FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ABSOLUTELY MUST KNOW, during the American Revolution George Washington put a massive chain across the Hudson River (not George Washington himself, obviously, although he was an excellent swimmer and could’ve done it if he really wanted to impress Martha) to keep British ships from sailing up the river and attacking his army at Newburgh. It was not to keep eastern New York and New England from drifting out into the Atlantic Ocean, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Whoever told you that (and you know who you are) was being facetious.

THE CEASED AMONG US: The other thing I’ve been thinking about is why we call dead people “the late.” They are not late; they are not picking up the kids at school and running a little late or got caught in traffic or had to go to the dentist for some work on a crown and couldn’t get here on time. The condition of being late implies the ability to be on time, of being on schedule, and thereby taking an active part in the life of the community, which, let’s face it, is something the people we usually describe as “late” are no longer capable of. They do not care if they are or are not on time, since time no longer has any meaning for them, nor do they care about caring or not caring or even ruffling our sensibilities by being late, as they are beyond caring, having shuffled off this mortal coil and passed into the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns (like that? Shakespeare references, no less, and you thought I was just ranting here) without their luggage or the frequent flyer miles either. In short, they are not “late,” they are dead.

The other thing I don’t get is why we called the dead deceased. Usually the de- prefix means that the opposite of the root word is taking place, i. e., detrain, derail, deracinate, so on and so forth. So wouldn’t it make more sense if we referred to the dead as the ceased, as in the ceased Bob Hope?

JUST WONDERING, PART DEUX: Bill answers our query in Just Wondering about what flavor the primordial soup was by using an ancient conundrum, even though I am sure Bill knows that conundrums should only be used once and only if they are reasonably new. The primordial soup, Bill says, was chicken noodle, thereby proving which came first, the chicken, not the egg. However satisfactory this answer may be to Democratic presidential hopefuls, intelligent porn stars, and admirers of the Iowa crocus, it does not, of course, answer the cosmological question, why the noodle, and what is its role, if any, in the forming of the postmodern American consciousness? St. Augustine of Hippo states in The City of God that the noodle, like space and time, is an attribute of the divinely created universe, a theory that St. Thomas Aquinas uses in Summa Theologica as one of the proofs of the existence of fettucini alfredo. William of Occam, on the other hand, suggests that this theory is only so much wishful thinking, that fettucini alfredo is a useless complication in the explanation of natural phenomena, and that Aquinas should stop being such a damn glutton and settle for spaghetti with clam sauce.

Today, quantum mechanics suggest that the noodle is, in fact, the string of modern string theory, the underlying force behind all matter and energy in the universe, although quantum mechanics have been known to exaggerate after a few beers, as witnessed by recent claims by some quantum mechanics that they have fixed the life cycle, when in fact anyone can see for themselves that they have put the seat on wrong and that the tires are way too small. If, however, an egg noodle is the string at the heart of creation, then the conundrum Bill challenges reasserts itself with greater force. Therefore, the chicken, the egg, the noodle, and the primordial soup; which came first…and why?

PETE ROSE--BACK IN BASEBALL?: No, not now, not ever. The question is not whether Rose finally admits to what he did, but the fact that he did it at all. He bet on baseball, especially and including, games that he participated in as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. His owning up to what he has denied vehemently for fourteen years changes nothing. Major League Baseball Rule 21 (d) states unequivocally that anyone, player, umpire, or manager, who bets on a baseball game they took part in “shall be permanently ineligible” to play, manage, or umpire in the major leagues. Rule 21 (g) orders that the entire text of Rule 21, the rule defining misconduct, “shall be posted in every clubhouse” in baseball. Pete Rose played in the majors for 23 years; there is no way he could not have known what would happen to him if he was caught betting on the Reds. He knew the rule and he chose to disregard it, and as a result he is suffering the exact punishment prescribed in the rule for his misdeeds.

