Checking in with Will.......................

 

Toby.  Approach, Sir Andrew.  Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes; and "Deliculo surgere," thou know'st.*

Andrew.  Nay, by my troth, I know not, but I know to be up late is to be up late,

Toby.  A false conclusion; I hate it as an unfilled can.  To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes.  Does not our lives consist of the four elements?

Andrew.  Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.

Toby.  Th' art a scholar!  Let us therefore eat and drink.  Marian I say, a stoup of wine!

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night,  Act II, Scene III

*Ed. Note:  Those of Shakespeare's time would have recognized Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est as "it is most beautiful to rise early.

Unexpectedly..................................

Radio began its life as a two-way medium, a practice that continues to this day as ham radio:  individual hobbyists talking to one another over the airwaves, occasionally eavesdropping on other conversations.  But by the early 1920s, the broadcast model that would come to dominate the technology had evolved.  Professional stations began delivering packaged news and entertainment to consumers who listened on radio receivers in their homes.  Almost immediately, something entirely unexpected happened:  the existence of a mass medium for sound unleashed a new kind of music on the United States, a music that had until then belonged almost exclusively to New Orleans, to the river towns of the American South, and to African-American neighborhoods in New York and Chicago.  Almost overnight, radio mad jazz a national phenomenon.  Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong became household names.  Ellington's band performed weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in Harlem starting in the late 1920s;  Armstrong became the first African-American to host his own national radio show shortly thereafter.
     All of this horrified Lee De Forest, who wrote a characteristically baroque denunciation to the National Association of Broadcasters:  "What have you done with my child, the radio broadcast?  You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie."  In fact, the technology that De Forest had helped invent was intrinsically better suited to jazz that it was to classical performances.  Jazz punched through the compressed, tinny sound of early AM radio speakers;  the vast dynamic range of a symphony was largely lost in translation.  The blasts of Satchmo's trumpet played better on the radio than the subtleties of Shubert.
     The collision of jazz and radio created, in effect, the first surge of a series of cultural waves that would wash over twentieth-century society.  A new sound that had been slowly incubating in some smalls section of the world - New Orleans, in the case of jazz - finds its way onto the mass medium of radio, offending the grown-ups and electrifying the kids.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

From the wisest man in the Twitterverse.....

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

via

This sounds about right............

I was one person raised by two very different people, each with a separate perspective to impress upon me, each trying to act in concert with the other, and each of whose eyes I tried to see the world through. Bringing up a son who can survive to adulthood must sometimes seem to parents little more than a dogged exercise in repetition, and an often futile but loving effort at consistency.

-Richard Ford, as shared by David Kanigan

Me too..............................

"I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds."

-Dizzy Gillespie

From the NYT Magazine..................

of all places, comes this interesting essay:  How ‘Elites’ Became One of the Nastiest Epithets in American Politics.  A wee excerpt:

Despite all the abuse hurled their way, some “liberal elites” have accepted at least part of their detractors’ critique, particularly on the progressive left. It was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that the social critic Christopher Lasch published “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” which mourned that “upper-middle-class liberals” had turned into “petulant, self-righteous, intolerant” scolds, thoroughly out of touch with the concerns of Middle America. Since then, the torch has passed to a younger generation of writers, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, whose 2012 “Twilight of the Elites” called for rethinking the entire ethos of liberal “meritocracy” — a system, he argued, that tends to fuel self-congratulation and incompetence at the top while offering little but contempt and dim prospects for those at the bottom.

This sounds about right..................

"My assertion is that all investment manias have the common characteristics of the perception of easy profits with little or no risk, loose lending standards, and outright fraud and deceit."
-Gary Carmell,  The Philosophical Investor:  Transforming Wisdom into Wealth

Blended............................................

"Somewhere in each of us we're a mixture of light and of darkness,  of love and of hate,  of trust and of fear."
-Jean Vanier

True that...........................................

Bringing writing to life............................

Victor Borge......................................Phonetic Punctuation

Equalizing......................................

via

On ethicists and the honour system....

It appears their ethics are just run of the mill........

"Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free-ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists behave no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics."


thanks mungo

Just because it's in The Onion......................

..............doesn't make it wrong.

WASHINGTON—As President Obama continues to push for a plan of limited military intervention in Syria, a new poll of Americans has found that though the nation remains wary over the prospect of becoming involved in another Middle Eastern war, the vast majority of U.S. citizens strongly approve of sending Congress to Syria.

Full read-worthy post is here.

Both...................

"To do great work, a man must be very idle as well as very
industrious."
-Samuel Butler

Higher math....................