OF A GOLDEN AGE

Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech is the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And here, from the Caustic Cover Critic, this preview of Penguin’s latest set of Great Ideas volumes:

What a magnificent design. The others in the Great Ideas series are equally compelling.

Things you never think you’ll do: Espouse the good works of the United States Postal Service.

Sure, FedEx and UPS do fast-turnover deliveries and do them well for the most part, but they cost an unreasonable amount for your average Joe or Jane who doesn’t care about the time frame. Paying $15 to ship a couple of volumes of Time Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown that cost 50¢ each at East Dundee’s Community Thrift Store defeats the purpose of the gesture.

I shipped three parcels — 1.2 pounds to Beloit, Wisconsin; 4.3 pounds to Minneapolis, Minnesota; and 3.7 pounds to Fairbanks, Alaska (“Honey, you sure? That’s gonna take twelve business days!”) — for a grand total of $11.08. FedEx’s cheapest rates combine to over $50. Plus, the post office lady had some bodacious acrylic nails.

Moreover . . .
– The new Love stamp doesn’t make me hurl,
– The Simpsons are on their own stamp series, and
– The beautiful Abraham Lincoln stamp series is still available.

Good on you, USPS. I’m not holding my breath for this to continue.

Unnecessary side note: Did you know that some kinds of biodegradable packing peanuts are edible? This is not an endorsement, merely a trivium.

Writing about Abraham Lincoln the other day brought it to my attention that this is really the year of Lincoln. His 200th birthday is approaching fast and Barack Obama clearly has an epic head-of-state crush on him. This means that for me, a notorious Lincolnphile with a head-of-state crush of my own, these are times ripe for the picking. Here are some examples.

• The New York Times story I posted the other day (“From Books, New President Found Voice”).

• This interactive feature, also from the Times, by which you may compare inaugural addresses from Washington to the present. Lincoln was one of the few presidents to prominently feature the word “constitution” in his speech.

• “Why Doesn’t Every President Use the Lincoln Bible?” from Slate describes an upcoming Library of Congress exhibition of “Lincolniana,” a word that makes me want to hurl regardless of my Lincolnphile status.

• My otherwise-terrible hometown has a beautiful statue of Lincoln, and once hosted him as an overnight guest following a speech. The site of the speech is marked by an engraved rock, while the inn where he stayed tries to utilize this connection. Too bad Oregon is still shitty!

• The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum opened in 2005. I still have not been, and this is really a travesty. Of course, I’ll have to lock myself in and never leave, a la From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

I’ve decided to write a series of posts on my favorite things. They will be issued as I get the itch to describe things and why I love them.

Andy directed me to this New York Times story about Barack Obama’s reading habits, and I love it because of the following:

Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves.

Yes! Obama may be Harvard-educated, but he has followed a Lincolnish self-educating Great Booksy curriculum in his own life. His questioning attitude toward life and his professional pursuits indicates that Obama would wring more meaning from a reading of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax than Bush did from the 95 books he purportedly read last year.

► Nothing synergizes my day like an article about Abraham Lincoln in the New York Times. The comparison of plaster casts from 1860 and 1865 is a meaningful reminder that each president experiences the kind of stress that likely shortens each of their natural lives, even barring a terrible death like that of President Lincoln. Hell, look at a photo of George W. Bush in 2000 and today. Regardless of how you feel about the man, you can see the stress he wears in his face.

► Math solitaire via FreeArcade.com — oh, my goodness, I am not going to get work done ever again. The splash screen includes the word “operand”!!

► One of our customers had an email address at this domain: Online-Buddies.com. It sounded, well, exactly how it is. Any legitimate business homepage with a press release about MANHUNT gets a chortle out of this kid.

Oh, bother. Michael Crichton, progenitor of Jurassic Park and its resulting sequels and movie franchise, has died of cancer at age 66.

What Star Wars likely is to you and your childhood, Crichton is to me and mine. Crichton meant the world to me because JP and his other novels were the way I learned about the huge ups and downs possible through the application of human brilliance. His characters were smart and flawed, sometimes greedy, sometimes overwhelmed, and his stories were near-future cautionary tales against reckless science.

Then of course he created ER, one of the most successful television shows ever, based on his own training and expertise as an MD.

This is especially sad because Crichton helped bridge the gap between pop fiction and something deeper and more stimulating.

As a side note, he was 6’9″, a fact that I greatly appreciated as a 5’11″, thirteen-year-old girl. He would have towered even over Abraham Lincoln, my perennial childhood hero. But not over Lincoln’s hat. Barack Obama, by the way, made three Lincoln shoutouts in his victory speech, holding Lincoln up as the catalyst of the Republican party and an example of cross-partisan ideals. I suspect we are on the way to something wonderful.

in my statistics class we are studying hypothesis testing and how to determine if two samples (i.e. pools of data, in this case life expectancy and heights of presidents: i like presidents! i like height! it’s pretty sweet, though they do not include abraham lincoln because his life ended in an early and unfair fashion) are statistically comparable.

having recently completed a problem in which i decided that two variances were close enough to be considered equal, i wondered: at what point did we decide to declare equal things which are NOT equal? 86.9 and 73.6 are not the same, though apparently they can be used this way when making additional calculations.

this is weird, and a little scary. i need more information.