Safety Fork, the

I made this organ pipe yesterday. As you can see, it isn’t quite finished; the ends and edges still need to be trimmed so that everything is flush. It speaks an A, 440 Hz—plus or minus a few.

I was impressed by a website documenting the author’s construction of his own instrument. It was a video on his site demonstrating how to build a pipe that made me want to try it. In the end it took more time to assemble the table saw I used than it took to fashion the pipe (discounting time spent waiting for glue to dry, which, though necessary, is not really work).

Now I’m left considering whether I want to try to build a whole organ. It seems like it might be a good hobby, in that a few hours work can yield one or more pipes—complete on their own even if intended for something larger. And my parents are turning an old church into a house, which is as good a place for an organ as I could ask, assuming I ever finished one. On the other hand, I would have to drive out of the city to work on it, since I’m not likely to have appropriate space for a wood shop any time soon. Perhaps it will be a project for me to do on my Fridays this summer.

The cafeteria where I work posts its weekly menu on our company intranet website. It lists daily breakfast and lunch specials and the soup of the day. Every week, the Friday section includes “Soup of the Day: Du Jour.” If I ask a waiter in a restaurant what is the soup of the day, he doesn’t tell me it’s du jour. I know it’s du jour. That’s why I’m asking the question. I’m sure they write du jour there because they don’t want to put whatever’s left or who knows. Maybe it seems more sophisticated to whoever writes up the menu, but after two years it strikes me more like Vizzini constantly exclaiming “Inconceivable!” They keep using this word and I do not think it means what they think it means.

I was invited to take part in a protest today. I thought about going. I mean, I make fun of protesters, but I realized that I’ve never before seriously considered protesting something. I was told that people would show up for both sides and I was cordially invited to be on either one. I still didn’t want to be there, but it took until this evening for me to figure out exactly why.

I don’t want people to make decisions based on protests. I don’t want rule by volume; I don’t want victory by bigger banners; I don’t want the catchiest slogan to win. In my mind I imagine a world where people are persuaded by wisdom and reason, by thoughtful essays, by impassioned lecturers in great debates with knowledge and logic and diction and audiences who go home with heads so full of new thoughts that ideas leak out their ears.

It’s probably not realistic, but I didn’t pick a side and paint a slogan on a placard because the only way I’ve figured to make such a world is to act as if it were so and use what knowledge and reason I can muster to persuade you to do the same.