Posting again

Okay, I'm a bit more on the move again.  There's still likely to be lighter-than-usual posting the next few days.

But at least I'll be doing some more blogging.  Good thing, too.  Monday afternoon I came to a sudden epiphany:  "I'm actually sitting here watching a cable documentary about Nostradamus."

So, for today's link, I can't do better than Jerry Brown's latest: Free Sigarchi 02/23/05. Speaking of his comments section, he says:

It is curious how people perceive platitudes and extremism on my part when I perceive the same thing in them. Schopenhauer said that extracting truth from oneself required putting one’s mind on a rack and subjecting it to relentless interrogation—so prone are we to delusion and denial. Of course, the ideologues know nothing of such anguish because they rarely leave the refuge of their own tightly held identities.

And he did an obituary for Hunter Thompson on 02/21/05:

Hunter S. Thompson took muckraking to an outer edge in the early 1970s, when he was among the first to detect the rancid odor of White House corruption. His screeds against the sitting president were overwrought and tinged with paranoia, but Nixon’s resignation would vindicate his torrid animadversions. As California’s secretary of state, I had to yank the notary public commission of Nixon’s personal lawyer. It seems that he notarized a backdated deed of Nixon’s papers so that the president could qualify for a charitable deduction—illegally. These were unusual times.

Thompson’s personal life was not as grounded as his work, but as Dr. Gonzo often observed, via Dr. Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”  In the end, it seems, the pain caught up with him out on Owl Farm. Like a Chekhov story, the firearms he favored during a turbulent life figured in the manner of his untimely exit.