Saturday, September 14, 2019

Taking Kurt's.........................


.........................................................................advice:

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

-Henry Louis Mencken

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


On the second floor of a characterless hotel in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar, a lithe, agile man in his late fifties restlessly paced his bedroom.  His very British features, though pleasant and plainly honourable, indicated a choleric nature brought to the limit of its endurance.  A distraught lecturer, you might have thought, observing the bookish forward lean and loping stride and the errant forelock of salt-and-pepper hair that repeatedly had to be disciplined with a jerky back-handed shoves of the bony wrist.  Certainly it would not have occurred to many people, even in their most fanciful dreams,t hat he was a middle-ranking British civil servant, hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic departments of Her Majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office to be dispatched on a top-secret mission of acute sensitivity.

-John Le CarrĂ©,  A Delicate Truth

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


Gary Puckett & The Union Gap................Don't Give In To Him

Thursday, September 12, 2019

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Questions and answers.......................


The quality of the answers we get are directly correlated with the quality of the questions we ask.

We can learn a lot, often more, from the work involved in answering a question than from the answer itself.

There are no dumb questions. Don’t be afraid to ask them. They are the most straight forward path to learning.

-All from this Farnam Street post

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


The Beatles....................................................Here Comes The Sun

Monday, September 9, 2019

All we need is love.......................





“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

-attributed to John Lennon

but not too much.....................



Always the last to know...............





“I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.” 

-Paul McCartney


On saying "Yes"....................





“I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I’m here because it happened. But I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying ‘Yes’” 

-Ringo Starr

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


The Beatles.................................................Octopus's Garden