Stuff, 26 March 2007

I think all legislation governing property rights should end with a final clause/section/subclause/whatever-the-hell the lawyers call it, providing for an "Asshole Exception": if the property-rights holder is an asshole about said property rights, the legal protections of said property are vitiated for the duration of said asshole-y behavior. So, when that jerk takes up four parking spaces with his SUV, you can key the hell out of it with no legal consequences. When the mining company gives you the legal-minimum 24 hours' notice before tearing up your property, you can pull out all of their surveying markers. When Microsoft's anti-theft programming makes it a pain in the ass to replace your hard drive and still be able to use your operating system, then you can pirate their software to your heart's content.

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This didn't bother me as much as it seemed to bother the author. I mean, what do they think happens to us when we're put into the grave? Genesis 3:19, "...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (sometimes the King James bible is just the way to go). I once asked why old English parish churches' floors are often below the outside ground level. By way of answer, consider that they have centuries-old graveyards that should be filled with centuries' worth of the local population, but there aren't centuries' worth of marked graves in them. A documentary about the construction of the Episcopal Cathedral of Ss. Peter and Paul, in Washington, D.C., (a.k.a. the National Cathedral) reported that after one of the stonemasons' wives died during construction, he asked whether she could be interred in the cathedral and was refused; so, after her cremation, her remains were mixed into the mortar and she thus found her final resting place "in," as it were, the cathedral after all.

But the mordancy in this sentence from that blog posting went unremarked, which just goes to show how context is everything (the site is the name of the NYC landfill, and if you live in NYC, it's just a name, a two-word noun whose words, when used together, overwhelm their individual denotations):

Beck was the senior supervisor for Taylor Recycling, a private contractor hired to sift through debris trucked to Fresh Kills after the trade center attacks. Before the arrival of Taylor's equipment at Fresh Kills in October 2001, the debris was sifted manually by workers using rakes and shovels.

To me, it's an appalling coïncidence for the debris from the WTC to have been deposited in a location with that place-name.