Hoggers, pickled cabbage and monoblogging

Three unrelated topics today …

1.) You’ve heard of “wilding,” I’m sure, a term that came into general use during the 1989 Central Park Jogger trial. People involved in wildings – the perpetrators, not the victims – enter a psychotic flow state, as I understand it. Mob mentality. It’s a bad thing.

There’s a wilding variation unique to the jogging community that I call “hogging.” Hogging occurs when a group of joggers spills out of the sidewalk and into oncoming traffic. They then occupy the lane as if traffic laws – and not a few of the laws of physics – were suspended.

A typical hogging took place early yesterday morning as I was headed into town on Augusta Street. Four- or five-abreast, they brought me to a complete stop. No waves or eye contact as they ran by.Weird, rude, reckless behavior.

2.) The man who approached me in the public square asking for help several days ago found me again today. This time, I heard him out. Here with a carnival, he said, registered at the homeless shelter on Washington Street, on a waiting list for one of four available beds there, hungry and asking restaurants to let him work in exchange for food. Could I spare a few dollars?

So I bought him breakfast.

And my sins are forgiven.

Or, as W. Somerset Maugham put it:
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent … It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. … a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would have long since become extinct.

3.) The blogosphere is divided into two camps: diablogs and monoblogs. Diablogs allow commenting. Monoblogs don’t. This blog is a monoblog. I do hope you’re cool with that.