Ayatollah Bashir al Najafy, a leading Shia cleric, criticized the Council of Ministers for its failure to consult Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani before passing the draft law, and said it contains "numerous digressions from both civil and religious jurisprudence".
I have written before about the complications of my father's Alzheimer's, but now that he has passed, after six years of slow digression, all I can think about are the other ways it could have gone.
Stanley Greene traveled a long road to become a photojournalist, one that passed through personal crises and professional digressions, and eventually led to a search for a good reason to be a photographer.
Other great centers of cultural exchange -- Cairo, Palermo, Naples, Seville -- pass in review under Lyons' steady gaze, as do measured digressions on particular problems and disciplines, many of them enlivened by citation ("see: Antioch, Crusader ladies").
Connected to virtually every item was a piquant vignette — a comic oddity, a compilation of historical or biographical arcana — but each digression inevitably led to a plaintive anticlimax, because the tangible artifacts had now passed from Jay's care.
There are digressions on the chemistry of toxins "adsorbed" (a nice word which means sticking to the outside of, rather than sucked into) by pelagic plastic – and, alarmingly, the way they bio-accumulate as they pass up the food chain.
Her digressions had a music of their own, punctuated by the tintinnabulation of carefully dropped names ("I also became friendly with Annie Fischer"; "I did have the opportunity of playing many of these sonatas to Clara Haskil"; "Rachmaninov did pass on some of his ideas to Nicholas Medtner who allowed me to copy them into my own edition").
It's impossible to pass through Gil Scott-Heron's memoir "The Last Holiday" without "hearing" it in the musician's own voice — the pitch and cadence of his unmistakable burnished baritone; the declarative positions and improvisational digressions that wander deep into a thicket.
But I digress (from my digression).
