waste

What sounds like a farting goose and isn't Leo Kottke?

I am listening to double reed music after having decided that, while I do want to do a double-reed show in the spirit of the accordion show, I can't really justifying playing the whole of Rite of Spring (nor will I consider playing only part), even though we did just get some reputedly great recording and even though it does begin with a famous bassoon solo, and want therefore to make sure that I'll actually have the material ready to hand.  (ISTR reading Greg Sandow claim that the opening solo should sound really raw, or words to that effect; the CD I have lacks that feature, and I'm considering playing Univers Zero's "Ronde", even though it's not the best track on its album, mostly because of the skronky overblown-sounding bassoon solo somewhat early on (and it's really not bad, it just doesn't measure up to "Complainte" or "Malaise"—though in terms of showing off the bassoon it might be better, hmmm).)  The point: while I still maintain a theoretical devotion to the bassier instruments, I'm finding Hindemith's sonata for contrabasson and piano kind of hard going.  The last time I heard a contrabassoon (in … 2002, maybe?) it sounded much more musical.

I discovered via wikipedia that some charlatans are trying to call an instrument the "tenoroon", which is utterly ridiculous.

By way of an update: Gerald Oshita's contrabass sarrusophone playing on the album Space (with Roscoe Mitchell and Thomas Buckner) suits me right down to the ground.

Nooks do burnish a gloom

I'm not taking, but am trying to follow along at least some of the readings in, a class reading Jackson/Pettit/Smith's article "Ethical Particularism and Particulars", in which is made this claim:

It might be objected that, pace what we said before in the preliminaries, Wittgenstein's example of family resemblances shows that this line of thought is mistaken.  A diet of examples, or putative examples, can give us understanding of a term, can allow us to grasp a concept, without its being the case that there is a pattern exemplified by the examples, namely, the pattern whose grasp underlies our ability to say of new cases whether or not they fall under the concept.  What shows this is that, in the case of family resemblance concepts, new cases often call for decision—perhaps arbitrary, perhaps guided by "external" considerations.  But then, the argument might continue, there is no pattern, because if there were, no decision would be called for.  However, if there is no pattern in the diet of examples, every new case would call for decision, and any decision would be as good, as any other.  Sceptics about meaning can perhaps embrace this conclusion, but meaning scepticism is a high price to pay for particularism in ethics.

I don't know much about what skepticism about meaning actually involves (despite ostensibly having read something about it), though I do know at least two people who don't believe in literal meaning, but I'm extremely uncertain of the success of the above line of argument.  (For that matter, I'm not sure what to make of the earlier claim that a pattern does actually underlie family resemblance concepts, though "it can be difficult to spot or state" it.  If that were the case, wouldn't we be well advised, at least from a certain perspective that's probably not so unpopular, to work really hard at spotting and then stating the pattern, after which we could conclude that it was the pattern, and not a system of family resemblances, that gives the concept's instances?) 

Poet aureate

Cesium, ballast, Louisiana, Haifetz, Tallulah, W, Rhesus, Osiris, Irrlicht, Portugal, Aureola, Hugs, Texas Instruments, Peanut Butter, Bilonium, Polonium, Atme, Reen.

Pie is the new cupcake

Proof.

Today in the lounge was mentioned what was asserted to be a peculiarly British punctuational proclivity, the so-called "comash", that is to say, a comma, followed by a dash, with nothing between,—like that.  The phenomenon was adduced in a sort of "that's crazy!" way (incidentally there's little I dislike more than the tic exhibited in this sentence, of, owing to lack of writerly skill, writing something like "in a 'actual description goes here' way": clearly one simply can't think of an elegant way to describe whatever), but really, doesn't it make a lot of sense?  Punctuation marks can be very expressive, especially em dashes (my favorites!—maybe tied with semicola), so why ought one restrict their use to single isolated occurences?  Surely in combination they can achieve heretofore undreamt-of degrees of subtlety in expression.  (My gloss on the comash was that it implies a degree of reticence or hesitancy, and then:—suddenly elsewhere, or the dam is burst.)

