SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND
About five years ago, I read a critique of an episode of one of my favorite television shows (no points for guessing which show(s); what - do I look like I'm running a charity commission here?). The critique ridiculed the episode for its implausibility, noting that "Even the Red Queen only tolerated six implausibilities before breakfast."
I suspected that the Red Queen was a figure out of some fantasy tale - maybe one written by J.M. Barrie, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or Lewis Carroll, or Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells. I never looked up the phrase "Red Queen" on the Internet, though, even as the statement remained fresh in my mind from the time I first read it until now - it has a certain appeal the way a joke you don't quite get (but one which nonetheless SOUNDS really funny) does.
Well, today, I was reading David Corn's blog, and what do you know? The column stated:
"And bravo to Alberto Gonzales. At yesterday's Senate judiciary committee hearing, he did the most subtle impersonation of the Red Queen I've ever seen. The Alice in Wonderland matriarch once said, "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." For hours after his breakfast, Gonzales kept telling the committee that Bush, in authorizing warrantless wiretaps of American citizens and residents, did not break the FISA law because Bush is, according to the implied meaning of other law, above this law, while he kept refusing to acknowledge that such a reading of the law would place Bush above all laws."
Mr. Corn also fleshed out a phrase that I remember being used in an article about law school rankings - specifically, how U.S. News arbitrarily ranks the schools, and how the schools confound the arbitrariness by insisting they cannot be numerically ranked while at the same time ritualistically genuflecting to U.S. News' will:
"Or perhaps Gonzales had once studied law under Humpty Dumpty, who proclaimed, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." Even several GOP senators were frustrated by the A.G.'s channeling of Lewis Carroll. In any event, the hours of explanation Gonzales provided the commitee warrant further explanation.
Thanks, David
Oh, and then there was the time when I was speaking to someone famous and tried to impress him with a witty (so I thought) quotation that I thought was germane to our conversation. Turns out that the person who I was talking to was the person who made the...
More on that later.
I suspected that the Red Queen was a figure out of some fantasy tale - maybe one written by J.M. Barrie, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or Lewis Carroll, or Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells. I never looked up the phrase "Red Queen" on the Internet, though, even as the statement remained fresh in my mind from the time I first read it until now - it has a certain appeal the way a joke you don't quite get (but one which nonetheless SOUNDS really funny) does.
Well, today, I was reading David Corn's blog, and what do you know? The column stated:
"And bravo to Alberto Gonzales. At yesterday's Senate judiciary committee hearing, he did the most subtle impersonation of the Red Queen I've ever seen. The Alice in Wonderland matriarch once said, "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." For hours after his breakfast, Gonzales kept telling the committee that Bush, in authorizing warrantless wiretaps of American citizens and residents, did not break the FISA law because Bush is, according to the implied meaning of other law, above this law, while he kept refusing to acknowledge that such a reading of the law would place Bush above all laws."
Mr. Corn also fleshed out a phrase that I remember being used in an article about law school rankings - specifically, how U.S. News arbitrarily ranks the schools, and how the schools confound the arbitrariness by insisting they cannot be numerically ranked while at the same time ritualistically genuflecting to U.S. News' will:
"Or perhaps Gonzales had once studied law under Humpty Dumpty, who proclaimed, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." Even several GOP senators were frustrated by the A.G.'s channeling of Lewis Carroll. In any event, the hours of explanation Gonzales provided the commitee warrant further explanation.
Thanks, David
Oh, and then there was the time when I was speaking to someone famous and tried to impress him with a witty (so I thought) quotation that I thought was germane to our conversation. Turns out that the person who I was talking to was the person who made the...
More on that later.
posted by EnterCenter at 1:03 PM
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