Saturday, January 2, 2016
Enjoy it now. Won't be posting it again......
The Bay City Rollers..................S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT!
The trouble with lists.................
................of leadership "bests and worsts", is that they are just snap-shots in time. John E. Smith points to this list from Fast Company and then he asks some interesting questions.
Me thinks Fast Company's bias is showing. Also, the absence from the list of anyone whose day job is located in Washington D. C. is interesting. The history major in me thinks that making judgments from snap-shots in time can be a risky proposition. For instance, shouldn't we wait a few years, or decades, before deciding that the recent decisions of Angela Merkel make her a great leader. Important on the world stage, yes. Great? Let's wait and see.
Fifty years ago...................
The Righteous Brothers.............................You Are My Soul and
My Heart's Inspiration
Friday, January 1, 2016
Joining the other 43,467 blogs playing........
U2...................................................................New Year's Day
Fifty years ago...........................
The Temptations..............................Ain't Too Proud To Beg
Thursday, December 31, 2015
With a certain sense of style...........
Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians.............Happy New Year
Read this passage......................
......................................and immediately thought of Kurt:
Robert glanced into his kitchen. The dirty dishes were cleaned and stacked on the counter. The sink was spotless, the tile floor shined, and the table was set for four.
"When did you do all this?" Robert asked the Professor.
"Couldn't sleep," Brown Shoes said.
"I usually can't sleep much either," Robert said realizing that this was the first night in years that he hadn't heard any voices. "But that's way too...."
"Since you are putting me up, it's the least I could do."
As the men sat down at the table, Brown Shoes looked at Robert. "Well, they called this morning from the garage. They say it's going to take a week or so to get the parts, then probably take another two or three weeks to put her back together. So I'm looking at almost a month."
Robert tasted his orange juice. Freshly squeezed, he thought. He unfolded his omelet, the aroma of fresh green and red peppers, cheese and onions wafted to his face, and then the fragrance of lilacs hit him. Brown Shoes had cleaned out a Dr. Hopps' beer bottle and used it as a vase for lilacs from his front yard.
"This is a taste of heaven," James said, letting is omelet slowly dissolve in his mouth.
"Well, thank you, "Brown Shoes responded. "Lin Yutang used to say, 'Our lives are not in the laps of the gods, but in the laps of our cooks.'"
-David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
Fifty years ago.......................
Beach Boys................................................Auld Lang Syne
Ed Note: Off the Beach Boys' Christmas Album, which was released in November, 1964
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Every so often............................
................................................you just have to listen to this.
Jim Gomer Pyle Nabors...........................The Impossible Dream
Fifty years ago.......................
The Honeycombs...............................This Year, Next Year
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Still in a doo-wop mood..........
Fred Parris & The Satins........................In the Still of the Night
Barry Mann.............................................Who Put The Bomp
Us wingless bipeds.............................
Not only is play a human cultural universal, but most animals are top-notch players too. Whether it a a pair of bear cubs splashing one another in a stream (where, judging by their mother's impatient reaction, they are supposed to be learning how to fish) or my dog, Snookers, running ever-expanding circles around the spruce tree in our yard back home - the animal instinct for aimless fun is clearly built in. Ditto for us wingless bipeds, especially when we are still at that stage of life when notions of accomplishment and making something of ourselves have yet to put the damper on just plain fooling around.
The transformation of pure play into competitive play - the ancient Greeks were Olympic champs at this - constituted one of the first such dampers. We went from pointless play to keeping one eye on the scoreboard. And our current dedication to sports as self-improvement, complete with personal trainers and strange garments made out of spandex, has virtually wiped out any lightheartedness remaining in play. Even when taking a walk, distance and elapsed time are now often recorded, then measured against previous records as we compete with ourselves for our personal best. Play is no longer something we do with our idle time, it is another ambitious activity crammed into our schedules.
-Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
cartoons via
The case for optimism............
"Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable."
-Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
Fifty years ago.......................
The Rockin' Berries...................The Water Is Over My Head
Rebelling..........................