It didn't take me long to come up, as I walked off, with the following silly and no doubt highly derivative series of thoughts.  One might think that punctuation marks are designed for capturing (and, it wouldn't surprise me, perhaps were originally actually used to capture) vagaries of expression present in speech but not in a simple records of which mere words were uttered, and that, even so, the textual representation of a sentence can never capture the specificity of the spoken sentence (on which it would, then, logically depend), that, say, there's a digital/analog analogy to be made, such that no matter how frequent the samples, something is always missing.  But that would be batty, because obviously what sorts of things you might mean ("mean" isn't really right, something more like the emphases you might intend ("intend" arguably not being an improvement), or, I guess, what you take yourself to be doing, or what you take yourself to want to do) in saying something (or communicating in some particular medium) will plainly be influenced by the notational/expressive possibilities afforded by writing/punctuation (or some other medium).  The characteristic rhetorical possibilities of linking, for instance, in HTML, whose absence in some other medium might irk one.  (Or consider the inability, in a representation allowing for real italics and in which italicization is the customary means of emphasis, of distinguishing between *this* *sort* of emphasis, in which each individual word gets its own distinct emphasis, and *this sort*, which operates on the whole phrase; this is something that bugs me once a month or so.)  In that case, the punctuation marks, though perhaps introduced in order to capture something already present in whatever it is the writing system is supposed to encode, could easily take on writing-specific valences, which would then be exported into other media and become general; moreover, since the (new) expressive possibilities of the marks would be associated with easily manipulable signs, it could be possible simply by juxtaposing two of them to create (or at least render explicit) a possibly intended attitude useable in other media, so that the relation would be bidirectional.  (Consider the interrobang.  Actually don't, because I'm certainly not prepared to say that the familiar "what?!" was created by the mark, and not that the mark was created in response to a lack in the punctuation pantheon, though I am prepared to assert that there are probably now people who, when reacting what?!ly, think of their reaction in interrobangish terms, so maybe, sure, consider the interrobang.)

This is probably the familiar point about landscape painting teaching us how to look at nature recast, though.  (Not (a) that I have any reason to believe that that was the first formulation of the general idea or (b) that plenty of people haven't gotten by recasting that point in a myriad of ways anyway.)

But I want to register my full support for the comma-dash, the semicolon-dash, the colon-dash, dashes of all sorts of lengths (consider Tristram Shandy), and all that.  But the postscript is sacrosanct! Don't fuck with the postscript! No strategy!  Boo strategy!

Pallas in the the spring

Pallas slaps a Lapp: what?!  Lapp's brat pal, Sam, mans a tank, starts war, attacks Pallas.  Pallas bats at tank-clad Sam; adamant hatch-hat has all bat's attack and brat stays at war, lacks harm.  Rats!  Sam calls Lapp barracks: attack Pallas!  Lapp armadas amass arms.  Sam's tank and small handgats blast at Pallas; Pallas calmly yaws, balls fly past.  Sam gawks at map, has plan: flank Pallas!  Plan lags, flags, has a flaw: Pallas calls gallant Mars and Mars hacks and saws Lapps.  Can Sam crack Pallas/Mars phalanx?  Sam can't, calls a talk.  Pallas that slaps Lapps stands, stamps and balks: an Sam starts war, Sam shall stay at war.

In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine

I am going to take a series of photographs, black and white, soft focus, of people looking into the middle distance blankly while holding vaguely abstract poses and pissing on each other.  They will be numbered nonsequentially under the title Micturotica, and will make my reputation.

Unrelated: the idea I had here, to which I cannot directly link because there don't seem to be links to individual comments, and which I therefore reproduce verbatim:

Douglas Hofstadter and I, in an essay I wrote for my 12th-grade English class on The French Lieutenant's Woman, thankyouverymuch. It was about multiple endings or some such crap.

Another way to do it would be to write your book in continuation passing–style: at the end of each page, a note saying which is the next page, so that the progression of the book would come apart from the progression of physically consecutive pages. If the book were of a decent length, this might prevent one from being able to tell based on purely physical characteristics how close one was to the end (you'd be able to tell that you've seen some facing pages before, or the like, but it would hard to keep everything straight enough to have the sort of immediate indication the diminution of thickness on the right-hand side offers will-you or nill-you). On the other hand, it would be annoying to read.

, is, I think, pretty great (though the reference to continuation-passing style, which is so hyphenated (not en dashed), is perhaps not technically correct).  One way to improve matters: have both a novel and a short story (beginning on page 2) in the same volume, just to prevent the reader from counting pages. 

