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Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 28, 2013 at 5:49am

Holy Moly!

I await tomorrow's Special Issue.

Bon weekend!

Comment by Ian C Dengler on September 28, 2013 at 4:56am

hole theory: oh that's the vacuum, the space between, the nothing-doing part of the universe.

we commemorate holes in many ways: philately marks the many lost states, whence costs of living, utopias of social planning.

photography covers everything else.

tomorrow another stamp, covering both subjects.

Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 28, 2013 at 4:46am

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Ian dear Ian

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Ian, a hole.

Then mend it, dear Hoagy, dear Hoagy, dear Hoagy,

Then mend it, dear Hoagy, dear Hoagy, mend it.

Etc.

Moi -- I prefer philately and photography to philology.

Each to his or her own.

Or, in the immortal words of Sly and the Family Sloan, "Different strokes for different folks".

Comment by Ian C Dengler on September 27, 2013 at 9:18pm

Well, now there's the real story of philology: Written in 1930 by Hoagy Carmichael (music) and Stuart Gorrell (lyrics). Gorrell wrote the lyrics for Hoagy's sister, Georgia Carmichael. However, the lyrics of the song are ambiguous enough to refer either to the state or to a woman named "Georgia". WORDS ARE LIKE A GARBAGE PAIL YOU SIMPLY CAN’T BEAR TO DEPART FROM. There's a rule for science, covering everything from the statement to the mood you use in portrayal. Not much of that is left in philology!

Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 27, 2013 at 9:12pm

So, Georgia was on your mind, Ray?

Comment by Ian C Dengler on September 27, 2013 at 3:46pm

haha!

Georgia! There's a game of philology in itself. What would be the first human word for the abstraction of beauty??? And would it have had a feminine designator??? Girls have a lot of 'Georgia' names as flowers, scents, cuteologisms of all sorts. I couldn't work that into the stamp name, as I use pre-designated United States provinces as postal addresses.

How about the condition of finding any and all Georgias fairest? That would be a dream, and would go beyond even Lacan's mirror phases.

Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 27, 2013 at 3:22pm

"Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Georgia is the fairest if them all."

Comment by Ian C Dengler on September 27, 2013 at 3:06pm

Of course it can all go bad: that's Lacan's mirror phase, or mirror stage. Even his language tells you the mirror you create is about to eat you up: "the mirror-image is the threshold of the visible
world." In this stage one finds the social dialectic which
structures human knowledge as paranoiac. "The mirror-phase
is a drama whose internal impulse rushes from insufficiency
to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, captive
to the lure of spatial identification, the succession of
phantasies from a fragmented body-image to a form of its
totality which we shall call orthopaedic - and to the
assumption, finally, of the armour of an alienating identity,
which will stamp the rigidity of its structure the whole of the
subject's mental development."

Comment by Ian C Dengler on September 27, 2013 at 3:06pm

I was interested in the mirror recognition rule in doing this stamp. Some creatures are willing to admit to scientists that they extend their self-knowing to mirrors, or external replicas of themselves. However, the mirror test is much more: This is the pictorial rule: you abstract the entire landscape, not just yourselves, and you can then treat it by indirection.
Cartoon ghosts have scared up evidence that the ability to visualize objects in one’s mind materializes between ages 3 and 5. When asked to pick which of two mirror-image ghost cutouts or drawings fit in a ghost-shaped hole, few 3-year-olds, a substantial minority of 4-year-olds and most 5-year-olds regularly succeeded, say psychologist Andrea Frick of the University of Bern, Switzerland, and her colleagues. Girls performed as well as boys on the task, suggesting that men’s much-studied advantage over women in mental rotation doesn’t emerge until after age 5, the researchers report Sept. 17 in Cognitive Development.