The Explorers Club
And now for the insults: you lot are terribly ignorant. You aren't dim, at least not any of you with whom I am personally acquainted (and I can hardly be expected to vouch for the cerebral adroitness of complete asshole strangers*), in fact most of you are really quite clever. Several of our readers are, I daresay, even smarter than me. But so many of you are so frighteningly ignorant. And I do not exempt myself from such condemnation; there is so much about this world I do not know that even should I dedicate every moment of every day from now until the ending of the world (my death), I should but barely scratch the surface. From a certain point of view, then, the acquisition of knowledge is a futile pursuit. However, this is not my point of view; I repudiate it with as much venom and disdain as I can muster.

Venomous repudiation aside, the problem of ignorance remains. (If you believe that being ignorant is not a problem, that we're all fine just the way we are, please stop reading this blog at the conclusion of this sentence, exercise your Second Amendment freedom to purchase a firearm, and use it to end your misbegotten life.) We are clever people, not dim people; we know much about the world, but there is much we do not know. What to do? Banish ignorance, or at least make the attempt. How? To quote J.K. Simmons from The Ladykillers, "Easiest thing in the world": learn. We all need to know a great deal more about a wider range of topics.

"The Explorers Club" is to be a weekly feature dedicated to expanding knowledge, i.e. relieving you poor bastards of the crushing burden of your own ignorance. Self-motivation is the key; you shall get out of it only as much as you are willing to put in. Every Sunday, I shall post a new item to be researched and explored. My hope is to stimulate the impulse to learn and explore within each of you, to spark a voracious, nomadic curiosity that will not be confined to that week's "Explorers" topic. This is going to be great, I can feel it in my bones. (Or perhaps I have a bone marrow infection. We shall know in the fullness of time.) Come, friends, we have avatars of ignorance to slay, myths and superstitions to dispel, and a culture of anti-intellectualism to undermine.

The week of 26 November 2006: the Fairey Rotodyne.





BTW South Song of the Day
John Linnell, "New Hampshire" from State Songs (Mt. Love)

*By using the phrase "complete asshole strangers," it is not my intention to call those among you who are to me strangers assholes. This is merely an affectation of my fondness for the comedy of Denis Leary. Leary states, "I've got two words for you, 'nuclear fucking weapons'!" The obscenity does not even register as a word. So it is with "complete asshole stranger," another Leary invention. That's merely how I refer to persons unknown to me. If you take offense, then, yes, I meant it, you are an asshole, and not in the positive way associated with the song "I'm an Asshole."