Chill..................................................

Stan Getz...................................Trains And Boats And Planes

Later..........................................

First you say no......................................

Atlanta Rhythm Section............................................Spooky

True, that................................

via

dad said "You'll find out when you're fourteen"...

Sunderson must have been about ten and was burning up with fever from strep throat and still had to go to Sunday morning Lutheran service.  His mother had her antennae out for malefactors and only Berenice who had broken her leg tobogganing had recently succeeded in avoiding church.  It was dreadfully boring and that particular week they had a visiting pastor from Escanaba who was far too loud to allow Sunderson to drift off into a doze.  He was thinking of the sausage an pancakes that he would have at home after the service and the likelihood of going ice fishing with Dad in the afternoon.  The pastor's resounding basso boomed out the Seven Deadly Sins:  Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, and Laziness.  On the way home in their old Plymouth with the bumpers and fenders rattling with rust he asked loudly what "lechery" meant and his dad said, "You'll find out when your fourteen," a typical answer wherein all life was an unearthed hostage to the future.  He had a clue because the high school girls referred to the male gym teacher as a "lech" and there must be some connection.  When they got home he checked with the dictionary and found out that lechery meant unrestrained sexual desire.  He couldn't totally leave it alone and at breakfast asked if the sins were deadly how soon would you die?  What if you just forgot and committed one, did you deserve to die?  The doctor's son had the best bicycle in town and you would die if you wanted it.  At his age this was less abstract that sexual desire.  When you looked up the teacher's legs under her dress in fourth grade could you drop dead?  Could just looking be lechery?

-Jim Harrison, The Big Seven

God bless the laypersons...........................

“The stock market is an inexact phenomenon.  Laypersons’ opinions often seem as worthy as professionals’, and shoeshine men and brokers compete for genius.” 

-Michael Steinhardt

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

Jackie DeShannon.................................................Summertime

Running amok......................................

...........with political correctness and the names of sports teams.

the larger context......................................

  
   Augustine is reminding believers that the center of their lives is not in themselves.  The material world is beautiful and to savored and enjoyed, but the pleasures of this world are most delicious when they are savored in the larger context of God's transcendent love.

-David Brooks,   The Road to Character

Can I get an amen............................?

23.  "Revenue is good.  Profit is great.  But cash is pretty powerful, too.  Watch the right numbers."

-Sir Nicholas Bate, Brilliant At The Basics of Business 100 (2010 edition)

Might as well............................................

via

Take a ride...................................

Amboy Dukes.....................The Journey to the Center of the Mind

Instead.........................................

In Augustine's view, people do not get what they deserve;  life would be hellish if they did.  Instead people get much more than they deserve.  God offers us grace, which is his unmerited love.  God's protection and care comes precisely because you do not deserve it and cannot earn it.  Grace doesn't come to you because you've performed well on your job or even made great sacrifices as a parent or as a friend.  Grace comes to you as part of the gift of being created.
     One of the things you have to do in order to receive grace is to renounce the idea that you can earn it.  You have to renounce the meritocratic impulse that you can win a victory for God and get rewarded for your effort.
-David Brooks, as excerpted from The Road To Character

On fear.................................................

You want to win back your country? Here’s how. Fear nothing. Hate no one. Stick to principles. Unchecked borders are dangerous not because Mexicans are evil but because evil thrives when good men don’t stand guard. Poverty programs are misguided, not because the poor are undeserving criminals, but because dependency on government breeds dysfunction and more poverty. Guns save lives and protect liberty. Property rights guarantee liberty. Religious rights are essential to liberty. Without liberty we are equal only in misery.

These things are true. They’re true for white people and black people, male people and female people, straight people and gay people. We should support the smartest, most proven, most statesmanlike candidate who best represents those principles. And we should do it out of — dare I say the word? — love. Love for our neighbors, our fellow citizens, white and black, male and female, straight and gay.

-Andrew Klavan, as extracted from here

Reduce...........................................

"The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself."
-Bayard Rustin

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

I'm speechless......................................

Freddie and The Dreamers...............................Do The Freddie

Betrayed.......................................

"Man is an individual but he is not self-sufficing.  The law of his nature is love, a harmonious relation of life to life in obedience to the divine centre and source of his life.  This law is violated when man seeks to make himself the centre and source of his own life.   His sin is therefore spiritual and not carnal, though the infection of rebellion spreads from the spirit to the body and disturbs its harmonies also.  Man, in other words, is a sinner not because he is one limited individual within a whole but rather because he is betrayed by his very ability to survey the whole to imagine himself the whole."
-Reinhold Niebuhr

A replay - I just love this song........................

Ryan Tennis and the Clubhouse Band..............Sunlight & Shade

Professionalism 101.................................

29.  Has decided their priorities,

30.  and their daily activities are aligned with those priorities.

31.  Can cope with odd-numbered Lists.

32.  Doesn't use "everybody does it" as an excuse.

33.  Thinks through the consequences of an action.

34.  Helps others in their career just as (or not) others helped him/her on their career.

35.  Understands every day is perfect for the challenges they need.

-Nicholas Bate

Well, it's about time........................

If you choose to be full of wants and hopes........

......................these are pretty good wants and hopes to be full of.

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

Freddie and The Dreamers.........................I'm Telling You Now

Beware the justification................

    
     To justify the fact that their lives are out of control, strugglers like to feel that struggle is noble - that somehow God is pleased with them for struggling.  If you were God, you would fall over laughing at that one.

-Stuart Wilde, Life Was Never Meant to Be a Struggle

Worthwhile.....................................

via

Only.............................................

 “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” 
-Thomas Sowell

as extracted from here

Nothing I can do..................................

Hootie and the Blowfish.................Only Wanna Be With You

Dancing..................................

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

"Saving money is simple, but always very far from easy."
-excerpted from here

More than you ever wanted to know.......

................about the robust science - almost a detective story - in studying the Cascadia subduction zone.  A massive earthquake is in the future of the Pacific Northwest.  The only question is - when?  Makes fascinating reading for us Ohioans.

via         cartoon via

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

The Zombies.......................................................Tell Her No

Life its ownself................................

.................................................a happy, loving, toughness.



via

There was a time..................................

Marshall Tucker Band..........................Change Is Gonna Come

Most logical.......................................

     I had always loved sunrise;  was always renewed in spirit.  For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd slept through dawn.  The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plain had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why;  and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.
-Dick Francis,  Wild Horses

Just wondering whom has captured whom..............

The real danger to the free, open, capitalistic society the Founding Fathers set up isn’t the mega corporation.  It’s the mega government that enables the mega corporation.
-Jeffrey Carter, as excerpted from this post about the inexorableness of math

Pretty much true...................................

"Habits eat willpower for breakfast."
-John Ortberg

cartoon via

Good advice.......................................

as extracted from here

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

The Animals........................................................I'm Crying

A fair warning...............................

"Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live," Marcus Aurelius warned himself in his maxims.  All those in the grip of the Will to Fail act as if they had a thousand years before them.  Whether they dream or dance, they spend their precious hours as though the store of them were inexhaustible.
-Dorothea Brand

Go west, young man...........................

...............................or, maybe it's go north.  Here is a cool map showing, decade by decade, the most populated American cities.  1790  has two you might not recognize.

Chill.....................................................

Stan Getz..................................................Windows of the World



How does he produce that sound..........................?

We are.....................we will............................