WEBVTT

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And the grand prize
goes to anyone who

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knows who Gerolamo Cardano is.

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It's not that I'm so
smart, just my wife

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keeps feeding me these names
and I go to the library

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and look them up.

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Gerolamo Cardano was a
Renaissance mathematician

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and astronomer, all
around Renaissance man.

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And if you go over
to the library

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and check his biography,
even in an encyclopedia

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you'll find it fascinating.

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And one of the most
fascinating things about him

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was because of his
interest in statistics,

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he calculated the day
that he would die,

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and then when that day came he
committed suicide out of fear.

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I don't know why you're laughing
at someone else's misfortune,

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but the problem when
it comes to a poem

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was of course, that was the sort
of thing a poet would go for,

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which is a reason why I don't
mention that in this poem,

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because it seems to me
too obvious and too easy,

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too dramatic.

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So I wrote the poem, it
touches on a variety of things

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in his own life and on things
in Western civilization.

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It begins with a short
Latin phrase, Ubi panis ibi

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patria, who knows what that is?

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There's another book.

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Ubi-- you're all so modest.

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I had to look it up too, it
means roughly translated,

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where the bread is that's
where your country is.

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"Gerolamo Cardano"

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Ubi panis ibi patria, sing the
emigrants through their noses.

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God's calliopes as
they cross the sea,

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so sparkling it
might grow wheat.

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They're not looking
for virtue but a place

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to bury the riches
they carry with them.

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To what land?

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Perhaps it makes
little difference,

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except in the peasant dress
their flirting daughters

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will wear, their sons
in their romantic sweat.

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As for them, as
allogamous as bankers

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who support the local opera
and watching the show,

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wishing they were thieves,
participate in it,

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any land will do.

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They calculate and calculate.

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Wherever they go they
stay home, afraid of this:

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the day the Catholic sky
grows gravity and breaks open

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like a wheat sack to
affirm their calculation.

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However you cut it, in
palaces or log cabins,

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government is the
badge of lost paradise.

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And wise from that, in between
the gamble and philosophize

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in Italian at the
edges of their lives,

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wild buckaroos having
the bad boys' good time.

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Supposed to be hilariously
funny, but anyway.

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