Some badass quotes by Thomas Jefferson concerning religion and politics, from humanismbyjoe.com.

"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions. . . . I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrine."

"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

My top five all-time favorite medical journal titles (btw, my day job is at the Countway Library of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. I'm a library assistant, which I have taken to abbreviating as "Library Ass"):

1. Journal of Human Lactation. Might as well get the obvious one out of the way.

2. American Journal of Insanity. Classic.

3. Depression and Anxiety. I'll let the library catalog entry for this one explain why: "Formed by the union of: Anxiety; and: Depression". I'll say! How did these two ever get along without each other?

4. EMBO Journal. I just like the name on this one. It always soothes me when I'm in the stacks. It sounds like Rambo's little brother.

and

5. Folding and Design. Not an origami journal, no no. I think it has something to do with proteins, but damned if I know for certain. Hey, I only work here.

Of course combine this decision with the Supreme Court's ruling today that school vouchers are A-OK, and I guess it's two steps forward and two steps back? Ah, America...

My response to Alan Wolfe's Salon essay about why the Ninth Circuit's ruling the Pledge of Allegiance unconstituional was a bad idea (in the form of a letter to Salon's Editor):

Wow. Talk about missing the boat entirely. Alan Wolfe's essay on why the Ninth Circuit's decision ruling the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional was (in his opinion) wrong is a perfect collection of the presumptuous sort of thinking that lead to such a legal challenge in the first place. To wit:

1. "God was the best available alternative, broad enough to be inclusive of just about everyone in 1950s America who believed in something." That sounds like a pretty wide net at first, but suppose that you include along with the atheists all of the agnostics and freethinkers out there who would rather not put a name or face out there responsible for the cosmos and beyond. Mind you, this would include most of our Founding Fathers - despite Ari Fleischer's claim that the Declaration of Independence uses the word God "three or four times", in fact the word is only used once and it's a pretty hedged usage at that: "...the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" - whatever that means, but it sure doesn't sound like the God that our President and Senators are so chummy with these days, does it?

2. "Those who believe in more than one God still believe in at least one." Alan Wolfe suggests that adding an 's' will bridge the gap between the polytheists and monotheists of the world, but the problem here isn't singulars or plurals, but the notion of exclusivity. When a Christian, Jew, or Muslim says the word "God", he or she is referring not to an abstract concept, but a specific divine being, one of whose most important commandments is to reject all other gods. *That's* why the word "God" doesn't work - not because it's a singular noun, but because it's a loaded one.

3. "But nothing about the pledge is coercive. Students can opt out of saying it." Where did this man go to school? Certainly not where I grew up - and not too long ago either, mind you! - where such a refusal could lead to ridicule, suspension, or worse.

Finally, Alan Wolfe trots out the old argument that since "faith is essential to how we Americans define ourselves collectively", then we must reject any attempt to remove the language of faith from our public discourse. I think it's only appropriate to let Jesus Christ himself rebut that one:

"When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.

"But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." (Matthew 6:6)

'Nuff said, I think!

Crap. The Greek font didn't post below. Will try and fix that.

"Down the shore."

As in: "Next week I will be down the shore, visiting my folks." What a great Jerseyism.

Homer has something close. In Book One of the Iliad, the priest Chryses, having been ill-received by Agamemnon, goes away pretty steamed towards the beaches of Troy to call in the ancient equivalent of an air strike on the insolent Greeks, courtesy of his divine patron Apollo. The Greek here is quite lovely - âç ä' áêåùí ðáñá èéíá ðïëõöëïéóâïéï èáëáóóçò - "and he went, silent, down to the shore of the much-roaring sea" (my translation).

I've seen other translations of this, and it seems most people want to turn ðáñá èéíá into "by the sea", forgetting that while ðáñá can mean "by" or "beside", when used with verbs of motion (here âç), it almost always has a sense of that motion attached to it as well. Furthermore, the accusative case itself connotes motion towards a goal. If Homer had wanted to paint a picture of Chryses walking along the shore, he could just as well have used the dative case, which is motion-neutral, as the object of the preposition ðáñá, and not the accusative, without even disrupting the meter of the line as it stands. No, I'm thinking Homer had an idea of Chryses storming away from the Greek generals' headquarters and towards the water's edge.