Somewhat related to this post: the teacher for whom I wrote the abovementioned essay (very short thing, it was in-class) claimed, marginally, on the basis of the introduction in which I adduced the fact of the continual shortening of the right-hand side, that she could imagine me writing for the NYRB—rather unlikely, I should think.  I'd be pleased, though, if I could regain some of the rhetorical excess that occasionally informed this humble blog and humble comments left elsewhere in times past.

Glory be to transforming things

Back in my day, Primus was just a being of pure energy.
Primus is the being who created the Transformers.

Abstract energizing, outrage exciting outrage without an end, without a target.  The Decepticons¹, no doubt, are his thoughts, as are these mens' nemeses; their forms not unaltering, in our truth, but changed whenever needed.
In this doubtful battle between Decepticon und Wahrheitsbot, for whom ought a man, at end, tip his thoughts?
Fathering forth, though past change, best² & first, outbursts, shapeless energy, he is our transcending god. Bots' morphful battle, these shifting grounds—are his glory, to thus grant being to us and them; his is, though, sameness, eternity.

1: I was confused with my Transformers mythology and thought the same entity created both Decepticons and Autobots; I am not longer certain of this.
2: Another confusion, this time between the names of Primus and Optimus Prime.

Wicky pocky

Some no good fucker has recalled Sources of the Self, which I've only had out for about a year and am only halfway through.  I'll show him or her, though, and recall it right back.

I recycle an old email

I happened across this quotation that I had copied out of an article in some German newsmagazine while eating some mediterranean foodstuff at Knofie on Bergmannstr. towards the end of the time I was in Berlin:

Immer weiter müsse das Experimentieren gehen, sagte er, nur so sei die Tradition zu retten. Stillstand ist der Tod.

The he who said that is some hotshot molecular gastronomy chef dude with six Michelin stars (twice three, I think, not thrice two or some other combination); most of the article was about his suppliers who go about everything the real way, which is to say, the old-fashioned, expensive, labor-intensive leidenschaftlich way.  I thought at the time, and now, seeing it again, think again, that the sort of attitude that sees experimentation as a means of saving traditional values (as opposed to either seeing experimentation as a means of discarding them, or as thinking that experimentation must be opposed for their sake, which is I suppose really the same view twice over with the valences changed) might be easier to pull off in a culinary realm, since there (probably) isn't as much of a teleological view—probably not so many people think that developments in cooking show that we're on the path to something not just newer but superior and that therefore the old can be discarded (or must therefore be exploded because the tradition's out of gas or whatever).  Whereas that attitude is not unknown elsewhere (NB I have actually only read a part of that essay, a few paragraphs, really, and they made a different point from that for whose sake I am presently adducing it, and this despite at least two intelligent people having assured me that it's not all bad; though, really, it's probably true that even culinary modernists want their food et).  (Though cf. the comment quoting Steve Reich here, and the post to which that comment is pendant is interesting, too.)  It could also be that chefs are generally trained in a more hands-on way than, I gather, composers (at least) are these days, though that is presumably not unconnected with the view above.

The article also contained this, which was also interesting, albeit for different reasons:

[so und so] ..., ehemaliger Bauunternehmer, der alles hingeschmissen hat und jetzt das einfache Leben geniesst.  Wenn er nicht gerade durch Bali fährt, sammelt er für Veyrat Pilze.

(Veyrat being, I guess, the chef.)  I wouldn't mind enjoying that kind of simple life.

Istunpa Sankys Laitalla

Here's an interesting exercise you can do. Follows a list of words from §§93–4 of the Philosophische Untersuchungen.  It in turn is followed by a list of the words used, in the Philosophical Investigations, to translate the words in the first list; the second list, however, is out of order with respect to the first (that is, the first word in the second list is not necessarily the translation of the first word in the first list).

merkwürdiges; Merkwürdiges; Seltsames; merkwürdiges
remarkable; queer, queer, queer

What is the correspondence, do you think?  Does, perhaps, "remarkable" translate "Seltsames"?  The numbers would, in that case, match up.