There are and there will continue to be those who wonder why drug addicted and / or alcoholic players keep getting second, third, or fifty-third chances while Rose has been ejected from baseball for a lesser crime. The answer to that argument is simply this: a drug addicted or alcoholic player hurts no one but himself. His addiction will interfere with his play and will eventually get him benched and then fired; his reputation as a substance abuser will follow him to every team he signs with. He will not get the slack that other players will get; fans will think every mistake he makes on the field is a sign that he has surrendered once again to his addiction. Gambling, on the other hand, calls into question the integrity of the game itself. The fan in the stands does not know in such a situation if what he sees on the field is honest effort or elaborate fraud, if the two teams he sees are trying to win or whether there is another secret agenda behind what is happening on the field. The Cincinnati Reds fan of the late 1980’s could not know if the actions Pete Rose took as manager were a result of baseball acumen or a need to cover a bet. Pete Rose knew he was breaking the rule; he should not be allowed to weasel his way out of the consequences now.

COLLECTIVE NOUNS: I have been thinking about collective nouns these past few weeks, mostly on the advice of my doctor, who says that collective nouns are less stressful than fish puns and can clear up persistent acne in laboratory rats. I don’t have a laboratory rat of my own, let alone one in its teenage years, and so I am spared having to listen to it whine about its face breaking out and not getting a date with Cindy from the varsity cheerleading squad. But enough of this adolescent bickering; let us return to the collective noun. And I do not mean the collective nouns that we are all familiar with, like a school of fish or a pack of cigarettes, but the odd ones like a murder of crows or a scurry of squirrels or a warren of wombats. My favorite, though, is a rumba of rattlesnakes, which seems to be just the sort of thing any suburban housewife would want in order to liven up a dull party. To make the party especially lively our housewife could also invite a plena of pythons, a bomba of boomslangs, and a mambo of mambas. One might not get away from such a party without requiring medical attention, but my guess is that our theoretical housewife has no problems with rats, laboratory or otherwise.

THE ALA AND FIDEL CASTRO: Randy at Beautiful Horizons, which is over on the blogroll as Yet More Beautiful Horizons; the Beautiful Horizons on top is Randy's old blog, and yes, I know, I should get off my lazy ass and change it; has a number of posts on the American Library Association's scandalous kowtowing to Fidel Castro, all of which are guaranteed to raise my blood pressure and should raise yours as well. There are links to Nat Hentoff's columns on this same subject in the Village Voice (just a short digression: Nat Hentoff is the only reason I even look at the Village Voice) and you should read them all. For an organization dedicated to intellectual freedom to defend Fidel Castro while bashing John Ashcroft is, as I wrote here back in July, absolute rank hypocrisy.

ASTRONOMY, GREEK AND OTHERWISE: My niece, an altogether lovely young blond moppet who looks like a poster child for the Nazi Party, recently came down my house to ask for help on a report about how the constellations got their names. She told me that her teacher said that Orion was some sort of Great Greek Hunter who'd go on safari without a shotgun or a rifle or a whole string of black guys to carry his stuff and call him Bwana, which is some African tribe’s word for “dope who insists on shooting innocent wild animals for no apparent reason when everything a man could want is available for everyday low prices at Wal-Mart’s” or even how to do the Tarzan yell as good as Carol Burnett. I listened to this teacher’s codswallop for as long as I could before setting the niece straight. The constellation Orion is named after Patrick Michael O’Ryan, the great Paddy Mike, the bare-knuckle heavyweight boxing champion of the universe, born in Ballinalee, in the County Longford, Ireland, and raised on the South Side of Boston, Massachusetts, US of A, and don’t you forget it, smart guy. Forty thousand years ago the world was covered with ice because of a palooka from Chicago named Jack Frost, whose real name was Zygmunt Malinowsky but his manager said a name that long wouldn’t fit on the handbills and besides, who’d be afraid of a fighter named Zygmunt? Frost’s manager had a sweet deal: as long as Jack kept winning it stayed winter and all the ski equipment manufacturers and the ski lodges and the snow blower manufacturers had to pay off the manager in order to stay in business, all facts that came out in the Congressional investigation that followed the third fight. But Nemesis reared her ugly head, as she was wont to do in those days, especially when Tito Puente was playing the Palladium; she could ran kan kan as neat as Hugh Please, an encyclopedia salesman from Parsippany, New Jersey, whose wife thought there was something going on between the two of them, but this is not the place to discuss the gruesome details. When Jack Frost first won the championship and started the Ice Age he was the people’s darling; he couldn’t put out a wrong foot since he didn’t know his left from his right foot, everyone supported him, everyone wanted to see the boy from Chicago do good. But after a few millennia people got tired of him and it always being winter, and, truth be told, his last few fights before he met up with Paddy Mike, well, let’s just say he phoned those fights in. He was out of shape and bored and he won because the judges were bribed and his right hook was still as tremendous as ever.

