Skip had a really good column today. I will post a link later. It is a wonderful piece about foxes and hedgehogs. Though he does not put names in the column (except Plato, Aristotle, Ibsen, and Shakespeare) I get the feeling the final paragraph was, at least passively, mentioning a certain grant administrator.

Classicist Guy Davenport always thought that Berlin got the poem fragment’s translation wrong. He said that its true meaning was something like this, a translation that my five-year-old linguist granddaughter will love: “Fox knows/Eleventythree/Tricks and still/Gets caught:/Hedgehog knows/One but it/Always works.”

Or so political hedgehogs believe, safe, taut, defensive and victorious. But, then again, foxes have been known to slyly nudge balled-up hedgehogs downhill toward the river…