Hogan
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hogan590.bsky.social
Hogan
@hogan590.bsky.social
150 followers 110 following 1.7K posts
Retired biblioprole, overeducated dogwalker. Maybe things will get a little better in the morning. Me: he/him/his. You: as you wish.
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hogan590.bsky.social
I'm re-reading Middlemarch, and I realized that TCW is Mr. Casaubon.
MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian’s permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion of a life’s plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union. And it goes on like that. George Eliot, Middlemarch, chapter 5
November 20, 2025 at 6:32 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
If you see this, post a bird.
Three-eyed crow from K-Pop Demon Hunters. He steals the hat from the cat.
November 14, 2025 at 10:30 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
From Monty Python and the Holy Grail: When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up!
November 12, 2025 at 9:41 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_...
From Wikipedia: The Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany on 22 June 1941. Vasily was transferred to the front in August 1941 and given the surname Ivanov in an attempt to conceal his identity. As the son of Stalin, he rarely flew in combat, and when he did he was accompanied by a formation. Vasily took part in 29 combat missions, and is said to have shot down two enemy aircraft.[20] As the son of the Soviet leader, Vasily was hated by most of his colleagues, who felt he was an informant for his father.[21] In the spring of 1942 he was sent back to Moscow, and given the role of inspecting the condition of the air force. He mainly stayed in Moscow for the rest of the war.[20] Bored by his new role, Vasily found himself in trouble after an April 4, 1943 incident where he had explosives dropped into the Moskva River, injuring himself and killing a flight engineer.[22]
November 10, 2025 at 10:36 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Eugene Debs: “I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.”
November 5, 2025 at 10:05 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Picture of a great white shark and of Mayor Vaughn: "The mayor from Jaws is still the mayor in Jaws 2. It is so important to vote in your local elections."
November 3, 2025 at 6:17 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited":
Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare--the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn't add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship's party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places-- --The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money.
November 1, 2025 at 5:40 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Sting in a bellboy uniform, from the movie Quadrophenia
October 30, 2025 at 9:00 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Jam tomorrow.
From Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass: "I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Two pence a week, and jam every other day." Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire me – and I don't care for jam." "It's very good jam," said the Queen. "Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate." "You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day." "It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day'," Alice objected. "No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
October 30, 2025 at 3:59 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
"'Too much Diogenes'? What do those words even mean?"
From Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: [The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.
October 25, 2025 at 9:28 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Doonesbury strip from 1979: "See, Rick, in its way, mellow-speak is a remarkably economical dialect. What Dr. Asher has done is reduce language to only its most essential components. . . . "Here, I'll show you. Give me a line to translate." "How about this. 'The moon like a flower in heaven's high bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.'" . . . "William Blake? Okay, let's see . . in mellow-speak, that would be . . . "'Oh, wow, look at the moon.'" "Duane, we've got to talk."
October 22, 2025 at 11:52 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
The pre-printed Soros signs never arrived in NW Philly, so we made our own.
Banner reading "Are we great yet? 'Cause we just feel embarrased!"
October 18, 2025 at 6:10 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
I am I because my little dog knows me.
My little dog Penny on my seersucker lap
October 6, 2025 at 2:25 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
What was startling to him was how, despite all his efforts, the crime was still so rampant. Chicago was a war zone. They needed Fire and Med and PD and Justice, and there was also a bear there, running a restaurant. New York was worse, or had been; it needed as many as six different forms of Law and Order to even begin to tackle the lawlessness and orderlessness, and had for decades.
September 30, 2025 at 5:39 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
I was wondering about Hegel, and I found this, so Kant's looking good:
when Schelling left for Würzburg in 1803.[25][27] In 1805, the university promoted Hegel to the unsalaried position of extraordinary professor after he wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang von Goethe protesting the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him.[28] Hegel attempted to enlist the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the renascent University of Heidelberg, but he failed. To his chagrin, Fries was, in the same year, made ordinary professor (salaried).[29] The following February marked the birth of Hegel's illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–1831), as the result of an affair with Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt née Fischer.[30] With his finances drying up quickly, Hegel was under great pressure to deliver his book, the long-promised introduction to his philosophical system.[31] Hegel was putting the finishing touches to it, The Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on 14 October 1806 in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city.[11] On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:
September 21, 2025 at 11:59 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Oh man. Good times.
Andrew Breitbart in the armor of a Teutonic Knight maybe. No that perspective isn't effed up shut up you're effed up.
September 19, 2025 at 6:41 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution, quoted from memory:
He had not reached the stage of moral development where hypocrisy was possible. He thought his action was right because he was the one doing it; he had never learned to judge his own actions as if they were someone else’s. If he said he would do something he did it, unless there was a reason not to. He had the morals of a State; had, almost, the morals of an Army.
September 19, 2025 at 1:12 AM
hogan590.bsky.social
Duolingo is either reading my mind or writing country and western songs.
Screenshot of a Duolingo exercise: Italian: Voglio che qualcuno mi offra da bere. English: I want somebody to offer me a drink.
September 13, 2025 at 10:51 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
"Surrender Dorothy" skywritten by the Wicked Witch of the West, from The Wizard of Oz
September 9, 2025 at 3:12 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Paul Blanshard, thou shouldst be living in tis hour.
Cover of a book by Paul Blanshard titled "Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power" Blurb: "A study of two great systems of authoritarian control over men's minds: KREMLIN AND VATICAN . . . by the author of American Freedom and Catholic Power"
September 6, 2025 at 11:19 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
Just been rereading Pratchett's Making Money:
“He has never drawn attention to himself. All I know for sure is that he arrived here as a child, on a cart owned by some traveling accountants . . .” “What, like tinkers and fortune-tellers?” said Moist, as the cab rocked its way through streets that grew narrower and darker. “I suppose you could say so,” said Miss Drapes with a hint of disapproval. “They do big, you know, circuits all the way up to the mountains, doing the books for little businesses, helping people with their taxes, that sort of thing.” She cleared her throat. “Whole families of them. It must be a wonderful life.” “Every day a new ledger,” said Moist, nodding gravely, “and by night they drink beer, and happy, laughing accountants dance the Double-Entry Polka to the sound of accordions . . .” “Do they?” said Miss Drapes nervously. “I don’t know. It would be nice to think so,” said Moist.
August 29, 2025 at 7:04 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
So not renewing my WaPo subscription.
Headlines from the WaPo front page: Megan McArdle: "When the rule of law becomes lawfare" Jason Willick: "Why Trump has a point on mail-in voting"
August 24, 2025 at 1:28 AM
hogan590.bsky.social
I keep thinking of this bit that didn't make it into the film version of The Music Man:
Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda, Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda biscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete! Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin’ by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.
August 22, 2025 at 3:29 AM
hogan590.bsky.social
The Onion called it in 2012.

theonion.com/new-breeding...
The Onion headline: New Breeding Program Aimed At Keeping Moderate Republicans From Going Extinct
August 10, 2025 at 10:40 PM
hogan590.bsky.social
I've been chuckling over this uncontrollably all day. Daeby Conley, you magnificent bastard.
Get Fuzzy comic strip Satchel: "Fungo's pal Logger volunteers at the aquarium building new houses for marine mammals who outgrow their old ones. He has a hammer." Rob: "That's nice." Satchel: "Yeah. Habitat for Huge Manatees is great."
August 10, 2025 at 9:42 PM