Into The Legal Fray

 Yes, why should us in Louisiana suffer under the, under the chicanery and mis-deeds of a, of a Joe, a Joe, you know the guy, come on!! -when we voted 64% for The Donald, and when the election was defrauded in less savory places like Detroit, Michigan.

The mistake that "they" made was in padding the votes of Biden and bringing his total to an implausible 80 million. "They" would have been better of with a strategy of "losing" Trump votes, rather than stacking up votes for Joe until the required counties where tipped.

I've been working a lot on the keyboard. I was using it in a limited way, but since I have been playing bass lines on it, I decided to use a more classical approach to the thing and at least position my hands where the instructor would the hands of a 4 year old student.

I actually had a few piano lessons in my life; and I remember being taught to play scales in a way that the thumb would "cross over" and land on the 4th note of the scale.

I keep finding more books.

I have the Cambridge Companion to Dante, and "The Bible as History," and a "foods of the Bible" type book, which extols things like fig paste and mixing oats and raisins together to treat a horse with a swollen head or a sore nose.

Those books actually came off of the rack in the Sacred Heart Multipurpose Room Library.

Then, I came upon a box by a trash can in front of a house which had many computer type books, one of which is on Linux and is only 8 years old, and so three quarters of it will be useful.

It seemed like a person who lived in the house was at one time a student in Information Technology who for some reason decided to throw out all of her course materials.

There was a good book on programming, which used a very Perl-like language to illustrate concepts; and one on "Information Systems Security." That last one might have been the straw in the camel's back as far as that student giving up on ever being an I.T. person.

And today, I found a cool book on regular expressions.

I use regular expressions in my program to format these blog posts, which I shelved at least a couple years ago. I had it working fine; it would make the first three words of a paragraph a bit larger and in a different font; and then would change the color of each paragraph randomly. Then it would give a word count at the end.

I just love stuff like this...

I started to work on the program to add the function of creating a dictionary out of my vocabulary -running everything through, a word at a time; checking to see if each word is already in the dictionary, if so, skipping it; if not adding it.

Then, after I have fed the entire 30 gigabytes of text from this blog, going all the way back to 2009, through it; it would tell me how many words I have in my vocabulary.

I could then even have this list matched against an actual Webster's dictionary to find a word that I haven't ever used that is in there, and suggest it as a "word of the day," or something, to build vocabulary.

So, the program is torn apart in order to have that functionality added to it. I have the flowchart in my head; I just have to get back on the Perl manual and find the right commands and functions and, of course, dig into the regular expressions.

I will use the regular expressions, for example, to find every word that starts with a capital letter and emphasize (bold face) that word, as I already do manually. These are the people places and things that I highlight, so as to give, at a glance, what the post is about.

There will definitely be looting after the election goes to Trump.

I can remember us being led through the Inferno in high school.

I needed to live a live of almost 60 years in order to put Dante into context though.

I'm sure I averaged about 85% on the tests I took on Dante's Inferno. But that is just a testament to my ability to, for example, eliminate 2 out of the 4 possibilities of a multiple choice question (two of the answers often mean the same thing but cannot both be true; so neither is. That turned the question into, at worse, a 50-50 guess.

But, I certainly wasn't able to look at Dante against the backdrop of human experience; even though we had already been force-fed Gilgamesh, and The Iliad and The Odyssey.

As a matter of fact, we were assigned "summer" reading, in the form of 3 books which we were expected to have consumed over the 10 weeks of summer vacation.

Those 10 weeks shrunk in perspective with each passing school year.

The vacation between 2nd and 3rd grade seemed to last a year. By about sophomore year in high school, I had figured out that it is "really" just 10 weeks, and that by next Monday, it will be down to 9.

That was when we were hit with the summer reading. I calculated that I needed to average something like 75 pages per day in order to finish what were, for Freshman year; "Ivanhoe," by Sir Walter Scott, "Nine Coaches Waiting," by Mary Stuart, and "Billy Budd," by Herman Melville.

That might have been the time I learned that if you ignore things, it won't make them go away. With each day that I didn't get my 3 hours of reading in, the average climbed until I was up against the task of reading something like 760 pages the last week of vacation, in order to be ready for that "summer reading test" which was administered immediately after the start of the school year.

I just wasn't ready to not be a kid during summer vacation and so I just made a stab at Ivanhoe, and perhaps got to about the 400th page; out of about 1,100 in that book; never mind the other two books.

I really wish I was more of a student back then; but I still can't see how I would have been worldly enough to put those books into any meaningful context.

I understand now that we were being taught a lot about the culture that most of us came from. A lot of the mores and norms of the society written about were exported to America; and I guess that's why we were assigned that book. I can't say for sure, I still haven't read it. I'll come across it for 50 cents at the Goodwill Store one of these days...