Now the "down" part is all me, but it's not unwarranted if you know a thing or two about the ways the Greeks oriented themselves spatially. In Greek literature, away from the beach is always "up" and towards the water is always "down", even if you're not necessarily talking about the island of Santorini and what seems like ten thousand steps from the boat to the center of town. This sense has carried through into English, as my Jersey expression "down the shore" demonstrates. For those of you who haven't been to South Jersey, let me assure you that there is no topography there whatsoever, unless you're counting landfills. Since all of SoJo is pretty much at sea level, "down" and "up" don't make much sense, but they're the preferred directions when talking about your summer vacation plans.

So even though Homer isn't actually saying "down (to) the shore", I think he's meaning it, in the looser sense that a modern Greek or even Jerseyan would understand. If Chryses were clambering down a cliff to the water's edge, Homer would probably have used another preposition such as êáôá, but the "down"-ness of going to the beach is implicit here, I think, so I'm going to stand by my somewhat free translation. Besides, it has a nice ring to it.

All this from thinking about going to Jersey for the 4th of July!

I've been at work for about six hours now, and I haven't done a damned thing yet. Nor do I intend to.

Spent the morning watch South Korea lose to Germany. A good fight, though, and a damned good run for the Red Devils. I just barely made the 10:18 train into North Station, giving myself shin splints in order to cover the 7/10's a mile from my house to the Lynn stop in a little over ten minutes (ouch!). Trying to imagine how much it would suck if those idiot conservatives manage to succeed in killing Amtrak, leaving all of us who depend on commuter trains up shit creek without a paddle. Thank God the Senators from the Northeast Corridor have risen to the occasion, making it clear that for many of us Easterners the option to drive instead is not always an option. Truth be told, my wife has a car and - rarity of rarities - a free parking spot in the city of Boston, and so we often do drive in, but living along the train route gives us the freedom not to have to battle traffic every morning, especially if it's a beautiful day and the walk down to the station would do us good. Because that commute is for the birds. Who would honestly rather sit in his or her car in bumper to bumper congestion, rather than sit on a fast-moving train for an uninterrupted half hour or so that could be dedicated to reading, napping, or just plain zoning out?

But the conservatives tell us that trains should pay for themselves, that "it's not up to the federal government to subsidize a whole transportation system." Excuse me? Do our highways pay for themselves? Do the airlines? Not a chance. If we ever billed taxpayers by the mile for driving on Interstates, there'd be a revolution in a heartbeat. Highway tolls are already anathema, although they're tiny compared to the true costs of road building and maintenance. And airlines - hah! We gave them $15 billion for allowing the worst terrorist attack on American soil to happen, and then told them they really didn't have to comply with all the conditions Congress originally attached to the handout, like making sure that 100% of all checked luggage is screened before takeoff (and according to the recent figures I've heard, still only 1 in 20 pieces of checked baggage is actually screened prior to being loaded onto an American passenger airline!), and the tax breaks that air carriers and the manufacturers of aircraft were getting already makes the amount Amtrak was asking for in order to stay afloat look like a pittance.

How about this for a modest proposal - instead of slashing the budget for passenger rail, why don't we give it a third of the transporation budget, then give another third to the highways, and then another third to the airlines. *Then* let's see which form of transportation is the dead weight, and which isn't. Does anyone honestly believe that if we had a decent, high-speed rail network that spanned the country that people would prefer to be crammed into tiny flying sardine cans whose security is still highly suspect to say the least? "But airplanes can take you right there..." When's the last time you flew a direct flight to anywhere, without having to pay through the nose for the privilege? Whereas trains don't take you through the corporate hub in Atlanta, when you're going from Boston to Chicago.