The translators have done something that in ordinary circumstances would be kind of odd, but which here makes sense, I suppose—only they haven't done it consistently.  I just noticed a word italicized in the English, but that's not the odd thing.  The odd thing is rendering phrases like "ein deutscher Satz" as "an English sentence",  or "er habe … eine Gruppe von vier Zeichen als OBEN gelesen (oder gedeutet)" as "he has … read (or interpreted) a set of five marks as A B O V E".  But then in §165 we have "ein deutsches gedrucktes Wort" translated as "a German printed word", which caused me much confusion when, in §168, I read "That is how it is when I read English and other languages"—I thought Wittgenstein, known to me as a native speaker of German, was talking about what it's like to read second (third, fourth, nth where n ≠ 1) languages.  But actually the original is "wenn ich Deutsch und andere Sprache lese".

That high lonesome sound

Keiji Haino recorded a solo hurdy gurdy album, and with its title, 21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man, gave himself one of his undoubtedly few commonalities with Bad Religion.  Jim O'Rourke, too, has such an album, or so I recall.  (Even Sting played one during the Oscars a few years ago.)  I would like to hazard a guess: the next hard-to-play instrument with a whiff of the antique to find use in avant-garde noisery will be the bagpipes.  Can't you imagine a concert featuring someone sitting on stage, squeezing the pipes, pedals festooned about his feet?  Or maybe two mutually slightly out of tune bagpipes.  That piercing keen—looped? I can, and I can't wait.

Maybe Richard Youngs can start the trend; what I'm imagining would be up his alley, and he is Scottish.

The problem with the New Yorker caption contests

No, it's not that the right answer to all of them is "Christ, what an asshole!", nor that the submitted captions nearly always suck (though those are problems).  The chief problem, or at any rate the problem which the cartoon for which a winning caption was picked in the Jan 15 issue, is that no caption is necessary.  There's a couple, in a jail cell, in bed; the woman is smoking.  The caption reads "How about we just stay in tonight?".  You see, it's funny, because they're in jail, so they couldn't actually go out if they wanted to, but the dialogue seems "out of sync" with their situation—it's as if they took no notice of their actual surroundings but instead thought themselves in a perfectly ordinary bedroom, free to leave at any time.  Ha! Ha!  But we knew that much from the postures, expressions, and activities captured mid-action in the cartoon before the caption.  To the extent that it's clever, the cartoon needs no gussying up with words.  I thought maybe that particular cartoon was a test by the editors, to see if anyone contributed a caption that was actually a suggestion that they leave it blank.

The editors of the New Yorkers set middle America a test, and it failed.

I am in fifth grade

Homo sum; pedicandi nihil a me alienum puto.

title!

Several months ago Adam Kotsko said this:

It's the same with people who want everything to be broken down into clearly defined arguments: I actually hate that. It seems transparently worthless to me, and I never condescend to formulate my ideas in ways that will satisfy them. Partly it's just a matter of not wanting to learn a new game -- just as I have never picked up a new video game in close to a decade, but am virtually unbeatable at Street Fighter II. But it's partly just that I recoil from the idea that my statements will be rejected due to formatting errors, or that the truth can fail to win out based solely on the contingent fact that falsehood was defended with stronger arguments.

After announcing that I'd reread Religio Medici, I actually start it again, though I didn't even get through to the second part (which means I didn't get to the really awesome lines like the one about standing above Atlas his shoulders 'nat); I did, however, get to that part quoted below, which when I first reread it seemed noteworthy to me since Taylor in Sources of the Self makes much of the rising importance of reason as procedural, and of demonstration by one's own efforts and resources, as opposed to a sort of reason that comprehends an external order, with the way one got to that comprehension being comparatively unimportant, and here's Browne saying, let's not rush in to ratiocination, since your grasp of the truth might not be equal to your ability to argue for it.  (But why then are you certain it's the truth? Well—exactly, that's why it was striking.)

I have no Genius to disputes in Religion, and have often thought it wisedome to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weaknesse o my patronage ... Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gantlet in the cause of Veritie: Many from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate zeale unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troopes of error, and remaine as Trophees unto the enemies of Truth: A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet bee forced to surrender; tis therefore farre better to enjoy her with peace, then to hazzard her on a battell.  If therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I doe forget them, or at least defer them, till my better setled judgment, and more manly reason be able to resolve them; for I perceive every mans owne reason is his best Oedipus, and will upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the subtilties of errour have enchained our more flexible and tender judgments.

