I wonder if.............................................

Moody Blues.............................................Your Wildest Dreams

Congratulations Ray.............................

The Not-So-Simple Village Undertaker has been counting up the days, and they total five years.  Not only am I a regular reader but I'm also proud to call him a friend.  Well done, Ray!

Taking a radical step......................

Seventy years ago.............................

Perry Como...............................................Till The End Of Time

Good question..............................

Where would we learn stuff if it wasn't for school...

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

The Beatles.....................................Hide Your Love Away

Us humans are a stubborn sort....................

"You can’t just lecture people and expect them to change their behavior."

Plus, expecting others to conform to our wishes is not a recommended path to peace, love, and happiness.   Full post (about financial literacy) whence the quote was taken, is here.

Sixty years ago..................................

Roger Williams..........................................Autumn Leaves

Not trying to be judgmental, mind you,..........

...............................................but isn't this a tad bit absurd?

courtesy of 

Still has it.............................................

Trending 81, Frankie Valli is still a presence.

This human experience........................

......................................................................can be difficult.

"We're all just monkeys with smartphones."

Source, and context, is here.

Imagi-nation....................................

via

Irresistibly..................................

"The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth."

-Frederick Law Olmsted

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

Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons.......................Let's Hang On

Never out of style..................................

Dismantled..........................................

"Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach."
-Horace Mann (1841)

A reflex....................................................

"The Washington Reflex:  you discover a problem, throw money at it and hope somehow that it will go away."
-Kenneth Keating

17 Things....................................

...........................I wish they taught in college.  Full list is here.  Two of the seventeen here:

A survey of biases: Students read an old State of the Union address given by a president they disagree with, but told the speech came from a president they admire. After the student glows about how wise the speech is, the true speaker is revealed and the student instantly finds parts of the speech they dislike.

Sometimes life isn't fair 101: Twenty percent of the class's homework is randomly deleted. The other 80% get scholarships for no obvious reason.

I actually had the good fortune to have several professors who taught some of these subjects, even though they called them something else.  As they say at Faber College, Knowledge Is Good.

thanks craig

I'll drink to that...................................

Not a very happy song..................................

Jimi Hendrix Experience...........................................Hey Joe

Look..........................................

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” 
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Opinions.............................................

"Opinions are like watches.  None goes just alike, but each man trusts his own."
-attributed to "the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations", Alexander Pope

Energies........................................

"The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

Herman's Hermits.....................Can't You Hear My Heartbeat

Constant..............................................

"Man's capacity to behave in flagrant contradiction to the ideals he pretends to profess has been constant throughout history."
-Jean-Francois Revel

Yes, there are.....................................

Fruitless..............................................

"He who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts."
-Samuel Johnson

Outside in the cold distance.....................

Jimi Hendrix..................................All Along The Watchtower

Was JimiHendrix the greatest guitar player.....?

He didn't think so.  "How about one of the best sitting in this chair, how about that?"  Minute long interview excerpt with Dick Cavett - here.

Re-thinking Jimmy Carter...........................

Peter Beinart pens an essay suggesting another look:

It is certainly true that, more than any previous Cold War president, Jimmy Carter challenged global containment: the doctrine that, in order to safeguard the United States, America must oppose every communist advance anywhere in the globe. That doctrine, first proposed by Harry Truman as a way to justify aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947, had by the 1970s turned catastrophic in Vietnam. In that war, the United States lost 58,000 service members, killed millions of Vietnamese, spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and wrecked America's image overseas. All on the theory that if one backward former French colony thousands of miles away went communist, the global system of alliances on which American security depended would collapse.

Carter's move away from global containment rested on two basic premises: his respect for nationalism and his optimism about democracy.

... the wild diversity .................................