I'm sorry. People just aren't thinking straight on this one. So much money has corrupted our transportation policy (the airline industry, the trucking industry, the suburban construction industry, the automotive industry, et cetera, all plunking down major league contributions to ensure that railroads are run out on a rail) and yet most Americans still actually believe that things are the way they are due to market forces and consumer choice. As if! You want market forces? You want consumer choice? Fine - everyone gets a transponder that meters their highway usage, and every plane ticket must cost what it actually costs the company to fly you from point A to point B, sans tax breaks, infrastructure, and multi-billion dollar bailouts. Only then can you lay that out against the cost of keeping Amtrak afloat and make a logical and informed decision. Anything else is motivated by ideology, plain and simple. Or worse.

For a brief moment this weekend, I think I understood how a Gloucester fisherman feels.

My brother-in-law and I went to what has become our favorite fishing spot again, on the pier between Lynn and Revere Beach, this time armed with a fresh change of bait (clams and mackerel, instead of herring) and blessing from the wife to stay and fish for as long as we damned well pleased. About an hour after dead low tide, we started getting big bites on our bait as the incoming ocean brought in some hungry sea creatures, and next thing you know George is pulling his first striped bass out of the water. What a beautiful fish! But it was rather small, so he threw it back without even thinking about it, although a family of Cambodians crabbing off the pier thought he was crazy. Then he catches another striper! Again, it's a little on the tiny side, so back in the water it goes. And yet another! At this point I'm starting to feel a little left out, but before I have time to feel sorry for myself I get a huge hit on my line, and as I try to reel it in and I can feel whatever I've hooked is zigging and zagging and bending my pole so far that I'm afraid it's going to snap. I reel my cheap little Wal-Mart reel as hard as I can, hoping the whole contraption won't disintegrate before I get this fish up onto the pier, and then I see it. A striper! And he's twice as large as the ones my brother-in-law has been catching. Immediately I'm thinking about how I'm going to cook this thing (I love to cook, and especially seafood!), when I hear one of the old salts fishing alongside of us say, "that's probably a 19-incher," and then my heart starts to sink. 19 inches! No way! It's gotta be bigger than that. But no, I haul this big elegant fish up onto the wooden deck and someone whips out a tape measure, and what I thought had to be easily more than two feet long turns out to be between 18 and 19 inches, well short of the 28-inch legal minimum size for a "keeper".

My first thought, standing right there, realizing that I had to throw my catch back was this: To hell with the law, I'll keep it anyway. What right do some pencil pushers in the Department of Fish and Wildlife have to tell me what I take from the sea and what I don't? Then I thought: Well, if I don't keep it, who's to say that someone else won't catch it five minutes later and take it home themselves? The Cambodian crabbers already though my brother-in-law was demented for throwing back small fry - what are they going to make of me tossing back something almost twice as big? So I stewed and I stewed, railed against the injustice of the situation, and briefly contemplated keeping the fish again before I finally made the realization that this is what it must feel like to be a professional fisherman ALL THE TIME. Elation at the catch, indignation at the law, but a gnawing sense of guilt at the thought of taking too much, too soon. In the end I tossed the big silvery fish back into the deep, where I knew it belonged, hoping we'd meet again someday.

Well, I guess it was inevitable, but America's wild World Cup ride has come to an end, although I must say it was edifying merely to watch the Germans take our soccer team seriously. Now all of my hopes are on South Korea to take its Cinderella story all the way to the top. I guess a Senegal v. Brazil upset would also be an amazing thing, as well, but let's not kid ourselves. Watching this Brazilian team play even the "good" teams of this Cup is like watching the Harlem Globetrotters run circles around their no-name adversaries, and although I'd like to see the Red Devils take it all, the smart money says that Brazil is now the unbeatable team to beat. I guess we'll all just have to lose more sleep and see!

