one more from the Jordan archive

This is the “God, disguised as Michael Jordan” game– 63 points in the 1986 playoffs against Larry Bird and the mighty Boston Celtics. Still an NBA playoff record.

It was only Jordan’s second season (he was skinny and still had hair, you will see). He had broken his foot in the 3rd game of the season and returned just a few weeks before the playoffs.

It’s also strange to see Jordan already in a Bulls uniform, but surrounded by people who would turn out to be non-entities in terms of Bulls history, all of them gone by the time Jordan’s dynasty got going in 1991: Kyle Macy, Orlando Woolridge, Charles Oakley (traded to New York), Coach Stan Albeck. Pippen and Grant only arrived in the 1987 draft, and Phil Jackson only became coach in 1989.

This is good, raw footage again, though a little dark, and you also have to sit through at least 90 seconds of filler before it gets going.

Poe vs. eliminativism

You may recall the plot of Poe’s wonderful “The Black Cat.” The narrator begins as a happily married animal lover. But through alcoholism he becomes a wife-beater, and then perversely cuts out his cat’s eye with a knife, finally hanging the poor creature from a tree. That night his house burns down, and on the sole remaining wall there is the ghostly silhouette of a cat with a rope around its neck.

But not to worry… There is a perfectly natural explanation for this:

“When I first beheld this apparition –for I could scarcely regard it as less– my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd– by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.”

a book I’ve enjoyed for years

If you have trouble keeping all the pre-Socratics straight, there’s a work that might help, and it’s among my favorite history of philosophy books:

Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy

I won’t link to it on Amazon because there seem to be a profusion of editions of it there now. The one I have is the Dover paperback, but I can’t find that exact version on Amazon.

Zeller was one of those great 19th century German scholars who knew his material inside and out. A few changes were made to the book posthumously by a sympathetic heir of Zeller, to take more recent research into account.

It’s compact, readable, and memorable. You’ll have less trouble than before in remembering the difference between Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Anaxagoras.

Oftentimes, people want to read the most recent book on a subject. And there are times when that’s a good idea, especially in quickly evolving fields like the sciences. But when it comes to areas like history, literature, philosophy, I tend to think that any book still in print after more than a century must have a lot going for it.

For instance, I was recently reading a book of Roman history published in the last 5 years. And it was just painful to read in comparison with Gibbon, even though there are now known to be some definite factual inaccuracies in Gibbon.

The prejudice of recentness is based on the notion that factual accuracy is the basic building block of wisdom. It’s not. That plays a secondary role, as long as the facts are in the ballpark. More important is the ability to synthesize, systematize, reflect.

As I’ve said before on this blog, though not in some time, knowledge is not about being right, it’s about not missing the point.

The great philosophers did not make fewer bad arguments than others, they simply missed the point less often than the narrow and the correct usually do.

chopstick story

A 14-month-old Chinese boy SURVIVES A CHOPSTICK EMBEDDED IN HIS BRAIN.

But the really remarkable part of the story to me is that the drive to Beijing took ten hours, after the local clinic said they couldn’t help. It’s hard to imagine what a ten-hour trip to the emergency room would feel like in a terrible situation like that.

congratulations to Dawson

Another unexpected occasion arises for Chicago sports reminiscence… Congratulations to Andre “Hawk” Dawson for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the only successful candidate on the ballot announced today.

This choice will have its detractors. And truthfully, he might not have been at the very top of my ballot either. But his 1987 season with the Chicago Cubs was special. And before that, during 11 years with Montreal, he was in some ways even better.