Part I
First is that I was almost a burn victim about an hour ago. My friend Scott is moving tomorrow, and so tonight myself, him, and another friend Mags went to get some pizza at the favorite pizza place here.
One thing led to another, and we were on a secluded baseball field with fireworks. At one point during the night, Mags' firework thing tipped over and started spewing fireworks into center field. Scott decided he'd do the same, after watching the effect, pointing his into left field.
I was in left field.
I saw the firework pointed some direction, and in the dark wrongly interpreted it to be pointed in my general direction. I ran.
Turns out, I ran into the firework's field of fire. All I heard was "No! The other way!" and there was a crack.
Only one firework was in that tube, but when I saw it launch I jumped (more from reflex than anything else). And I swear to God, the firework flew under me. I felt the heat. Half a second later it exploded.
I wish someone had recorded it, because it must have looked pretty cool. I was a little shaken, but we were from that period on a little more careful about our horizontal fireworks.
Part II
Last week I finished two books - works of fiction - and since then I've been reading an Oxford classic ... a collection of two of Cicero's works of political philosophy. Fairly dry stuff, only made worse by the fact that many of the pages of the original are lost, so there are constant notes to the effect that "The gist of the next few pages appeared to have been ... "
Anyways. I found this, and thought it was pretty cool:
... There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all-the god who is the author, proposer, and interpreter of that law. Whoever refuses to obey it will be turning his back on himself. ...
The words are in the mouth of the character of Laelius, who is asserting that justice is necessary for the stability of a state. He is describing the natural law, I believe, which had just prior been described as separate from the laws of a state by an opponent in dialogue.