Okay. This is totally square, but my first solo attempt at web design "for hire" is apparently a hit. I know for a fact that this is a pale imitation of anything out there that's actually cool, but still it feels good that someone out there was impressed. And I didn't even have Photoshop at my disposal... (patience, Grasshopper)

Courtesy of the BBC Sports World Cup coverage:

Perugia have decided not to renew the contract of Ahn Jung-Hwan, the South Korean midfielder whose golden goal knocked Italy out of the World Cup. Ahn Jung-Hwan, who missed a penalty earlier in the match, was hailed as a national hero in Korea when he headed home the winner in the 116th minute of the second round match.

Perugia chairman Luciano Gaucci linked the non-renewal of Ahn Jung-Hwan's contract to his role in Italy's defeat.

"That gentleman will never set foot in Perugia again," club chairman Luciano Gaucci told sports' daily La Gazzetta dello Sport.

"He was a phenomenon only when he played against Italy.

"I am a nationalist and I regard such behaviour not only as an affront to Italian pride but also an offence to a country which two years ago opened its doors to him.

"I have no intention of paying a salary to someone who has ruined Italian soccer."

But a Perugia spokesman insisted the club had decided to release Ahn even before the World Cup tie.

Ahn Jung-Hwan joined Perugia on loan from the South Korean team Pusan Icons in the summer of 2000, but he scored just five goals in 29 appearances.

Korea's victory has been greeted with fury in Italy, where the referee and soccer's ruling body Fifa have been accused of fixing the match.

Even before scoring his goal, Ahn Jung-Hwan, with his model looks, was a huge celebrity in Korea, the closest thing the Koreans have to David Beckham.

He is married to a former Miss Korea, Lee Hye-Won.

Times like this make me ashamed to be a son of Italy, but there's some ironic comfort here - one of my uncles (a Bruno) married a woman from South Korea, and somehow everyone managed to live happily ever after. Which all just goes to demonstrate how much of a big steaming crock of shit nationalism truly is, when everything is said and done.

Go Red Devils!

Israel: "We won't leave until you stop blowing us up."

Palestine: "We won't stop blowing you up until you leave."

Yeah, this is going to end well. In desperate need of restoring your faith in humanity? Follow this link. Someone overlaid the lyrics to Eminem's "Without Me" to the music of Shakira's "Wherever, Whenever", and it's no exaggeration to say that the result is transcendentally awesome. Listen and be healed, brothers and sisters!

New arrivals to my stack of Books I Want To Read:

Bright Lights, Big City. By Jay McInerney. An interesting foray into the second-person narrative that a good friend of mine just recommended. I liked the movie which featured a dark and complicated portrayal of the book's protagonist by Michael J. Fox. So we'll see.

Throwing Fire. By Alfred Crosby. Exploring the history of projectile warfare, from hairy apes throwing rocks to not-so-hairy apes throwing cruise missiles. There's a personal dimension here, too - I had the good fortunate of spending an evening at Mr. Crosby's Austin, Texas residence, when I was a student intern for an NEH-sponsored summer seminar that his wife was directing. At the time he had just written an excellent book called Ecological Imperialism : The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, a thesis which ended up being popularized by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, though the former book is a more dispassionate inquiry into the matter I think. I had a Tecate and some chips and salsa with the one guy on his back porch, though, so perhaps therein lies my bias. In any case, I'm looking forward to cracking this puppy open.

Ten reasons to miss Jersey (after all, this page is called The Jersey Exile):

1. Pork roll. If you have to ask, don't bother.

2. Philly Cheesesteaks. "Wit", of course.

3. Atlantic City. You can keep your precious Las Vegas and those mall-sized Native American supercasinos!

4. Tastykakes. Yes, there's a lot of food involved here.

5. Skee-ball. The sport of the gods. (cf. Kevin Smith's film Dogma)

6. All night diners. And lots of them.

7. Birch Beer. Pennsylvania Dutch style, with the artificial coloring to make it red.

8. The Pine Barrens. Home of the Jersey Devil.

9. Ocean Drive. Thirty miles of rickety bridges and gorgeous saltmarsh vistas.

10. WaWa. The best convenience store in the universe.

Hey, just found this pretty cool page about eating skate. And how about another one right here, from which I quote:

For many years, the finicky French have revered the skate, serving it up with brown butter or lemon caper sauce and calling it gastronomique. In fact, about 95 percent of the skate caught in American waters is exported to France where they gladly accept the fish that Americans don’t have much taste for.

