A little slice of history...........

John Sebastian.......................Darling Be Home Soon

A paradox of freedom.............

"Freedom, after all, is not the absence of responsibility.  It is the absence of restraints imposed by others.  To be truly free, however, we must generally impose severe restrictions on ourselves.  That often means delaying gratification.........or settling for less.................or simply doing without."
-Alexander Green,  beyond Wealth

Eat your french fries..............

Louis CK.......................................Why?

Stranger..................

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is 
stranger than we can think.”
-Werner Heisenberg

photo courtesy of APOD

Not so helpful advice.................

Speculate........................

William Blake's  Ancient of Days

"I feel most deeply that this whole question of 
Creation is too profound for human intellect. 
A dog might as well speculate on the mind of 
Newton! Let each man hope and believe what 
he can."
-Charles Darwin

A test...........................

“One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.”
-Evelyn Waugh

Kurt points to a vocabulary test.  This one is designed to project the total number of words in your vocabulary.  Having sedulously worked on my vocabulary over the years, my final tally seemed reasonable.  However, while significant self-selection is going on, it strikes me that there was regnant overstatement of the reported SAT scores of the testees.  Not calling them caitiff, just forgetful.  Personally, there was a sense of williwaw when I realized I didn't know the difference between a valetudinarian and a funambulist.  

No rules..............................

"Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something."
-Thomas A. Edison

Drinking her wine.................

The Beatles..................................Norwegian Wood

Pet the dog...................

Scott Adams reports:

"Recently scientists have discovered that adolescent male monkeys prefer playing with trucks while adolescent female monkeys prefer dolls. As it turns out, toy preferences are more about chemistry than society.

"You might say the monkey study is one more step in humanity's slow-motion 'discovery' that human behavior is caused by whatever chemicals are sloshing around in our skulls. On one hand we all know that the physical composition of our brains at any given moment dictates our choices, and yet we cling to the superstition that we exercise some sort of free will. Science, being awesome, keeps chipping away at that magical thinking."

Lest you think all is lost, Scott concludes we have some control over our brain chemistry:

My neighborly advice for today is this: If you think your environment has taken a turn for the worse, consider the alternative explanation. Maybe the only thing that changed is your brain chemistry. Take a nap, drink some coffee, go for a walk, pet the dog, and try again.

Full essay is here.

Hmmmmm..................

Fair warning............................

thanks Dennis

Work...........................

"Ideas must work through the brains and arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Matter..........................

     "Democracy, he admits, is always difficult, but only a Christian society has the fixed principles to face those difficulties.  To make democracy work, we have to face honestly the problems of injustice.  Chesterton reminds us very pointedly:  'God Himself will not help us ignore evil, but only to defy and to defeat it.'
     "There are some people who are very concerned about politics and insist that religion doesn't matter, just as there are some who are very concerned with religion and insist that politics don't matter.  But both matter. Just like both of the two great commandments matter and must always go together:  Love God and love your neighbor."
-Dale Ahlquist,  Common Sense 101:  Lessons from G. K. Chesterton

Currency....................

     "The greatest of disadvantages is that we are too prone to welcome everybody else's wrong solution to the problems of life.  There is a natural laziness that moves us to accept the easiest solutions - the ones that have currency among our friends."
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

A fresh addition to my Amazon shopping cart........

"...knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light."
-Christopher Hitchens.   

Maria Popova highlights Hitchens's posthumously published Mortality - here


Link to Brain Pickings has been corrected.  Sorry.

After all, we are all just visitors here........................

"The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner."
-Stephen Jay Gould

Can't say anymore..................

Moody Blues..........................Nights in White Satin

Chaos...................

thanks Michael

More wine...........................

“A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a 
miserly wine lover” 
- Clifton Fadiman

More wine...........................

Astonished..................

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don't think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities.  Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse.  And the clouds
- no mere measure or geometry, no cubism
can account for clouds, or satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new - who has known it
before? - and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man.  And you, who are as old
almost as I am.  I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.

-Wendell Berry


art courtesy of

Rationing..................

"No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude."
-Karl Popper

As I suspected......................

from Barking Up The Wrong Tree

thanks Kurt

Playing.........................

thanks John

Soaring ever higher....................

Kansas...........................Carry On My Wayward Son

Service...........................

Service takes many forms.   Newark Kiwanians have made
a project out of the care and tending to of this garden on the
Courthouse Square.  It has looked fabulous all summer long.
Thanks!

Entertain...................

"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained."
-Walt Disney

I would hope so..................

Some guys just refuse to follow the rules...........

thanks jonco

Progress.........................

