Are you still?

For my daughter Amelia.

Are you still as beautiful as when we last met?

No. You are fairer still.
And filled with light and whimsy.

You wear beauty gently.
A gossamer gown flowing with light.

I stop. I stare and stutter.
Beauty overcomes and my joy is complete.

Where did such wondrous grace emerge?
What sorcerer conjured you from dust?

Twas God and Nature and Truth together.
For none could by themselves.

I revel in your shadow.
And wonder that you are my child.

No one deserves such bounty.
No man could hold such wealth.

All one can do is to love and be loved.
By that which cannot be possessed.

To love my own blood. To love you. My Amelia.

ATM Monopoly takes all of the fun out of the fraud

ATM Monopoly? This is going to absolutely ruin the game. When we were kids we always played "Attack" Monopoly. It specifically mandated fraud and theft as essential to a well played Attack Monopoly session. Indeed the discovery and prosecution of monopolistic practices, banker peculation, misrepresentation and secret player collusion were always the high points of the game which usually ended when players from rival syndicates got into a fistfight or dragged their lying cheat of a younger brother outside and tossed him in the lake where he belonged. Ah the joys of youth!

Now it's ruined. Unless there's hacking! Hmmmm.

Fun with Foucalt - Jacques Lacan's Penis Edition

"Fun with Foucalt" is a new series that I am starting to honor the Great Men and Womyn laboring in the vinyards of literary deconstruction and post structuralism who brighten our drab lives with the most ludicrous gobbledygook.  For some reason the best ones are all French. For our first episode I present Jaques Lacan rendering his world renowned proof that his penis is in fact the square root of negative one. Now you might worry that this is NSFW but no one normal could possibly tell whatinthehell this minder binder is talking about. Which is why "Fun with Foucalt" is such an important public service. So without further ado - to the jibberjabber:

Jacques Lacan
Lacan sought to give his deconstruction some methodical rigor with the following equation:

S (signifier)

——————  = s ( the statement ), with S = ( -1 ), produces: s = √ -1

s (signified)

“Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the √ -1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).”

So to clarify: he's arguing that his man chorizo is an irrational member  (because the square root of a negative is an irrational number) while making the rhetorical equivalent of nasty fingers-into-holes hand gestures. Golly the French are...so French .