The End of October and the First of the Year

 This year I did a fairly bad job of carving a jack o'lantern. I marked off the features with an indelible marker, then decided that they were too low. I carelessly cut across the top of the mouth, not outlining the teeth. As a consequence, Jack has badly applied eye-black (and mouth-black), and a couple of dental implants. Of course, in the dark that doesn't matter much.

 It occurred to me, though, that I had a large, sound pumpkin, with room enough to carve another face on the back side--a Janus-faced pumpkin. One could carve contrasting faces, say masks of tragedy and comedy. Or one could just cut out a mediocre jack o'lantern face, not better or worse, nor deliberately different. Yet I wonder whether the cross-draft would burn down the candle faster. Perhaps I will carve such a jack o'lantern next year.

Credentials

Metro trains stop for perhaps thirty seconds when running properly. Earlier in the month, in a fraction of that time, I found myself looking at an advertising display on the Union Station platform, where I saw at least three, and perhaps four advertisements for schools: Rochester Institute of Technology, the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, and something from George Washington University--perhaps the Elliot School of International Affairs.

 The next time that I was in a Metro station, to add money to a SmartTrip card, I noticed advertising on the walls and the floor from the George Washington University College of Continuing Studies. If I occasionally forget to local thirst for credentials, I am reminded soon enough again.

The End of the Tomato Season

The local tomato season, the period during which one can buy good, local tomatoes grown outdoors, is now over. In the Washington, DC, area, the season begins about the beginning of July and now runs until about the middle of October. Of course one can buy tomatoes in the stores all year, but they are bred for shipping rather than for eating: they will not bruise under reasonable handling; they have very little taste.

During the tomato season, my wife will come home with bags from a local farmers market. We will have a dinner of bacon, lettuce, and tomato (BLT) sandwiches many weeks. Most Fridays we will have roasted tomatoes over fettucini. She has frozen some roasted tomatoes for a treat to be enjoyed between now and next July. The BLTs, though, are over until then.

 The night this year after she first brought home bags of tomatoes, I woke in the dark hours thinking that I smelled smoke. Of course the smoke alarms are more sensitive than a nose, certainly more sensitive than mine, but that did not occur to me. After walking about the house and sniffing, I went back to bed. In the morning it occurred to me that it was the unfamiliar smell of fresh tomatoes that I had taken for smoke.

Difficulties

 Noticed in Aquinas on Mind, by Anthony Kenny:

The ability to write philosophical prose easily comprehensible to the lay reader is a gift which Aquinas shares with Descartes, but which was denied to Wittgenstein and Aristotle. Wittgenstein did, of course, write a plain and beautiful German; the difficulty for the non-philosopher, reading his later works, is not in construing particular sentences, but in understanding the point of saying any of the things he said. With Aristotle it is the other way round; it is clear that what he is saying is of immense importance, but the problem is to discover what meaning it has, or which of the seven possible meanings is the intended one.

Well, I have read a very little bit of Wittgenstein in German, and cannot testify to the plainness or beauty of his prose. I am grateful to the translators who wrestle with the difficulties of Aristotle.

A page or so later in the book there appears

 Bertrand Russell was one of those who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed. It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life.

At first glance that seems a little unfair to Russell, but is it?

K.u.K.

 There must be households that possess automobiles over many decades without encountering collisions and requiring auto-body repairs. We are not one. Over about 35 years as a household, we have had four trips to a body shop for repairs.

It was after the most recent visit, to Imperial Auto Body in northwest Washington, DC, that it occurred to me that our work has been parceled out between that establishment and Royal Auto Body of Rockville, Maryland. So far--and I hope that there will be no further--the score stands at three visits to Imperial, one to Royal. Who would have thought that such an everyday business as auto body repair would turn out to be Kaiserlich und Königlich?