I wonder how often minds are really changed simply by dint of arguments, and how often someone is merely forced to admit that, yes, argumentatively he's been defeated, but he still thinks he's right.  "Simply" there I suppose in contrast to an argument that additionally gets a person to look at the issue a different way, or to see not only that this particular argument has won out but that one's own position is unworkable, but that isn't proceeding simply by argument, it's proceeding by a good argument—the contribution of an another perspective isn't something superadded to the bare argument.  (I read a not very interesting because sort of, to me, obvious article recently in I can't remember which journal that was lying around the library with a title that may or may not have included the word "manifest" that made the point that a lot of philosophical  writing proceeds not deductively but more or less by saying "of course (usually not) X, just look at such and such!"; I can't remember, though, if the author thought that that approach was a species of argument or was to be constrasted with arguments traditionally construed.)

I'm so naïve

Slkinsey:

Isn't Old Overholt made by the same guys who make Jim Beam? Aren't these the guys who jumpstarted the small batch bourbon craze when they figured out that they could take regular old Jim Beam out of the still and just age it/bottle it/label it differently as Baker's, Basil Hayden's, Booker's or Knob Creek?

And here I had assumed they were actually made by different entities…

HAAALIFAX

Old Time Relijun is the second coming of the Hampton Grease Band, pass it on.

Not invented here

This post prompted, in a strange and still unclear wise, me to revisit an idea I've occasionally kicked around but never actually made any progress on in the past: namely, to move from my current system for tracking albums and generating my master playlist, based exclusively on the filesystem, to a more flexible actual database, which would allow me also to track, for instance, how many times a song has been played, and potentially much more if I ever bothered to think it up.  Nevermind that there are already many such programs/systems, even ones that work as plugins for the xmms/beep/audacious family of media players, better than anything I'm likely to come up with—nevermind that.

The real problem, the extent of which I now realize: since I'm just using the songchange plugin in audacious, but otherwise am only using it for playback and whatnot, I still move things around, retag, etc using the commandline.  But I can't use (say) `mv' if I want to move a directory somewhere, because mv doesn't know about the database.  So I have to write at least interfaces that are database-aware to all the ordinary filesystem-manipulation programs that I might use.  So far: a mv-alike for things within the db, an rm-alike, a tool to add things to the db, a replacement to my old `albums' program (which both cleaner and shorter—hooray).  To come: a rename-alike, a playlist generator, and an interface to my tagging script.  And at some point something which I couldn't already have done before, I guess.

At least it's keeping me off the streets (and from doing other work).

One for my public

I already employed the punned-upon phrase and would hate to repeat myself, and, more importantly, can think of no way to make the phrase that follows actually work as a punchline to a joke—can think of no setup of what kind soever that might lead to its utterance making the slightest bit of sense—and so I offer it up for public working-upon in the hopes that someone will be able to fashion it into a vehicle for hilarity: sestina lente.

Throwing in the towel?

If not only the Stanley Brothers but also Geoff Pullum think that "the reason is because" is a-ok,  do I have any choice but to accept it?  (Though really, what else would one expect from one of those permissive linguists?)

Fortunately Pullum's provided me with something else about which to twist my knickers: whence this claim that Americans prefer, or are starting to prefer, merely "d" as a suffix instead of "nd" or "rd" for numbers ending in 2 (but not 12) or 3.  I can't decide whether I'd be more likely to read "3d" as "thd" or "three pence" (and that not out of misguided anglophilia, no, nor anglophilia guided right) but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be mistaken in concluding its author a pervert.

Is the situation so uncommon, then, in which philosophy itself forbids one to philosophize?

Or so asked Georg Lichtenberg, as well he might have.  I have checked out but not yet begun to read, as it's waiting on my completion or giving up on of The Sources of the Self, which if good for nothing else at least has an interesting bibliography, a book called Ethics without Philosophy, which appears chiefly to be focussed on Wittgenstein with some Heidegger coming in towards the end.  But I seem to have hit upon a digression before getting properly underway on my ingression, as I meant to note that while reading TSotS in an overpriced, uncomfortable, and yet nearly always packed, not infrequently with me among those packing, café, I was overcome by the influence of Demon Instrospection, appropriately enough given that I was reading a chapter about Montaigne and self-examination.  And so I was going to write a big NAVEL GAZEY POST W00!

