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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (noun)
[BRAM-bahl] 
1. a prickly plant belonging to the rose family, genus Rubus, especially the raspberry or blackberry: "Jane knew exactly how to work the bramble, coaxing the ripest berries off without a scratch."
2. a rough and prickly shrub or vine
adjective form: brambly
Origin:
Approximately 1390; from Middle English, 'brambel,' from earlier 'brembel'; from Old English, 'bremel,' from 'brom': broom. In action:
"Actually, as Bremer shows, Winthrop was among the least wretched-making of the Puritans. He might be considered the Mohammad Khatami of the Evangelical Republic of Massachusetts. (Since 'Puritan' is an imprecise label, the vogue now among scholars is to alternate it with the synonyms 'evangelical,'+reformed,' 'godly' and 'hot Protestant,' the last of which makes it sound as if the brand has been extended beyond Christian rock all the way into spring-break reality television.) As in Iran today, theocrats in 17th-century Massachusetts were struggling with moderates, and the outcome was uncertain. The colony executed adulterers, seriously considered requiring women to wear veils and drafted a legal code based on the Old Testament. Clerics advised their congregations to 'be willing to be killed like sheep' in the fight against Antichrist, and when ministers suspected an enemy of Roman Catholicism, they warned that he should be hacked out like a bramble: 'Call for hatchets do not deale gently it will prick you.'"
Caleb Crain. "The Puritan Dilemma," [Book Review: 'John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father,' by Francis J. Bremer]. The New York Times (September 21, 2003).
"Maybe it's not the apocalypse we had anticipated, but here, among Seattle's seven hills, as the hours slog toward the new millennium in fits of chill rain, as a cathedral light filters through late-fall clouds onto a cityscape of fire, gas plumes and impassioned, chanting routs, a lot of us are feeling bound in our own Book of Revelation.
A spirit that had been dozing complacently here for most of the past 80 years or so -- resting beneath the rhododendrons, mellowing among the blackberry brambles, lolling in latte foam with all the polite civility and self-satisfaction that Seattle has come to represent lately -- has reawakened for the moment. The sword it brandishes may not be a fiery one, exactly, but it's showing a distinct glow this week.
Behind veils of secrecy and protocol and prerogative, more than 5,000 delegates from the 135 member and 38 observer states of the World Trade Organization are meeting at the downtown convention center. They've come to celebrate the righteousness of capitalism and the riches of commerce, to debate rules for the barter and chop that they trust will bring the new order closer to its hour of fulfillment. The WTO -- successor of the International Trade Organization of the late 1940s, the git of GATT -- has come to this emerald Babylon to set a mark on the world's forests and seas, factories and farms and bazaars. As it says in the Book of Revelation: 'And no one, great and small, rich and poor, slave and free, will be allowed to buy or sell unless he bears this mark, either name or number.'"
Jim Molnar. "Apocalypse now: For a longtime resident, Seattle's last few tumultuous days seem to have come straight from the Book of Revelation." Salon.com (December 3, 1999).
"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight
The great artificer
Made my mate."
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Scottish novelist, essayist, poet. My Wife, Songs of Travel (1896). [The lines 'Steel-true, blade-straight' are inscribed on the gravestone of Arthur Conan Doyle, Hampshire, England.]
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