The philosopher and Web pundit David Weinberger makes a particularly eloquent case for preserving the ontological chaos, arguing that human knowledge is inherently fluid and that attempts at orchestrating it are doomed to failure.  Celebrating the "new principles of digital disorder,"  Weinberger argues that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world."  He further argues in favor of making as much information as possible freely available, without trying to exert quality controls.  Instead, users should have open access to everything and choose whatever seems useful.  "Filter on the way out, not on the way in,"  he writes, predicting the emergence of what he calls a "third order" of knowledge, one not constrained by the physical limitations of paper, nor encumbered by layers of institutional gatekeepers.  Instead, he argues for a maximalist approach:  collect everything and sort it out later, since the online world provides "an abundance of access to an abundance of resources."  Pointing to examples like Wikipedia and Flickr, Weinberger argues that the old order of knowledge - the Aristotelian notion that knowledge was shaped like a tree - has fallen by the wayside and that the free-form structure of today's Web provides a more accurate description of culture, on that "better represents the wild diversity of human interests and thought.
-Alex Wright, as excerpted from Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Thank God..........................................

"American politics remains one of the most complicated systems on Planet Earth, and independent minded citizens of this country can and will surprise even the shrewdest of analysts with their creative responses to the changing challenges and conditions they face."
-Full Walter Russell Mead essay from whence this was extracted is here

Yep................................................

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

Beach Boys....................................................California Girls

Predicting the future is...........................

............................................not something we do very well.

"our imagination is too limited to be a good guide to the possible changes of the future."

Real Clear Markets asks, why did no one predict the oil-price collapse?

I believe I know what this means..................

"Risk is the price that you never believed you would have to pay."
-Alex Pollock

Working on it......................................

via

A twofer Tuesday.....................................

Frank Sinatra...............................................All My Tomorrows




Frank Sinatra..........................................................Winners

"Let's play two".....................................

      "Cub history before Banks seems archaic, cold.  You can admire the statistics of Hack Wilson, or groove on that three-note poem Tinker to Evers to Chance, but that's black and white, whereas Ernie is Technicolor.  Failing with him was not always fun;  failing without him would've been intolerable.  His philosophical position was existentialist.  He seemed to say, Yes, you will lose, yes, you will die, but it's a beautiful day, a wonderful park.  His great saying, "Let's play two," is as defiantly hopeful as anything by Sinatra."  -as excerpted from Rich Cohen's Ode to Joy in the 2/2/15 Sports Illustrated issue

More on Ernie Banks here.  Growing up in the '50's and '60's, well, things were simpler back then.  The Phillies would be bad, but the Cubs would be worse.  (At least that's how I remember it.  No fair looking up the actual standings and proving me wrong.)  It was one of those strange things.  They had great players in Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo and were always fun to watch, but something always seemed to happen.

Reacquiring the privilege.......................

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."
-Vannevar Bush, anticipating the Intertunnel, as excerpted from his 1945 essay As We May Think

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

     I was born on April 16, 1889, at eight o'clock at night, in East Lane, Walworth.  Soon after, we moved to West Square, St. George's Road, Lambeth.  According to Mother, my world was a happy one.  Our circumstances were moderately comfortable;  we lived in three tastefully decorated rooms.  One of my early recollections was that each night before Mother went to the theatre Sydney and I were lovingly tucked up in a comfortable bed and left in the care of the housemaid.  In my world of three and a half years, all things were possible;  if Sydney, who was four years older than I, could perform legerdemain and swallow a coin and make it come out through the back of my head, I could do the same;  so I swallowed a halfpenny and Mother was obliged to send for a doctor.
-Charles Chaplin,  My Autobiography

Ed. Note:  My Sweetie and I ventured out last Friday to a showing of Chaplin's 1921 silent movie, "The Kid."   The draw was that the movie would be accompanied by an organist, just like in the old days.  The organist was superb (playing the music as written by Chaplin his ownself) and the film a revelation.  A wonderful night out.

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

The Yardbirds...........................................Heart Full of Soul

Checking in.........................................

.........................................................with Jorge Luis Borges

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí.
I tried mescaline and cocaine in my youth, but i immediately switched to mint candy, which was more stimulating. I am not interested in drugs if they produce the same effects as alcohol. A drunkard is evidently ridiculous. I have been drunk some times, and I remember them as horrible experiences for me and everyone else.

Ser conservador es una forma de ser escéptico.

Being conservative is a way of being skeptic.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. 

I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library

El original es infiel a la traducción.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer. No he sido feliz.

