabbage plant into something distinct and beautiful over generations of labor. Open borders destroy the distinction and beauty of both parties.

"Truly, language actively shapes, and reflects, an individual’s and a nation’s world view. ... This basic Top Dog/runt social construct is reflected in the Spanish word for “you” ('Usted'), which is capitalized. One’s self is relegated to the lower case, lower class “yo”, which means “I”.

Well, now I kinda like Spanish. Of course, Japanese is better, which (if my memory serves) has seven sets of pronouns depending on your social status and sex.

"The reverse is true in English, where 'I' is capitalized and the other, 'you,' is expressed in lower case, championing the power of the individual while reflecting the diminished, secondary status of others, be they presidents, kings/queens, or groups. We terminated the King/subject-serf relationship ... No more Thou/Thee, except for God.

Despite the author's Jacobin opinions, these are terrible drawbacks of modern English: self-centeredness and pride.

Looking back to point one, Iberianizing English doesn't make it better English, it makes it Spanglish, purple, peanut steak butter, or something akin to what the French did to the Louvre.

The situation is akin to the Novus cOrdo, where they mashed everything together and came out with mud.