That still doesn't mean anyone in my house would have eaten it, if I had brought it home. But at least I have someone on my side! (The French are always there when you need them for all matters culinary)

A postscript to my George Lucas / Great Schism rant -

Just for the record, (if there's anyone out there who's actually reading this stuff!) I am a confirmed Catholic, although I haven't done Penance or taken Communion in close to twenty years, and I was married in the Greek Orthodox Church to my wife Maria in 1999, which is allowed for anyone baptized into a branch of Christianity that recognizes the Holy Trinity. All that having been said, I consider my a Catholic in extremely bad standing, and have done so pretty much since I was a little know-it-all brat. My objections to the present day Throne of Peter have softened over time, but I still find the doctrine of Papal Infallibility absolutely indefensible. The Orthodox may have their own quirkinesses, but at least their most authoritative bodies reserve the right to be wrong, human beings being what they are. And that's pretty refreshing for a dogma.

Personally I think religion is more trouble than it is worth, but I respect the rights of others to worship the divine aspect(s) of their choosing, so long as in doing so they don't shoot up abortion clinics or fly commercial airliners into choice Manhattan real estate in the process. Or tell me how to envision God. I tend to vacillate between thinking of the universe as one big happy ball of metaphysical Force-energy (damn you to hell, George Lucas!) and seeing it as a cosmic game of dizzy bat, where we're all spinning, spinning, spinning, and then trying our hardest to run in a straight line, even though we all damned well know that it's a lost cause. Oh, yeah, and sometime's I think God's out to get me personally. But that's probably just the caffeine talking.

Another day, another... flounder?

My brother-in-law and I went fishing this weekend, on an unseasonably cold Father's Day. Fortunately the rain from the night before had pretty much cleared out, so even though it was chilly it was a good day to fish. George caught a flounder before I even had time to rig my own line! And then I caught a skate, which has to be one of the ugliest sea creatures I've ever had the opportunity to see alive and up close. I also had something that looked like a severed tentacle stuck to my hook that squirted water when I tried to take it off. A sea cucumber? Truly weird.

After our initial success, we then settled in for a four-hour stretch of feeding the fish. But you know what? It didn't really matter. There's something about being out on that pier between Lynn and Revere when the tide is coming in so strong that you'd swear you were white-water rafting, I have to say, that makes me wonder why it's taken me so many years of living in New England to finally buy a rod and reel and get out and try to catch some fish.

There was a Cuban man crabbing off the pier right next to us. We struck up a conversation, and asked him what he was going to do with all the crabs he caught (we assumed he'd use them for bait, or maybe cook them down into broth like the Cambodian and Vietnamese crabbers do). He told us he'd take them home and give them to his wife, who would cover them with Chinese fish sauce until they'd basically been pickled in the brine, at which point you can eat them as a snack. Never in a million years would I have guessed that! And it sounds mighty tasty, although I'd worry about eating shellfish downstream from the General Electric plant... Then again, I've heard of people eating blue crabs out of the Meadowlands and Newark Bay all their lives, and what on earth could be more toxic than that?

So the score this season, after three days of fishing: George 1, Me 1. Skates may be ugly, but a fish is a fish!

"...there is a darkness. It is for everyone... only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who very well know where they are."

- Saul Bellow

Books I'm reading right now (kind of grazing among three of them):

1. Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Favorite quote so far: "Much of the taste and aroma of American fast food, for example, is now manufactured off the New Jersey Turnpike."

2. On The Greek Style, by George Seferis. An excellent collection of essays and lectures from the Nobel Prize-winning Greek author.

