A sneering review from TIME Magazine, March 23, 1962:

"Hero Ford, a playboy from Argentina, falls pampassionately in love with Heroine Thulin, a Parisienne married to a patriotic editor. When the editor joins the Resistance, the hero realizes his duty and secretly does the same. Unaware of his decision, the heroine decides that he is merely a lightweight, and goes back to her husband. At the fade, while the violins soar among the bomb bursts, the poor misunderstood playboy dies heroically in an attempt to weaken the Wehrmacht's defenses in Normandy.

The tale is trite, the script clumsy, and the camera work grossly faked. Though the lovers wander all over Paris, the Cathedral of Notre Dame turns up in the background practically everywhere they go, almost as if it were following them around like a little dog."

TIME Magazine is still wearing the Ivy League sneer it displayed so impressively in 1962.

A less dismissive summary from Answers.com:

"The World War I setting of the original Blasco-Ibanez novel has been updated to World War II, but the basic plot remains the same. A well-to-do Argentinian family, rent asunder by the death of patriarch Lee J. Cobb, scatters to different European countries in the late 1930s. Before expiring, Cobb had warned his nephew Carl Boehm that the latter's allegiance to the Nazis would bring down the wrath of the titular Four Horsemen: War, Conquest, Famine and Death. Ford, Cobb's grandson, has promised to honor his grandfather's memory by thwarting the plans of Boehm. At the cost of his own life, Ford leads allied bombers to Boehm's Normandy headquarters."

In memory of Glenn Ford, a talented character actor who died at 90 yesterday, the opening paragraphs of an obituary in The Scotsman:

Screen icon Glenn Ford
dies at 90

RHIANNON EDWARD

GLENN Ford, one of the most enduring stars of the silver screen, has died at the age of 90.

Ford, who appeared in more than 200 films in a career spanning five decades, died at his home in Beverly Hills.

The actor's health had been in decline for a number of years after he suffered a series of strokes.

Although he never achieved the superstardom he craved, Ford was widely acclaimed as one of the best character actors in the business.

The business of narrative:

From a narrative suggested by the name of The Scotsman's reporter and related, if only by association with Normandy, to Ford's "Four Horsemen" film:

"The Vandaleurs are a family of Norman nobles with a heritable version of the mages' Gift. They have been using magic covertly for what appears to have been a very long time.... Another branch of the family is known to hold a fief in Normandy, but it is not yet known if they are covert magicians as well."

The Vandaleur narrative may be of interest to fans of The Da Vinci Code. (Ford is said to have been a Freemason, a charter member of Riviera Lodge No. 780, Pacific Palisades, California.)

For Catholics and others who prefer more traditional narratives:

 Illuminated parchment,
1047 A.D.,
The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse

Related material:

Yesterday's entries, and
an entry from April 7. 2003,
that they link to:

for Van Morrison
on his birthday

Honey Blonde She's as sweet as   tupelo honey She's an angel   of the first degree. She's as sweet as   tupelo honey Just like honey, baby,   from the bee. -- Van Morrison, 1971

From March 24, 2006:

"It's not the twilight zone no,
it's not the twilight zone
Yes it's just a party phone,
pure
honeycomb,
honeycomb,
honeycomb"

-- Van Morrison, "Twilight Zone,"
in The Philosopher's Stone

Seven

"Research & Ideas" memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

"The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean 'from danger.'"

-- Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

      -- Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today's previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On "experience"

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

"Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace 'experience' right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, 'to attempt, venture, risk,' whence the Greek peira,"experience," the source of our word 'empirical.' It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, "danger, sudden calamity," whence Modern English 'fear.' Already, we see the 'cognitive' directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic -- which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly 'experience' derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting 'trial, proof, experiment,' itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, 'to try, test,' from from ex-, 'out' + base per as in peritus, 'experienced,' 'having learned by trying.' The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, "trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards 'drama,' crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!"

"... Finally, 'experiment,' like 'experience,' is derived from Latin experiri "to try or test." If we put these various senses together we have a 'laminated' semantic system focused on 'experience,' which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we 'fare' 'fearfully' through 'perils,' taking 'experimental' steps. ..." (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today's previous entry is a sort of "ritual passage" for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today's online Harvard Crimson, "she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her."

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

"Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660."

A Multicultural Farewell

to a winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature,
the Egyptian author of
The Seventh Heaven:
Supernatural Stories --

"Doctor Jackson has identified
the seventh symbol."
-- Stargate

Other versions of
the seventh symbol --

Chinese version:

pictorial version:

algebraic version:

"... Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra' ...."

-- Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
 

The Hand of Grace

"Only the hand of grace
  can end the race"

-- Mary Gauthier

"Have you tried 22 tonight?"

-- Rick in Casablanca

Today's lottery in Pennsylvania
(state of Grace):

Mid-day 229, evening 119.

Related material: 2/29, 1/19.

"... God to a nation
         dealt that day's dear chance.
 To man, that needs would worship
         block or barren stone...."

-- "To what serves Mortal Beauty?,"
     by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J.

"Cash it in, and don't come back."

-- Rick in Casablanca

William Friedkin,
director of
The Guardian,
The Birthday Party,
and The Exorcist.

Related material:

Yesterday's entry on St. Augustine
and the life of
Robert J. O'Connell, S.J.,
author of
Plato on the Human Paradox,
Fordham U. Press, 1997,
online at questia.com.

See also today's entry at noon.

Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.

"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

-- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine

Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:

The Eternal Symbol of necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity: For details, see finite geometry of the square and cube.	The Temporal Symbol of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: For details, see Under God (Aug. 11, 2006)
The eternal combined with the temporal:

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point and
the previous entry.

"...
Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how
'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra,
and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any
algebra' ...."

-- Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25

"Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, was named Isla de los Alcatraces after the birds that were the island's only inhabitants." --Bay City Guide

Related material

Thomas Kuhn's "Pelican Brief":

"... the Philosopher’s Stone was a psychic rather than a physical product.  It symbolized one’s Self...."

Philosopher's Pelican:

"The formula presents a symbol of the self...."

Jung and the Imago Dei:

"... Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self...."

...the movement of
a self in the rock...

-- Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977