1 - 2 - 3 - 4.................................................

Grass Roots.........................................Let's Live For Today

Teeming.................................

Can we get an Amen for Gene Callahan?

Apologies..............................

Not sure how I missed it.  Yesterday was National Doughnut Day.  Wiki is here.  Won't let this happen again.  Happy belated!

thanks Ka-Ching!

Go...................................

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.” 
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

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Fifty years ago...............................

Little Stevie Wonder...........................Fingertips



Released in May of 1963, this song zoomed to the top of both the Billboard Pop 100 and R & B Charts by August.  This YouTube version may date to 1964.  A live but non-live version (my favorite) is here.

Snooping............................

Walter Russell Mead pens a long, interesting, and insightful essay on the domestic phone surveillance and eavesdropping being employed by the Obama administration.

"The answers are anything but easy; the dangers of terror and the dangers of tyranny are both very real."

Choices, choices, choices.  I suspect the real damage inflicted by the IRS/Tea Party brouhaha is that it has taken the option of the President saying "Trust me" totally off the table.  

Anti-spontaneity...................

“We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.” 
-Jeremy Glass
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The bus.............................

“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone."
"I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” 
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

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Whisper................................

Mamas & the Papas.................Dedicated to the One I Love

Hate it when this happens........................

thanks jonco

Don't wait...................................

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Testing......................................

For those of us who fancy short cuts, are impatient, and are generally rule challenged, comes this dandy test.

I've forgotten who pointed me to this, but thanks anyway.

Fifty years ago............................

The Chiffons......................................Lucky Me

Reach...................................

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” 
-Eleanor Roosevelt

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This can only be good................................

thanks mark

Opening paragraphs...........................

Opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlightenment, and of its allies and disciples in other European countries, is as old as the movement itself.    The proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings, and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge, was naturally opposed by the churches and religious thinkers of many persuasions.  But such opposition, largely because of the absence of common ground between them and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, made relatively little headway, save by stimulating repressive steps against the spreading of ideas regarded as dangerous to the authority of the church or state.  More formidable was the relativist and sceptical tradition that went back to the ancient world.  The central doctrines of the progressive French thinkers, whatever their disagreements among themselves, rested on the belief, rooted in the ancient doctrine of natural law, that human nature was fundamentally the same in all times and places; that local and historical variations were unimportant compared with the constant central core in terms of which human beings could be defined as a species, like animals, or plants, or minerals; that there were universal human goals; that a logically connected structure of laws and generalizations susceptible of demonstration and verification could be constructed and replace the chaotic amalgam of ignorance, mental laziness, guesswork, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy, and, above all, the 'interested error' maintained by the rulers of mankind and largely responsible for the blunders, vices, and misfortunes of humanity.
-Isaiah Berlin, Against The Current:  Essays in the History of Ideas

Hometown beauty................................

The Newark Public Library..........................................

The kids are doing just fine......................

Unorganized Hancock................................Green Onions



Partial back story is here.   Hit the tip jar.  I have.  In a few days you'll get a hand written "thank you" note.  It's very cool.  Guaranteed.

Company..................................

"Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company."
-Booker T. Washington

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Fifty years ago...................................

Booker T. & the MG's........................................Mo' Onions

Jetboy broadens my horizons.........................

Besides introducing yours truly to some fabulous music, Jetboy recently posted this:
"Had this one on the old Seeburg back in the day..."

Not knowing (but sort of correctly guessing) what a Seeburg was, the Oracle Google was consulted.  Here is the start of an answer.  Here is a photo:

Opening paragraphs.................

Earlier volumes have led us to the point where the aggressors, both in Europe and Asia, had been driven to the defensive.  Stalingrad in February 1943 marked the turn of the tide in Russia.  By May all German and Italian forces in the African continent had been killed or captured.  The American victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway Island a year before had stopped Japanese expansion in the Pacific Ocean.  Australia and New Zealand were freed from the threat of invasion.  Henceforward in Europe the Axis must expect and await the Anglo-American assault which had so long been purposed.  The tremendous armies of the United States were growing in strength and quality with every month that passed.  But the Western Allies could never strike home at Hitler's Europe, and thus bring the war to a decisive end, unless another favourable change came to pass.  Anglo-American "maritime power," a modern term expressing the combined strength of naval and air forces properly woven together, became supreme on and under the surface of the seas and the oceans during 1943.  It was not until April and May that the U-boats were beaten and the mastery of the life-lines across the Atlantic was finally won.  Without this no amphibious operations on the enormous scale required to liberate Europe would have been possible.  Soviet Russia would have been left to face Hitler's whole remaining strength while most of Europe lay in his grip.
-Winston Churchill,  Closing The Ring

Competition.............................