While, in the past, I have claimed that oen goes to grad school to find out if one wants to go to grad school, that was a bit of a misrepresentation; really, as I knew then too, and even before I arrived here, one, if one is I, goes to grad school knowing that one wants to go, and knowing that that's a bad situation, but wondering: how did one come to be in this queer state, anyway, and is there anything to be done about it?  That is: one goes to grad school, knowing that it's too late not to want to go, to figure out, from some kind of morbid curiosity, why one wants to go—well … how did I get here? The result of this is that most of what I actually am interested is of primarily personal interest, and that interest has moreover a somewhat therapeutic character.  Each of the last two papers I've written which I think were actually pretty good has basically said, of different philosophers, [this] philosophy just messes you up; this is something that continues a theme that I've been, well, to say I've been thinking about it for three years or so carries too much of an implication of having done anything more than worry at the same basic thought without exploring the issues involved in any sort of depth, so let's just say that I've beene worrying, etc, for about that span of time.  (After reading the last note here I was, after first being quite pleased (especially since he really didn't have to do that), quite puzzled: what could I possibly have said? But eventually I decided it must have been the age-old hobby horse about authenticity (perhaps in its incarnation as a discussion about pretention).) Now that I'm finally writing about it it's quite odd; one doesn't really want to include anything personal, because that's really simply not the done thing, but that is, after all, the reason I actually want to right them and feel that it's important—not for anyone else to know (because then they too would be untimely spoilt!) but simply on my own account.

Fortunately I overheard from another in the dept. a description of a sketch from an unaired episode of Chapelle's Show I was able to use as motivation in a proposal for a paper, and so was able to pretend that I, personally, took a merely academic interest in the subject.  Though if the interest were merely academic, I'd doubtless be doing something else right now.

It's really too bad this thing isn't pseudonymous.  The real secret motivation for this post is having gone to dc and spent time with a bunch of people all of whom seem (by the infallible principle that everyone enjoys exactly what I want to, effortlessly, but I specifically have been locked out) to have a nonnegligible group of friends, and actual lives not tyrannized by the constant suspicion that really one ought to be working, and generally be in pretty cool spots.  (I'm so perspicacious.  There couldn't possibly have been anything not good, right?  Surely nothing at all was exceptional.)  Whereas the number of people with whom I regularly, or even occasionally, associate in extraacademic contexts here is … small, and my time is mostly spent either at school, at home, or at one of two cafés reading or playing chess (always with the same partner).  I could try blaming this on geography, but then I recall that my last year in Chicago, the only people I met were friends and associates of my then-girlfriend's.  I barely spent any time with my coworkers, who were really pretty cool.  So now, having come back from an awesome weekend, everything seems much worse here. 

The immediately superior paragraph is connected to those superior to it, no lie, but I'm not sure if that's obvious or not.  I have, anyway, decided on what to read while awaiting the return of Arnold Hitler: Religio Medici, which I haven't read in a while.  It seems profligate to reread something with so much unread, but I already reread Titus Groan at the beginning of the winter break, so why not?

Grass is greener

Crap, dude.

Two can be a trend if we try

Derek Bailey died on Christmas last year, James Brown this; what famous musician will buy the farm come Jesus's next natal day?  (And will he or she be as much more famous than Brown as Brown was than Bailey?)

bhop shift

About halfway through the conversation with my mother that ensued when I told her I had gone to a party in DC, she mentioned that if I had told my sister, I could then have told my sister's friend KR (I have no idea why everyone in my family calls her this, since it bears only a passing resemblance to her given name and are not her initials, but so it goes—at any rate it renders it unlikely that she or her agents or enemies will happen upon this), who, a recent transplant to the district, ought, thinks my mom, perhaps based on reality, meet people. KR is, quo' she, smart and would have kept up (or whatever; it's not as if people just stood around in the kitchen talking about philosophy, except for the ones who did), "and then she'd sleep with everyone".  I said that that was just as well, and mom replies: "She wouldn't have slept with you."—which is really also just as well, actually, but I'm not quite sure what to make of the whole thing.