Feel lucky?
Well, do you?

  This entry was inspired by the following...
1.  A British blogger's comment today.  This man, feeling
like a miserable failure himself, was cheered up by the following
practical joke: "If really fed up you could try putting in, miserable failure, (no quote
marks) into Google and pressing the 'I'm feeling lucky' button."

2. The page, excerpts from
which are shown  above, that you get if you put lucky (no quote
marks) into Google and press the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

3. My own entries of May 31 on Language Games and of June 1 on language and history,  Seize the Day and One Brief  Shining Moment.

4.  The related June 1 entry of Loren Webster, Carpe Diem, on the Marilyn Monroe rose.  Images from Carpe and Shining are combined below:

5.  The fact that the "day" to be
seized in Language Games is numbered 22, and that on day 22 of November
1963,  the  following died:

C. S. Lewis
John F. Kennedy
  Aldous Huxley.

6. The fact that November 22 is the feast of  Cecilia, patron saint of music.

7. Yesterday's entry about the alignment of stars, combined with the alignment of Venus with Apollo (i. e., the sun) scheduled for June 8.

All of the above suggest the following readings from unholy scripture:

A.  The "long twilight struggle" speech of JFK

B.  "The Platters were singing 'Each day I pray for evening just
to be with you,' and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on
in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and
went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the
heel of my shoe drumming against the driver's-side door in a spastic
tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I
was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was
information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where
they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is
found, and it was all information."

-- Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.  "I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in,
lady.  Sully your kind suffering child's eyes with it.  Live
burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of
arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their
burned trucks.... Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?"

-- Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

STAR WARS
Continued...

From today's New York Times:

Not even the most powerful
can alter the alignment
of the stars.

In a related story....

The Good Bad Boy

By Alison Lurie

William Manchester, author of the JFK book with the above title, died today at 82.

Seize the Day

From a March 31 entry --

A Jesuit cites Quine:

"To be is to be the value of a variable."

-- Willard Van Orman Quine, cited by Joseph T. Clark, S. J., in Conventional Logic and Modern Logic

For example, the variable

in the Crystal Software program EasyPattern Helper
supposedly helps to find any valid day number, 1-31, within a date, by
first translating  "[Day]" into the regular expression

(?:(?:0?[1-9]|[12]d|3[01])).

But it turns out that this expression fails
to find the day "22" -- at least during a trial run in the EasyPattern
Helper search window.

The following seems apt:

"A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth
thinking about: 'Sometimes you have a programming problem
and it seems like the best solution is to use regular
expressions; now you have two problems.'  Regular
expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive.
That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone
as writing any other complex programming code."

-- David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

The following irregular expression also seems apt:

&3#!+*^$#!!