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"Excellence demands competition."
-Ronald Reagan

Eclectic for sure.........................

Continuing the saga of the Mighty E.and his blog headers..........
If one were to click on the "Eclecticity" label, after scrolling down a considerable way on the right hand side of this blog, one would find a collection of some of the finest (no pun intended) sustained creativity in the blogosphere.  The latest installment to the collection is here:

One foot over...............................

Waylon Jennings.........................I've Always Been Crazy

Career advice.............................

Actually it is not advice, but if you go visit this chart and do the point and click thing, you can find all sorts of information about a whole host of careers.  Didn't find real estate brokerage, but then I only pointed a clicked a half dozen times.  Just as an observation kids: the people who have the most flexible careers, combined with the best earnings potential, tend to be the best salespeople.  Just saying.  Bet they didn't teach you that in college.

thanks craig

Why I invest in real estate.....................

............instead of the stock market.  Just a personal preference for bricks and mortar rather than fear and speculation.

From Monday's Business Digest:

     Stocks slid with Treasuries and gold as better-than-forecast data on business activity and consumer confidence fueled speculation the Fed will scale back its bond purchase.  The Dow tumbled 208 points.  Losers trounced winners by a margin of nearly 5 to 1.

From Tuesday's Business Digest:

     Wall Street closed higher on Monday as weaker-than-expected factory activity last month fueled worries that the economic recovery was struggling.   The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 138 points for the day.  Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones by a margin of 7 to 6.

Speaking of real estate.....................

All indications point to a continuing recovery of the housing market.   Have I told you lately that it is a pretty good time to buy a fabulous lot and build your dream home?  We still have a few wondrous lots for sale.

Back story on charts, with some commentary, is found here.

Fifty years ago................................

Marvin Gaye.................Can I Get A Witness



Written by Holland-Dozier-Holland, this song was recorded in July of 1963 and released that fall.  It peaked at #22 on the Hot 100 Chart.  The "B" side was I'm Crazy 'Bout My Baby.  I have no knowledge about the dancers.

Opening paragraphs...............

The small bloody hole in the ground that was Captain Bob Edwards's Charlie Company command post was crowded with men.  Sergeant Hermon R. Hustuttler, twenty-five, from Terra Alta, West Virginia, lay crumpled in the red dirt, dead from an AK-47 round through his throat.  Specialist 4 Ernest E. Paolone of Chicago, the radio operator, crouched low, bleeding from a shrapnel wound in the left forearm.  Sergeant James P. Castleberry, the artillery forward observer, and his radio operator, PFC Ervin L. Brown, Jr., hunkered down beside Paolone.  Captain Edwards had a bullet hole in his left shoulder and armpit, and was slumped in a contorted sitting position, unable to move and losing blood.  He was holding his radio handset to his ear with his one good arm.  A North Vietnamese machine gunner atop a huge termite hill no more than thirty feet away had them all in his sights.
-Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway,  We Were Soldiers Once...And Young

Beers..............................................

It’s a coincidence, but we consume blogs and beers at about the same rate.

Each week, the average American has 4.2 drinks and reads 4.1 blogs (sources: Gallup,Hubspot).

So if your blog was a beer, what kind would it be?

Full educational post from whence the above was excerpted 

is here.  Pix of beers here:

Yesterday was a beautiful day for a walk................

...........so we went to Black Hand Gorge..........

An old canal lock in a bit of disrepair

The InterUrban Tunnel sans tracks

Weathering

Low tide at the Licking River

The Deep Cut

By my side...........................

Sheryl Crow...................The First Cut is the Deepest

Commence making mistakes...............

"But my mistakes have been necessary. I’ve dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed, your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Success is a lot like a bright white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you’re desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it."
Conan O'Brian, as excerpted from here

Please..........................

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A few questions..........................

Jeff Bezos asks a few questions of the graduates listening to this 2010 commencement address at Princeton.  Full speech is here.  Some of the questions here:

"Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

"Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

"Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

"Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

"Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

"Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

"When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

"Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

"Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Please.................................

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