3. Bully For Brontosaurus, by Stephen J. Gould. Bought ages ago, never read. Then the big guy has to go and die. Well, I must say I'm sorry I didn't start this book sooner. I've always had enormous respect for Mr. Gould, but I had no idea how far and wide his interests actually ranged. Everything fascinated him, from the evolutionary biology of sea snails to the ironies of historical accidents to comparative linguistics to the agony of the Boston Red Sox, and he had a singular gift for sharing his enthusiasm for the world with the world.

About the "Great Schism" that now exists among Star Wars fans:

I was thinking about this a little more, and what I thought of first as a throwaway line really works! Okay, first a brief recap for the historically challenged - the Great Schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches occurred in 1054, the primary cause of which was the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope) with respect to the other Bishops of the Christian world. That and a string of theological "innovations" promulgated by the Papacy that were never recognized by the rest of the Church made a showdown inevitable, and after a string of four off-again, on-again separations between East and West, the final break was made almost a thousand years ago.

Back to Star Wars. Let's assume that there was once an undivided body of Star Wars faithful, or at least one that was not nearly as polarized as it is now. The Old Trilogy is in the can, and the New Trilogy still just a gleam in the Creator's eye. Enter the so-called "Special Editions" of the original movies, marketed as a digital clean-up of the old prints, but suspiciously stuffed with "innovations", such as enhanced special effects, CGI embellishments, and entirely new scenes. The majority of the fans line up happily for this altered trilogy and are satisfied, but a small yet vocal group of purists decries what is seen as an adulteration of the original masterpieces. At the time this argument seemed a trifle overblown, but in retrospect was just the tip of the iceberg. Fast forward to the debut of The Phantom Menace, the much-hyped first installation in George Lucas' new Star Wars trilogy. Again, a certain segment of the faithful accept it without criticism, but this time an almost equal amount of fans blast it as being an unworthy successor-predecessor to Episodes IV, V, and VI. Massive flame-wars erupt on the Internet, and the first hints of irreconcilable differences among fans become apparent. Still, many write off this movie as a warm-up for Lucas, who hadn't directed a movie for decades, and express their faith that Episode II will be a vast improvement and save the New Trilogy.

That was then, this is now. Attack Of The Clones is out, and the reviews once again are mixed. This time, however, there is a remarkable absence of "wait and see" fence sitters, as there was after The Phantom Menace. With the second movie of this trilogy done and finished, few detractors of Lucas' latter-day works are willing to hold out hope for any last-minute miracles that will redeem what they now see as fundamentally flawed movies. The still-loyal fans, on the other hand, have only increased their strident support of the new additions, and taken the extreme step of branding anyone criticizing them as not being "true" Star Wars fans at all. What was once a philosophical disagreement among peers has now turned into an ideological conflict between two opposing camps - the Orthodox, who maintain that the Original Trilogy had a magic whose essence has been diminished by George Lucas' revisions and his New Trilogy; and the Papists, for whom George Lucas and the denizens of Skywalker Ranch can do no wrong.

And consider this: it has been rumored on such websites as Ain't It Cool News that George Lucas is withholding the release of the Original Trilogy on DVD until he is done with the New Trilogy, so that he may add even more footage and innovation to Episodes IV, V, and VI, including scenes using actors from Episodes I, II, and III. Now it's no secret that George has consistently referred to the Star Wars movies as "works in progress", and no one can fault directors for wanting to perfect what they see as flaws in their own work, provided that they allow their fans access to their original work, and give them the capacity to decide which is better on their own. In light of the fact that there are no known plans for the release of the Original Trilogy in its original, unaltered form, forgive me for being a little more cynical about Rome's motives on this one. For just as the Catholic Church, having broken with the rest of Christendom, then set itself to the task of rewriting Christian history to make the Pope's primacy and infallibility both inevitable and irrefutable, so too has George Lucas, having heard the voices of dissent, apparently opted to squash his critics by erasing the very foundation of their protest.