"You can buy two bars of the best chocolate in the world for $5.  The Queen of England can't buy any better chocolate than you can."
-Norman Love

Let it go........................

John Lennon....................Watching the Wheels
 


I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go 
         round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go 

The tragic flaw....................

‎”Everything you could have been, all the accolades you 
could have won and all the achievements that have been
 nagging about, didn’t happen for one reason only. 
You procrastinated.” 
-anonymous

Slowly.....................

“I like work. It fascinates me. I sit and look at it for hours.”
-anonymous

Proactively delaying....................

“When faced with two equally tough choices, most people choose the third choice: to not choose.
”
-Jarod Kintz

Responsibility.........................

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by 
evading it today.”
-Abraham Lincoln

Believing................

“I'm a big believer in putting things off, In 
fact, I even put off procrastinating."
-Lisa Kleypas

Hard........................

“Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and 
putting off a hard one makes it impossible.”
-George H. Lonmer

No limits....................

"Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the 
work he is supposed to be doing at that moment."
- Robert Benchley

thanks Michael

Equal opportunity...................

“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.” 
-Denis Waitley

Tarry..........................

"My evil genius Procrastination has whispered 
me to tarry 'til a more convenient season."
-Mary Todd Lincoln

Enabling...................

“A year from now you may wish you had started today” 
-Karen Lamb

Not much happening..................

“Do you know what happens when you give a 
procrastinator a good idea? Nothing!” 
-Donald Gardner

Starting......................

“Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.”
-anonymous

Close my eyes....................

Kansas..............................................Dust in the Wind

Dangers............................

thanks Todd

A certain independence of mind...........

Greeted by one lonely, and out of season,
blossom on Mom's magnolia tree

My favorite magnolia tree

On reaping....................

"The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time.  That is when we must learn to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big."
-Jim Rohn

A start........................

"Man has made at least a start on discovering the
meaning of human life when he plants shade trees
under which he knows full well he will never sit."
-Elton Trueblood

The entitlement society...............

thanks Greg

A sign.....................

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."
-Karl Popper

May the force be with you..........

thanks jonco

Always good advice...................

A strangeness in the air..............

Al Stewart...........................................On The Border

Not quite the opening paragraph...............

     "One governing concept shaped a castle:  not residence, but defense.  As fortress, it was an emblem of medieval life as dominating as the cross.  In the Romance of the Rose, that vast compendium of everything but romance, the castle enclosing the Rose is the central structure which must be besieged and penetrated to reach the goal of sexual desire.  In real life, all its arrangements testified to the fact of violence, the expectation of attack, which had carved the history of the Middle Ages.  The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and Roman legions for its ramparts.  After the Empire's collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority.  Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy."
-Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous 14th Century

A few of my favorite things..........

Friend David has started bloggers in my wee little corner of the Intertunnel on the process of naming their top five favorite books of all time.  An impossible task.  It's  like asking which were your five favorite breaths of air.  Of course, David cheated a bit - he named eleven.  He tagged Kurt, who posted five and then tagged me.  Kurt also tagged Michael, who posted ten (although he includes as one  Patrick O'Brian's fabulous Aubry/Maturnin series, which is comprised of  twenty books you must read in this lifetime). Michael tagged Jeff, who posted  five great books plus one (plus some blogging references  for good measure).  Following their lead, I have omitted self-help books (of which I have about ten favorites), biographies, business books, Dr. Seuss (for fear he would dominate), those mentioned in the aforementioned posts, and those featured by Oprah.  My list:

Michael Shaara: Killer Angels
Wendell Berry: The Memory of Old Jack
Rafael Sabatini: Captain Blood
Pat Conroy: The Prince of Tides
Leon Uris: Trinity

Not sure who hasn't been tagged yet, but whoever you are, you're it (Ray).

Just one of those weeks.............

thanks jonco

Fixing........................

"I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows."
-Karl Popper

Hmmmmm.......

Rhythm....................

"Man must see that nothing really is, but that everything is always becoming and changing.  Nothing stands still.  Everything is being born, growing and dying.  The very instant a thing reaches its height, it begins to decline.  The law of rhythm is in constant operation.  There is no reality.  There is no enduring quality, fixity or substantiality in anything.  Nothing is permanent but change.  Man must see all things evolving from other things and resolving him to other things, a constant action or reaction, inflow or outflow, building up or tearing down, creation or destruction, birth and growth and death.  Nothing is real, and nothing endures but change."
-The Kabala

Will.......................

"If we don't expect, we have all things, says Buddha.  Love because you will to love.  Give because you will to give.  Flowers bloom because they must, not because there are people fawning over them!  You live and love because you will.  Because you must."
-Leo Buscaglia