June 15, 1993
The Piedmont Plateau is a geographical region of the United States that stretches from New York State to central Alabama. Hardly the mesa-like topography that the name implies, It is neither fish nor fowl. It is an ancient region of rolling foothills and watery dells, scrunched between the Appalachian Mountains and the coastal plains of the Atlantic Ocean. Wikipedia says of the Piedmont, “The last major event in the history of the Piedmont was the break-up of Pangaea, when North America and Africa began to separate.” In the southern tail of the Piedmont where I was born and raised, that sounds about right. However, a change of scenery was never far away. My family and our fellows were located equidistant from the Gulf of Mexico and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As we have discussed before, most of the citizens enjoyed seven days of vacation a year, when the textile mills closed for the week of July 4. As people tend to do, our community broke into distinct sub-groups: you went to the beach or you went to the mountains. We went to the beach, and I think that has had a profound influence on Arlo & Janis. However, this weekend I am breaking with form and going to the mountains, near Chattanooga, to spend a long weekend, my first real outing this year. I am very excited. I probably won’t post again until next Wednesday. That is what I set out to say.
77 responses to “Deep Subject”
What do you do if the actual science shows that a practice that makes you feel good about yourself is truly, in the long run, bad for you, everyone else, and the environment? Do you persist, or do you go with the science?
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1020/tierney100520.php3
Does anyone know who said this “Best to leave your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt”?
Apparently Maurice Switzer according to the NPR website. Most people attribute it to Abraham Lincoln, but there’s no evidence that he said it.
‘The earliest evidence that I was able to find was a 1907 book by Maurice Switzer. And it seems to contain a lot of original material and it includes the statement “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.” So it’s slightly different phrasing, but I believe that is what evolved to generate the modern common version.’
https://www.npr.org/2017/04/04/522581148/hemingway-didnt-say-that-and-neither-did-twain-or-kafka
“Si tacuisses, philosophum manisses.” goes back about 1500 years. I’ve seen the final verb as “remanisses”, too. Translation is “If you had been silent, you would have remained a philosopher.”. Nice example of the subjunctive for a contrary-to-fact condition, if I remember my Latin teacher [Miss Grace Light] & her advice after all these years.
I hate to come back to the author I tried to cite before and couldn’t. But, well, this quote really is from Mark Twain. It’s in Pudd’nhead Wilson published 1894: “Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Thanks, Dawn. I guess NPR isn’t perfect in its research! Maybe the search algorithm they use attributed that quote to Pudd’nhead Wilson himself?
Twain’s quotes are the best, next to Shakespeare.
Jerry et al, I hate to come back to Twain when I couldn’t place the earlier quote. But this time it really is his. “Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt” is from his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson” published 1894.
How about my Grandmother’s saying: Even a fish would stay out of trouble if it kept it’s mouth shut?
🙂
Re: Today’s comic- So Janis is a T cup?
I’ll show myself out…
Panel 1 could be interpreted in an interesting manner, too.
Jerry, Ron, and Curmudgeonly, I have tried to post this twice and can’t get it to work. So I will warn you it’s liable to show up repeatedly if I ever get it to work. BUT I am excited about this particular quote because this time it really IS one from Mark Twain: “Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” It’s from his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson” published 1894.
And it did! It has posted all three comments now! ::slinking out with tail between legs::
Dawn, I don’t know what it is about this new site of Jimmy’s, but some comments appear immediately upon posting, and others drift around and pop up hours later. It’s happened to all of us who post here, so no need to slink away. It’s not you, it’s the site.
Thanks, Mark — and Ghost too (below). Now at least maybe I can stop blushing. Gosh.
Re 10-6-20 real-time cartoon: I’d been wondering when Arlo would come up with a ploy to get Janis to sit up in the tub and defeat the Bumstead’s “opaque bathwater”. Thanks, Arlo!
Note: This comment seemed to post almost immediately. Although many of mine do not.
And then my second comment took 14 minutes to appear. ??
Then the one above again appeared immediately.
Perhaps some type of spam defense?
Well Ghost, you may have pegged it. I can never fill out those “prove you’re not a robot” things, checking every box with a traffic signal in it. (Does the pole count or not? I go nuts trying to figure it out.) So maybe now I have an online reputation as shady, potentially a robot out to intending to foul the works. 🙂
I read once that those “check every box with an X” tests weren’t really there to verify your humanity but to help train AI to recognize those items. Same goes for those frustrating, often unreadable Captcha letters and numbers.
Mark twain for president. This one I know. “IJerry belong to no organized political party. I’m a democrat.”
Never figured out why someone up to no good wouldn’t just program their robot to answer “No” to the question “Are you a robot?”.
Oops. If Dawn is a shady robot, I may have just told her how to beat spam filters. 🙂
The human delay and process of moving to check the box can’t easily be mimicked by programming. Also, the website can confirm that the email/user id clicking is coming from an address where it has been used before or that other clues on the computer match with stored data on the email. It’s sort of a mini Turing test.
Yeah, I figured it wouldn’t be simple.
I always loved Twain, Hal Halbrook was best next to real deal. I inherited a copy of every Twain book ever published ( a lot) in his lifetime (a lot) dating back to late 1800s.
Mike’s aunt was librarian in Sunflower, Mississippi so don’t know if library closed or how they ended up in my FIL library?
In effort to thin out a move I sold in a garage sale. Buyer was very happy.
Going back to the last two days strip….. My wife is 56 and I still believe she is the prettiest woman ever and try to get a personal peak at every opportunity I can. She thinks I’m a pervert! Go figure
Actually it appears that Will Rogers made the quip about an organized party. Although Twain could have said it too.
How did my name get in the middle of my comment?
Jerry, blame it on the software. If we can have artificial intelligence, why not artificial stupidity? After all, the product can’t be any better than the programmer.