Life is a game of give 'n' take......................

Stevie Ray Vaughan..................................................Dirty Pool

Beauty..............................................

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

On the television......................................................The F.B.I.

Won't be repeating that mistake........................

“I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis."
-Humphrey Bogart

The Republican primaries are going..............

..................to be fascinating to watch.  To wit:  Awesome Ted

He would've made such an interesting President....

thanks gerard

I can vouch for this................................

“Old habits are strong and jealous. They will not be displaced easily if they get any warning that such plans are afoot; they will fight for their existence with subtlety and persuasiveness.” 
-Dorothea Brande

It's not the years, it's the miles......................

George Thorogood & The Destroyers.....................I Drink Alone

More and better...................................

      The only certain means of success is to render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.  This is a habit followed by all successful people since the beginning of time.  Therefore I saith the surest way to doom yourself to mediocrity is to perform only the work for which you are paid.
-Og Mandino,  The God Memorandum

Speaking of statistics and demographics.....

"There is an old joke about the Scotsman who moved to England and raised the average level of intelligence in both countries."
-The opening line of this John Kay post puzzling about all the above

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

On the television..........................................................I Spy

Beauty.....................................

Improving the lot of Everyman............

Mark Perry reminds us to remember this:

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The Patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets – all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. The great achievements of Western Capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.

Cruel and unusual................................

Friend Bilbo suggests punishments to keep governmental types from misbehaving.  A for instance is here:

- Make them watch a "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" marathon; number of hours dictated by the severity of their misconduct.

Don't question..........................................

The Rolling Stones...........................................Ruby Tuesday

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

And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you're not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce.
-Oliver Burkeman,  The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Q and A..............................................

To know what questions we may reasonably propose is in itself a strong evidence of sagacity and intelligence.  For if a question be in itself absurd and unsusceptible of a rational answer, it is attended with the danger - not to mention the shame that falls upon the person who proposes it - of seducing the unguarded listener into making absurd answers, and we are presented with the ridiculous spectacle of one (as the ancients said) "milking the he-goat, and the other holding a sieve."
-Immanuel Kant

Love..........................................

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.   There may even be a certain antagonism between love of humanity and love of neighbor;  a low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.

-Eric Hoffer,  The Ordeal of Change

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

At the movies................................................Von Ryan's Express

Accumulate............................................

Most people have it wrong about wealth in America.  Wealth is not the same as income.  If you make a good income and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier.  You are just living high.  Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.
-Stanley and Danko,  The Millionaire Next Door:  The Surprising Secrets Of America's Wealth

Muddling through..........................

In 1788 Edward Gibbon completed his great work on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The following year he surveyed the world around him.  There seemed little improvement over the last two thousand years.  "The far greater part of the globe is overspread with barbarism and slavery:  in the civilized world, the most numerous class is condemned to ignorance and poverty...The general probability is about three to one that a new-born infant will not live to complete his fiftieth year."
      Gibbon's world was one with a population of less than one thousand million inhabitants.  As we stand at the end of the twentieth century, only a little over two hundred years later, there are more than seven times as many humans on earth.  Yet we see a world in which many millions have escaped from a daily fear of war, famine and disease.  For the privileged living in parts of Europe, America and Asia, there is wealth and stability undreamt of by peoples in most past civilizations.
-Alan MacFarlane,  Thomas Malthus and the Making of the Modern World

Strange............................................

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being;  almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.
-G. K. Chesterton,  The Everlasting Man

Flow...................................................

The Byrds....................................................Ballad of Easy Rider

Understanding Government Regulations 101:....

........................................The Bootleggers and Baptists Theory.
courtesy of

That would explain a lot...............................

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
-Aldous Huxley

Hallelujah.....................................

Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape?
    Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade,
    Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric
Hallelujah to the Maker 'It is finish'd. 

   Man is made.' 

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson,  The Making of Man

Fortunately, it can't...............................

more on Blanshard here

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

On the television..................................................Honey West

All things in moderation.....(including moderation)

via

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

But cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing.
-as excerpted from here

courtesy of

Those were the days my friend.....................

Ola & The Janglers.....................................................Let's Dance

Just saying....................................

twenty more here

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

Five friends I had, and two of them were snakes.  Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man's arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit's heart till in a grim pet I bade them go that day and nevermore to come again, nevermore to hiss their snakelove when they saw me drawing near or coil themselves for warmth about my shaggy legs.  They went.  They never came again.
-Frederick Buechner,  Godric

thanks kurt

Mother Nature....................................

..........................................................is one tough mother.

“Just leave a natural system alone, and amazing things happen,”
-as excerpted from this post on the après-eruption recovery at Mount St. Helens.

May 18, 1980

about now

That's what governments are for...............

 via

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

Herman's Hermits..........................Mrs. Brown, You've Got A ...

Your guess is as good as mine............

"It is hard to avoid the feeling that our current economic problems are more than just a cyclical downturn. We know that the economy has gone through some bad times. But what exactly are we experiencing?"
-Tyler Cowen, as excerpted from here

Uh-oh.....................................

via

Say it ain't so.....................................

from the mighty eclectic one.

Shhhhh....................................

thanks michael