A trifle uncool...........................................

Martha and the Muffins.......................................Echo Beach

I know it's out of fashion
And a trifle uncool
But I can't help it
I'm a romantic fool
It's a habit of mine
To watch the sun go down
On Echo beach, I watch the sun go down

From nine till five I have to spend my time at work
The job is very boring, I'm an office clerk
The only thing that helps pass the time away
Is knowing I'll be back at Echo Beach some day

On a silent summer evening
The sky's alive with light
Building in the distance
Surrealistic sight
On Echo Beach
Waves make the only sound
On Echo Beach
There's not a soul around

Doing my best.......................................

I don't know about the joke........................

...........................................................but his tie is to-die-for.

Get back, back I say..............................

via

Heart..............................................

                           Life

By one great Heart the Universe is stirred:
By Its strong pulse, stars climb the darkening blue;
It throbs in each fresh sunset’s changing hue,
And thrills through low sweet song of every bird:
By It, the plunging blood reds all men’s veins;
Joy feels that heart against his rapturous own,
And on It, Sorrow breathes her sharpest groan;
It bounds through gladnesses and deepest pains.
Passionless beating through all Time and Space,
Relentless, calm, majestic in Its march,
Alike, though Nature shake heaven’s endless arch,
Or man’s heart break, because of some dead face!
’Tis felt in sunshine greening the soft sod,
In children’s smiling, as in mother’s tears;
And, for strange comfort, through the aching years,
Men’s hungry souls have named that great Heart, God! -Margaret Deland, 1917

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

The Fortunes...................................You've Got Your Troubles



version with better sound quality is here.

A lot of work just for a parking space..............

courtesy of

Wisdom hanging on an office wall.................

Perhaps a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but perhaps not.  One version of the tale is here.

Speaking of Emerson..............................

"The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Compensation

It is........................................................

Mason Proffit..................................................It's All Right

Fluxion......................................

Know yourself - and is this the prime
And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time! -
Say, canst thou make thyself? - Learn first that trade; -
Haply thou mayst know what thyself had made.
What hast thou, Man, that thou dar'st call thine own? -
What is there in thee, Man, that can be known? -
Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,
A phantom dim of past and future wrought,
Vain sister of the worm, - life, death, soul, clod -
Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Self-Knowledge

Leviathan..............................

“Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.” 
-Herman Melville

But sometimes it is, and............................

...................................................don't you think that part of this life's journey is figuring out when it is and when isn't?

via

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

The Beau Brummels.................................................Just A Little

Suffice..............................................

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem."-Mahatma Gandhi.

Could do/intend to do/did do are very different things.

Occasionally check your aspirations against your accomplishments.

A high ratio means wasted potential.

courtesy of the Business Wisdom blog

You know what this means........................?

A recent study by the National Institute on Retirement Security concluded 40 million, or 45%, of working Americans do not have a single penny saved for retirement. -Source

Kierkagaard notwithstanding......................

...it has been my experience that life gives both quizzes and tests.

courtesy of

Guitar hero.............................................

Santana............................................................Oye Como Va

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

"Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

gif via

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

Despite the mist, she spent an hour working Chica, and working herself, and she smelled of it, mare-sweat and woman-sweat, with a tingle of Chanel No. 5.  They'd turned down the trail from the south forty, easing along, and she could feel the mare's heart beating through her knees and thighs.
-John Sanford,  Dead Watch

If aphorisms are your thing...............

...............................................................follow Kelly Hartland.

This is a good sign...........................................

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

The Beach Boys................................Dance, Dance, Dance

Don't know if it's progressive, but it sounds OK......

Truth....................................................

Decide............................................

thanks maggie

A boy tries hard.....................................

U2....................................................................I Will Follow



Thanks Rob

Tell us something we don't know.................

............................and we're a bit more than halfway done.

Finally.....................

More non-traditional self -help books here.

One of these days.....................................

..................................I'd like to visit John E. Smith's library.

Kind of quiet around here...................

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

Herman's Hermits.................................Just A Little Bit Better

I suspect there are as many blogs............

..............as there are stars in the Milky Way, but in case you're looking for one to check regularly, do visit Swiss-Miss.  She rocks.

Say it isn't so.......................................

.................................................Is Tootsie Roll truly at risk?

via

Everything is......................................

I'm wondering if cut-and-pasting is creative.....

As band names go, this one's not too bad.......

Sniff 'n' the Tears..............................................Driver's Seat



thanks Andrew

Some interesting excerpts.......................

         By training an entire generation of foreign bankers in American methods, Citibank helped create its own competition.  But Wriston, who was convinced that there was nothing more dangerous than a dumb competitor, reasoned that the bank would benefit in the long run.

-------------------------------------------------------

        At an auspicious June 30, 1961 luncheon, Kennedy lamented the poor quality of personnel who were working for the U. S. government in its foreign affairs agencies and asked Wriston and the other business and labor leaders to help him find better people for these jobs ... Wriston wanted to help.  but he told the president bluntly that top executives were reluctant to serve in government because of the difficulties they would have to face when they tried to return to their old jobs, particularly the grilling they would be forced to endure on potential conflicts of interest.  In fact, Wriston asserted, the government should try to recruit people who did have a conflict of interest, because they were the only ones capable of accomplishing anything.

