Quack-A-Doodle-Doo

Ace hardware sells a premium label, as well as their own brand, of duct tape, both named Duck Tape, which is apparently no infringement by either manufacturer because the terms -- right and wrong -- are in the public domain. However, it seems to me that this carries cuteness one river -- like the Pacific Ocean -- too far, without a bridge of Reason.

For one thing, it has always seemed to me an abbrogation of responsibility when a newspaper or manufacturer makes excuses of "the common idiom" to excuse breaking away from good grammar, sound spelling, or upright rhetoric to make their own works, not ouevres, easier. (Newspapers especially aggravate reason when they explain that their newly found standards are discovered in the need to "make," not fill, available space -- as in headlines; but then turn around and use these inventions only to discover that, had they stuck firmly to convention they would have used neither more column width nor lines to alert the readership to what is afoot in the kingdom of idea and actions. I can prove this any day with almost any daily newspaper chosen at random, for the examples are everywhere apparent, and the conventions ready to mind.)

In any event, for what good reason would a maker or a seller choose to adopt wrongly understood language (duck for duct), thereby both perpetuating ignorance and failing to perform the duty, fulfill the responsiblity to leave the world better off for having been handled by their touch? There is, I think, none, save that self-indulgent glee that is camouflaged under the rubric "humor." Let's have less of the self-indulgence and more responsibility; less ridicule of reason and more pursuit of it. These will not rid the world of good fun and playful ridiculousness but will provide the fields and courses on which we may better recreate.

It'll take balls and bouncing but we will all be better for it. Say it after me, now, "duct tape." That wasn't so hard now, was it?

Laus Deos ~ The Clumsy Debate

Nothing sticky about this but The Clumsy Debate.

Separation of Church and State, so admired by those who would erase all acknowledgement, vision, or mention of God from public mind, view, or ears, now tortures the language of the First Amendment -- that says simply and straighforwardly that the government may not establish religion -- to mean government shall conspire in the erasure of all artifacts of faith.

In the meanwhile, high above any other structure in Washington, DC, the nation's capital city, appear words that seem to read "In praise of God." They appear atop the Washington Monument, about which two facts cry out to be acknowledged, seen, heard, and kept in mind as The Clumsy Debate moves forward: that under law no other structure in DC may exceed that of the Washington Monument, and that the monument was fulfilled in ceremony as early as 1848.

Praise God, God the Praiseworthy, In Praise of God -- take your pick. It seems that, so few years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, after the Revolutionary War, after the Great Constituitonal Debate that led to the drafting of what was soon to become the Constitution of the United States, after the compromises that were struck and enshrined in the Bill of rights, the citizen at large had few doubts whether the First Amendment was in any manner an impediment to acknowledgement, vision, or mention of God.

They recalled what Washington had believed, and what he had said was requisite to a successful and long-lived founding of a nation: active belief in and praise of God. Thus appears "Laus Deos" atop the Washington Monument.