GRGR 1,5 darts / POLE / node of tranquility

[Michael Bailey]

I thought maybe darts parts have these names, the breast would be
maybe the wide swelling part, the throat would be the taper down to
the point, the wings would be the feathers - but my cursory search
didn't prove that

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http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/vogt04alife9.html
yet another link for Principle of Least Effort.  This one bears
closely on the quest for meaning.  Fascinating stuff.
Ach, it's got math in it - I suppose I need to get used to seeing some
of those math signs in print - may come in handy.  That log(cabin)
joke later in the Toiletship sequence, I can almost get that...

there was something in the toiletship about wind tunnels and nodes
within the current, wasn't there --  anyway, back to Snoxall's,
"Here's a shelter - perhaps a real node of tranquillity among several
scattered throughout this long wartime, where they're gathering for
purposes not entirely in the martial interest"
(32, ln 30-32)
-- there must have been places like this back during the 100 years
war, and even in the fabled days of knights questing, the lucky ones
when wounded would stumble on a monastery or a hermitage where they
could lie near death for weeks and have their brow mopped, be visited
by dreams (or even luckier, be in a nunnery like Galahad in Monty
Python's Holy Grail, only he didn't take advantage) --

a place where ethics of war do not inform daily life, not that they
reject it, but the bonding site for "the vision thing" is already
occupied by - in the seance - Spiritualism, or - in Snoxall's as a
whole - hospitality

Pirate's psychically wounded, but walking, so he can't completely fall
into the Snoxall's routine, but his personal wind is blowing him there
(AF) -- yet it is They who send him there!

anyway, "An elderly air-raid warden, starchy and frail as organdy,
stands on tiptoe to relight the sensitive flame." (32, ln 20-21)
Pirate indulges in his phantasmagoria, has some words with Mexico in
which their relative social status emerges (34, ln 4) "Ah, Prentice." 
Not an eyebrow or lip out of place.  Tolerance. Ah
-- like he's repeating it interiorly, tasting how it would sound to
say it himself if he were as uppercrust as Mexico --
though Pirate's actually got the higher security clearance
and he apparently Has Not Looked at the microfilm he's carrying for
Bloat, indicating he's a trustworthy minion  --

then a remarkable paragraph about all the governments in exile

Pirate's aware of Mexico's growing excitement, but not why - like
Gloaming, Roger's applying math tools to the realm of emotion, and I
don't see Pirate as a man very much into math - but Mexico's also
involved with (applying love tools on) Jessica, which does draw
Pirate's sympathy, so much so that we spend the rest of the section
reliving Pirate's romance with Scorpia Mossmoon.

He starts as "one sunburned, scroungy unit of force preserving the
Sheik and the oil money" - one wonders, why?  what were They thinking?
 for the sum spent on the Empire (not to mention the War), Britain
could have gasified any amount of coal, paid good union wages to the
miners, and even got at the North Sea oil - ok, but that Germany was
threatening - but of course They weren't exactly Britain: for what
Germany spent burning up lives, it could have done yeoman's work
within its own borders too.
Maybe there really isn't a They, but just a tendency to violence that
good management can put a check to ...

I fell into a reverie last night about that: let's say I want to cook
something, so I go next door and take the neighbors' olive oil
It would be so much easier to find the stuff in my own cupboards, even
with the fabulous disarray sometimes encountered there

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Slothrop backwards is Porhtols

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Glenn, I've been looking without success for an Amazon link you posted
for a psychologist a few digests ago, and I think you said you visited
him?

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Matt Ruf, Sewer Gas Electric trilogy recaps the alligators in the
sewer theme from V. and he's got one out that I started in the
bookstore, about Cornell, and another one about multiple
personalities...