I have committed the worst sin that can be committed. I have not been happy.

¿De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad.

How else can one threaten, other than with death? The interesting, the original thing, would be to threaten someone with immortality.

And this was written in 1934....................

      "The huge mass of published material grows by the day, by the hour, in amounts that are disconcerting and sometimes maddening.  Like water falling from the sky, it can either cause flooding or beneficial irrigation."
-Paul Otlet, as excerpted from Alex Wright's Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

This sort of sums it up........................

"Je dirais qu'il faut agir en homme de pensée et penser en homme d'action."

• I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

-Henri Bergson

Each day passes by.....................................

The Moody Blues............................................Isn't Life Strange

And you think you have problems..............

Explanation: These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as the "Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The above picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2002. These galactic mice will probably collide again and again over the next billion years until they coalesce to form a single galaxy.

Source and larger image here

Where the heart is...................................

thanks michael

Great scenes from great movies....................

Otis Day & The Nights..................................................Shout
(Let us not here debate the meaning of "great."  Please just enjoy.)

How I became a Richard Sherman fan......

I may be the only Ohioan who regularly roots for Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.  So, why do I now care about Sherman?  Try this excerpt, from his recent Sports Illustrated essay, on for size:

      I thought long and hard about joining in with players across the league and making a visual statement—a T-shirt or a hands-up gesture—but ultimately I decided against it. I asked myself, What message am I sending out? Am I going to end police violence? Racism? No, of course not. So how can I evoke change?

      I got some news nine months ago that helped me reach a conclusion. My girlfriend, Ashley, and I are expecting our first child, a boy, any day now. I’ve realized in the last year that I can evoke change by being a great role model: a man who respects women and police officers, who graduated from college and does everything in his power to be successful within the rules.

      Circumstances dictate where you start—a single mother raised Kam Chancellor to become the man he is today—but each individual determines his course. Where I came from, in Compton, kids were brainwashed into thinking that if they weren’t athletes or rappers or drug dealers they were nothing. My son will understand that he’s in control of his own destiny and that education, work ethic and discipline will guide him to an even better life than I’ve enjoyed. He’ll be the man who makes this world a better place through positive actions and influence.

404..........................................

A smattering of the best "error" pages can be found here.

thanks gerard

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

The Moody Blues....................................................Go Now

Janis..........................................

Any list of top ten women in rock 'n' roll music that does not include Janis Joplin isn't worth the time of reading it.  Just saying.

Couldn't agree more.............................

"I’m bothered by the continued creep of safety concerns being used to restrict individual movements. Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but citizens used to be deemed competent to make prudent choices."
-as excerpted from here

Good thing I really like spinach..............

"Tasks can empower you or drain you and the order you do work may be the secret to getting more done."
-as excerpted from here

thanks todd

Success...........................................!

"Better to focus on and delight almost no one."
-Seth Godin, as excerpted from this post

And a Happy Groundhog Day to you too..........

More than you want to know about Groundhog Day - here.

It takes a while to learn to live in your own skin...

Bon Jovi......................................................................I Am

That vision thing.................................

"We never see ourselves as others see us."
-Oliver Hardy

Choices.................................................

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”
-Charlie Chaplin

True that..............................................

Good question..................................

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

The Turtles..................................................I Ain't Me Babe

And the Browns say, "Wait till next year".............

Got that right......................................

Noting that Apple sold more than 34,000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, during the quarter, he said the sheer volume of sales was “hard to comprehend.”

-Fuller story on Apple vs Microsoft is here.

Life in the Age of Snowden

8.   Ever since Edward ███████, I don’t feel free ███████ ██ ███ ██████ █████ and also in ████ ████. The ███ ██ ███-███████ ██, █████ ██ happily keep watching Netflix. For me, this █████ ████████ █████ ██ █ self-censorship that makes me want to ████. ██ ███ and █ really ████ ███████ in our █████, we should keep asking ourselves whether we really want to live under these conditions.

As excerpted from this post at the friendly anarchist blog.

It's up to you...........................................

"It ain't what they call you;  it's what you answer to."
-W. C. Fields