600 –or– Martin made me do it
Thursday, 21 June 2007
Six hundred articles.
All worth reading. Except this,
the 600th.
If I had a dime for every time someone was sincere around here, I’d have 7¢.
Thursday, 21 June 2007
Six hundred articles.
All worth reading. Except this,
the 600th.
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We highly recommend The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible and the Historical Jesus. It is an incisive display of unpretentious, serious scholarship and it is the only word needed on the debate.
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A Merchant, driving his Ass homeward from the seashore with a heavy load of salt, came to a river crossed by a shallow ford. They had crossed this river many times before without accident, but this time the Ass slipped and fell when halfway over. And when the Merchant at last got him to his feet, much of the salt had melted away. Delighted to find how much lighter his burden had become, the Ass finished the journey very gayly.
Next day the Merchant went for another load of salt. On the way home the Ass, remembering what had happened at the ford, purposely let himself fall into the water, and again got rid of most of his burden.
The angry Merchant immediately turned about and drove the Ass back to the seashore, where he loaded him with two great baskets of sponges. At the ford the Ass again tumbled over; but when he had scrambled to his feet, it was a very disconsolate Ass that dragged himself homeward under a load ten times heavier than before.

Discussion
Comments
Re: 600 –or– Martin made me do it
I hope you're just accusing me of making you write poetry and not of making you move a syllable from the last line to the first. Did you do that on purpose?
Also thanks for the compliment on my listy type posts. I tend to do those from time to time when I feel I have four or five things to say that either aren't big enough to be posts by themselves or that I'm too lazy to flesh out enough to make them worthy of standing alone. The one I posted recently wasn't that at all though. It was more like one of those stream of consciousness writing exercises I still do frequently to keep myself open.
Thankfully I'm not upset by being 92% self-absorbed as a writer, or I might not have been as pleased with how it turned out.
Yeah, what with the exercises and the form poetry, I'm exactly what I seem like: One of those people who really listened to his creative writing teachers along the way and bought a lot of it.
By martin m on 22 June 2007 · 00:33
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Re: 600 –or– Martin made me do it
It was sort of accidental. I wrote it and noticed it had the cadence. I counted syllables and it was 18. Chopped a word. It wasn’t 5-7-5 but I didn’t want to tamper with it.
Forced formats and such are a very good way to kill the editor; get the creativity going. I’m all for it and have used it hundreds of times.
Um… also–
haiku
1. sophistication for the simple.
2. in Japan a form of poetry which is by definition about the seasons and nature; in America any piece of crap seventeen syllables in length.
3. a writing exercise perfectly suited to special education.
I have another story about them—I wrote down somewhere—I’ll have to look it up b/c I don’t remember the punchline.
By Ashley on 22 June 2007 · 00:52
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All a big lie
Turned out that I was able to resurrect a post that was pulled for JS problems so this is actually #601.
By Ashley on 1 July 2007 · 15:23
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