MOTD

Tony Blair is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. The patient replies:

Fair fa your honest sonsie face,<br/> Great chieftain o' the puddin race,<br/> Aboon them a you take your place,<br/> Painch, tripe or thairm,<br/> As langs my airm."<br/>

Blair is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:

Some hae meat and canna eat,<br/> And some wad eat that want it,<br/> But we hae meat and we can eat,<br/> So let the Lord be thankit."<br/>

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the PM moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

Wee sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,<br/> Thou needna start awa sae hastie,<br/> Wi bickering brattle."<br/>

Now seriously troubled, Blair turns to the accompanying doctor and asks "What kind of facility is this? A mental ward?"

"No," replies the doctor. "This is the serious Burns unit."

Today's Redeeming Felicitous Turn Of A Phrase:

"On a far higher plane of literature [than Symonds] stands Walter Pater; but he, though he was influenced by Ruskin, is singularly different from the elder writer, and the difference sheds back a light upon the master's theories. Ruskin, bowed with sorrows though he was, remained unconquerably optimistic, and, so long as he was capable of work, he laboured with even excessive hopefulness at schemes of social regeneration. Pater retires from the dust of conflict into an artistic seclusion. The conclusion of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance is, in the highest degree, significant. Its teaching is that, to beings like men, beings under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve, the love of art for art's sake is the highest form of wisdom. "For art comes to you, proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake." The Oscar Wilde development had not the good will of Pater any more than that of Ruskin; but it logically follows from Pater's principle."

http://www.bartleby.com/224/0317.html

If anything xml's innate penchant for proliferation has contributed to the demise of the notion of "standard," which is going the way of other, now moth-eaten, icons of modern conceptual life, such as, um, "truth" or, um, "reality." Have you looked at any of the commercial 'xml editors'?