People who are recognizably human have walked the earth for roughly two hundred thousand years. During those millennia, we survived by continuously adapting to our fickle environment. We braved harsh winters and punishing landscapes, and feared animals much fiercer than we were, bowing to nature, whose spell overwhelmed us, whose magnificence humbled us, and around which we anxiously rigged our lives. After a passage of time too long to fully imagine, and too many impression-mad lives to tally, we began rebelling against the forces of nature. We grew handy, resourceful, flexible, clever, cooperative. We captured fire, chipped tools, hewed spears and needles, coined language and spent it everywhere we roamed. And then we began multiplying at breathtaking speed.
-Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us
Monday, December 28, 2015
It's a doo-wop kind of morning............
The Marcels........................................................Blue Moon
Gene Chandler.................................................The Duke of Earl
The Monotones................................................Book of Love
On guidelines............................
"Our philosophies aren’t rules; they’re guidelines. In every long-lasting business, the methods of conducting business may constantly change, but the values, the culture and the philosophies remain constant."
-Yvon Chouinard, as quoted by Ben Carlson and as excerpted from this A Wealth of Common Sense blog post
Learning through losing................
"If you win every time, you don't learn anything. You don't learn anything about yourself. You don't learn anything about the other person. You don't learn anything about the game. You don't learn anything about life."
-Jack Nicklaus, as excerpted from Michael Bamberger's essay in the latest Sports Illustrated
Wishing all the "settled science".............
.................................................folks would take this to heart:
Your learned friends are wrong.
They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
-Francis Church, as excerpted from his 1897 New York Sun "Yes, Virginia" editorial
"A century ago, most scientists believed the entire universe was deterministic, and that if you could only specify all the details at one instant of time, you could calculate what was going to happen, forever. As for God, many scientists believed that he just wound up the clock of the universe and set it in motion, and didn’t do anything after that. Time was considered an absolute quantity that nothing could affect… not even God.
"And then along came Albert Einstein, who realized that space and time are not absolute quantities, but are related to each other, forming a space-time continuum. The absolute-ness of time was abandoned, determinism was discarded, and scientists realized they hadn’t dug very deep after all."
"As editor Francis Church wrote in 1897, “Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.” That point has gradually sunk in with scientists. By accepting with humility that we don’t know it all, and that our scientific instruments only investigate a small slice of the universe, we realize that reality extends far beyond the boundaries of science. “Love and generosity and devotion exist, and we know that they give to life its highest beauty and joy.”
-last three quotes excerpted from this American Thinker post
via
Fifty years ago.....................................
The Nashville Teens............................Whatcha Gonna Do?
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Lost in the moment..........................
R.E.M..........................................................................Outsider
All good questions.................
Epicurus grew up on another Aegean island, Samos, two hundred miles east of here, nearer to Anatolia, or Asia Minor. He was born in 341 BCE, only eighty years after Plato, but was little influenced by him. What Epicurus mainly had on his mind was the question of how to live the best possible life, especially considering that we only have one of them - Epicurus did not believe in an afterlife. This seems like the most fundamental philosophical question, the question of all questions. But students of the history of Western Philosophy are often disheartened to find that as the centuries went on that question began to take a backseat to philosophical questions that were considered more pressing, like Martin Heidegger's mindblower that used to make me laugh out loud with incomprehension. "Why are there things that are rather than nothing?" and the epistemological problem, "How do we know what is real?" Epicurus certainly speculated about the nature of reality, but he dis so fundamentally in service of his ultimate question, "How does one make the most of one's life?" Not a bad question.
Epicurus's answer, after many years of deep thought, was that the best possible like one could life is a happy one, a life filled with pleasure. At first look, this conclusion seems like a no-brainer, the sort of wisdom found on the side of a box of Celestial Seasonings tea. But Epicurus knew this was only a starting point because it raised the more troublesome and perplexing questions of what constitutes a happy life, which pleasures are truly gratifying and enduring, and which are fleeting and lead to pain, plus the monumental questions of why and how we often thwart ourselves from attaining happiness.
-Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
Fifty years ago........................
The Four Pennies...................................................Juliet
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