--------------------------------------------------------

       For his part, Wriston parted ways with Saxon on the notion of merging all of the bank regulatory agencies into a single agency.  He favored competition among regulators just as he did among banks.  "Every industry that's been regulated by one federal regulator has gone bankrupt over time,"  Wriston said later.  "The number one example, of course, is the railroads."

-------------------------------------------------------

       All of this would reinforce for Wriston the folly of government interference in economic and financial markets and would soon demonstrate once again the principle that Wriston referred to as the "unintended secondary consequence of primary events."


-Phillip L. Zweig,  Wriston:  Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy

A tragic comedy..............................................

Spengler turns his eye towards China and pens a most interesting essay concerning, among other things, the U. S. of A., China, and the Middle East.  I wonder if anyone in Washington reads and thinks about what he writes?

"Opinion is divided between those who think that America is merely incompetent and those who think that America deliberately wants to destabilize the Persian Gulf."

The all-purpose cosmetic..............................

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

Peter & Gordon...................................................I Go To Pieces

How to get the kitty to take a bath.............

Make everyday................................

....................................................................a self-care day.

Thanks Nan

Satisfied.............................................

"A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."
-Albert Einstein

It's our way and its the best way.................

John Denver & Cass Elliot...................Leaving On A Jet Plane

I guess this means..............................

.........................................the Arctic is not yet ice-free.

It’s not something Parks Canada’s underwater archaeologists can handle on their own, so for nine weeks they’ve been working with expert ice divers from the Royal Canadian Navy’s Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic. Parks Canada divers and the Navy divers have been training together so that the former can learn how to dive safely in below-freezing water under a sheet of ice that’s at least six feet thick (a terrifying practice known as confined space diving) and the latter can learn how to properly handle an underwater archaeological site and its artifacts.

The History Blog offers this story of human determination and grit, the recovery of the HMS Erebus.

More on the tale of the HMS Erebus here.

The word itself..................................

thanks for reminding me, Michael

So, I read this sentence.......................

...............................................on Arnold Kling's blog:

"I like to say that money is a consensual hallucination, using the phrase that William Gibson coined to describe cyberspace, a term that he also coined."

............and I wondered, "who is William Gibson?"   According to the all-knowing Wiki, William Gibson "is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the 'noir prophet' of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction."  If that doesn't raise the curiosity level, I'm not sure what will.  Anyway, Gibson is fairly quotable.  Here is a wee sample:

On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. 

The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…

 It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.

I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's nochicken, right?

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

The future is not google-able.

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

"The most astonishing thing about the extraordinary outpouring of growth and innovation that the United States and other economies have achieved over the past two centuries is that it does not astonish us."

Source, and another excerpt here.  Full article is behind the WSJ paywall, that I have chosen not to breech.

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

Gene Pitney............................Last Chance To Turn Around

Key ingredient.........................

      Walter used to read the short biographies of successful people in Who's Who, seeking some common thread or a key ingredient in a person's success.  He concluded that there was none.  "I was struck by the fact that there was no pattern."
-Phillip L. Zweig,  Wriston:  Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy

I'd bet a nickel that there was a pattern, a pattern in the way they organized their minds and controlled their thoughts.  Just saying.

The Right Thing.....................................

Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -
The right thing happens to the happy man.

The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.

God bless the roots! - Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,

And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.

-Theodore Roethke
via

Sometimes a downward trend is a good thing....

The Calculated Risk blog posts this chart on "energy expenditures as a percentage of consumer spending":

Larger image (where you can actually read the dates) is here

A generation's anthem...............................

The Snake Oil Willie Band..........I Don't Look Good Naked Anymore



thanks jonco

On listening...........................................

      As Wriston's responsibilities broadened, he remembered what his father had told him about the willingness of people to spill their guts to an interested listener.  Plying subordinates with jelly beans as his father did was not Walter Wriston's style.  In the late afternoon, Wriston would walk the sixth floor, sit down in his subordinates' guest chairs, put his feet on their desk, and puff on his cigar.  "He'd sit there with his feet on your desk and chew the fat," said a former overseas hand.  Said Wriston, "If you go out and walk around the floor talking with the bookkeepers, if you create a climate where people know you care what they're saying they'll tell you a lot.  That's really your data base on operations."  Over the next thirty years, Wriston would make his fair share of mistakes, but failing to listen to workers in the trenches would be the least of them.

      Both Henry and Walter Wriston were fascinated with the gathering and dissemination of information.  Early in his banking career, Wriston concluded that information about money was more important to the business than money itself.

-Phillip L. Zweig,  Wriston:  Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy

From time to time we have joked...............

.............that Ohio's long term economic growth plan was to just hold on until the southwest ran out of water.  Not looking so funny now.   This could get very interesting.

Hi-ho, Hi-ho, it's off to work I go..................

thanks craig

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

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles...........The Tracks Of My Tears

Almost always worth asking.......................

thanks

Keeping Things Whole........................

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

-Mark Strand

Why living forever................................

..................................will be difficult for us baby boomers.

Come....................................................