So a group of South American tourism ministers tired of waking up with a mile of ice on their front lawns went to see O’Ryan, who’d just won the championship of Europe from a mountain lion he later turned into a coat, and asked Paddy and his manager if there was some way to get him to fight Frost. Paddy said he’d fight if Frost would agree, but he was pretty sure Frost wouldn’t; he had a good deal going and he wasn’t going to take a chance getting his ass whipped.

The ministers went home, convinced that they had failed in their mission. And then a miracle occurred. A junior member of the Brazilian delegation leaked what Paddy had said to the New York Daily News, which announced in a banner headline, I’LL WHIP HIS ASS!!! Jack Frost took one look at that headline and demanded a match immediately, despite the best efforts of his manager to calm him down.

The fight was scheduled for Madison Square Garden and the fight was fought after the cops cleared all the rioting smokers and lesbian vegans out of the building and Jack Frost, to his shock and amazement, lost. Desperate to hang on to the money he was making off Frost, his manager invoked a clause in the fine print that gave Jack the right to a yearly rematch. The mayor of New York said that there was no way in hell that these two fighters were going to meet in his city again, not after the riot they’d caused, and so the next year’s fight was moved to Weehawken, New Jersey, near the place where Alexander Hamilton was shot and killed and went to spend eternity on the ten dollar bill.

Well, let’s just say that Jack lost that fight too, as well as destroying much of Weehawken’s waterfront, and the fight was finally moved to the Milky Way, where the boys could have at it without disturbing the neighbors too much. So they have at it every year; Jack Frost tries to win, and the money from the snow blowers and the ski resorts and everyone else who makes a nickel out of there being snow on the ground goes into his manager’s pocket, and every year he loses and goes to Aruba to get in shape for next year’s fight. You’d think they’d be tired of it by now, but Jack’s manager has an ironclad contract written by some of the smartest lawyers in New York and it looks like we’ll have to watch this go on for millennia to come.

The niece wrote all of this down and thanked me. Two days later she hit me across the back with a baseball bat. It’s a good thing to encourage girls to take up sports.

JUST WONDERING: What flavor is the primordial soup, anyway, and how long will it be before Campbell's starts selling it in American supermarkets?

THE WEATHER: Right now it is as lousy as a beautiful day can be. The temperature is in the single digits and when I woke up this morning it was so cold outside that my runny nose froze over and the rhinoviruses had to put on skates to move around. Every year I tell myself that I will go to Aruba to live and every year I remain in New York to endure the barely endurable; I can't know why. A glutton for meteorological punishment, I guess.

TAPS: Alfred Pugh, the last American soldier wounded in the First World War, has died in Florida at the age of 108.

"And through some mooned Valhalla there shall pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell,
The unreturning army that was youth,
The legions who have suffered and are dust."

Prelude: The Troops, by Siegfied Sassoon.

KATE HUDSON has just had a baby boy and many congratulations to her and her husband, but for a certain demographic in this country this can mean only one thing: Goldie Hawn is a grandmother...Goldie Hawn is a grandmother!......I feel incredibly old right now.

THE NEW YORK MINUTE: Now I have lived in New York, city and state, my entire life, and I think I can say, with a fair degree of assurance and without fear of contradiction, that New York minutes, despite what is said about them elsewhere in this our Great Republic, are the same length and consistency as minutes in other places, except for the bitter caffeine aftertaste and the heartburn they sometimes produce when taken too quickly.

MEANWHILE, ON THE JULIAN CALENDAR: On the Julian calendar, which, unfortunately, neither slices nor dices, but can rumba and do a mean rendition of Begin the Beguine, today is Christmas Eve. And so to all Eastern Orthodox Christians throughout the world, The Passing Parade wishes you and yours a very Merry Christmas.