Sunday, August 25, 2019

Time: the great leveler.....................


I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:  Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Better than not doing any at all...........




             via

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


Gestures are all that I have;  sometimes they must be grand in nature.  And while  I occasionally step over the line and into the world of melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively.  In order to make my point understood without question.  I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around in my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.  And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home—her should be here soon—lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine.
      I'm old.  And while I'm very capable of getting older, that's not the way I want to go out.  Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints.  Vision fogged with cataracts.  Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggy Depends stocked in the pantry.  I'm sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I've seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his as behind him when things start to fail.  That's humiliating and degrading.  I'm not sure if it's worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it's close.  He would do it out of love, of course.  I'm sure he would keep me alive as longs as he possible could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving until there's nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cable and tubes feeding what remains.  But I don't want to be kept alive.  Because I know what's next.  I've seen it on TV.  A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places.  It was the best thing I've ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain.  After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I've ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth:  when a good is finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man.

-Garth Stein,  The Art Of Racing In The Rain

Recommended..................


At the cinema....................................The Art of Racing in the Rain

Rx: Banjo music..............................


Add caption



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


The 1910 Fruitgum Company..............................Indian Giver

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Scott Blitstein,....................


..............................................our friend from Sensory Dispensary, has a new outlet.   Check it out.

Reasons why I like living in Newark and Licking County.......


Reason #73.............................................The Newark Skate Park

Thanks to collaboration between two local philanthropic foundations and the City of Newark, we are blessed by the $2,000,000 re-imagining and rejuvenation of Everett Park.  Today was the ribbon cutting ceremony for the cornerstone of this project - the Newark Skate Park,  The skate park is clearly a world-class facility.   Free for kids of all ages.  Amazing:












Ground Rules.........................



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


Smith.....................................................I Don't Believe (I Believe)

Friday, August 23, 2019

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


The Zombies........................................................Friends of Mine

Thursday, August 22, 2019

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


Janis Joplin...........................................................Summertime

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Corrective...........................


“Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.” 


-Henri Bergson

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


..............................................................................Ziggy:






Pretty good advice..........................


“My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself.  We need more dissent and less dogma.” 

-Camille Paglia

Why on earth not.....................?


“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” 


-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Pretending.....................................?


“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” 

-Bertrand Russell


Fifty years ago....................At Woodstock


Jefferson Airplane.................Somebody To Love & White Rabbit

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

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



Eleven Universal Laws of the World.........


………………………..can be found here.  Ignore them at your own risk.  Here are two, just to whet the appetite:

1. Littlewood’s law: We can expect “miracles” to happen regularly, because in a world with 7 billion people the odds of a one-in-a-billion event are pretty good.

7. Wiio’s laws: “Communication usually fails, except by accident.”

via

Value...............................


The value people place on free things is zero, though they may riot if the giveaways stop. When they must actually pay, or make other sacrifices, they value what they have obtained. This is human nature. It does not change when technology changes; it cannot ever be suppressed for long. But it can be corrupted.

-David Warren, from this disquisition

Fifty years ago..................at Woodstock


Creedence Clearwater Revival.....................................Proud Mary

Monday, August 19, 2019

Wow, here's a great idea................


I think conservative intellectuals should not try to build an ideological scaffolding around the Trump presidency. Just focus on trying to bring rigor back into academia.

-Arnold Kling

Ravikant..................



Fifty years ago.........................at Woodstock


Creedence Clearwater Revival.......................Born On The Bayou

Well, fifty years ago anyway...................


“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

-Will Durant


Eternally............................


Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

-Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Nice..........................


“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” 

-Henri Bergson

Paying attention.......................


     . . .in Egyptian monasticism, enormous stress is laid on the virtue of humility.  As Evagrius says, 'asceticism with humility is valuable, but asceticism without humility is extremely dangerous'.  And another Father said, 'It is better to fail with humility that to succeed with pride.'
     Above all else the Egyptian monks emphasised  self-knowledge.  The one practice which they harp on over and over again is 'paying attention to yourself', and going with this, they highlight the virtue of 'discernment', but which they mean an ability to diagnose exactly what is going on at any given moment.
     This explains why sometimes the Desert Fathers seem to be rather casual about morality.  Their concern is not that people should behave correctly according to the rules, but rather that people should be able to see their situation clearly for what it is. and so become free of the distorting perspective which underlies all our sins.
     Thus we hear of a fornicating monk, who kept a woman in his cell so indiscreetly that word got around about it.  The neighboring monks resolved to drive the monk away, and abba Ammonas, who happened to be visiting there was asked to go with them.  The offending monk heard them coming and hid his woman in a large jar.  Ammonas saw her at once, but 'hid the affair for the sake of God'.  He sat down on the jar, and then told the other monks to search the cell.  They, of course, found nothing and went away again abashed and apologetic.  Ammonas then took the culprit's hand and simply said to him, 'Brother, pay attention to yourself,' and went out.

-Simon Tugwell, Ways of Imperfection:  An Exploration of Christian Spirituality

Ryan Holiday on....................


........................................................................doing your job:

"Everything we do matters — whether it’s making smoothies to save up money or studying for the bar — even after we’ve already achieved the success we sought. Everything is a chance to do and be our best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires."

--------------------------------------------------------------
"The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell us. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s our job to answer with our actions.
"In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well."

Entrench.........................





     via

Today...........................



Fifty years ago..................at Woodstock


Creedence Clearwater Revival.....................I Put A Spell On You

Getting a head start on 2020.......



...............I started thumbing through the newest Almanac (for farmers & city folk).  Among the tidbits of interesting things, this was found:

     Lemmings are not suicidal!  Filmmakers in Disney's 1958 nature film, "White Wilderness" pushed dozens of lemmings off a cliff while cameras rolled, for dramatic effect—thereby staging a lemming death plunge.  This deliberate fraud started the myth.

Finding it difficult to fathom that Disney would ever release a film that wasn't the gospel truth, the Oracle Google was consulted.  Google clearly backs up the Farmer's Almanac on outing this fraudulent film.  Amazing.  How come I never knew this?

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Making a case for.................


...........................................paying down the mortgage.   While it is an interesting discussion, our tendency has always been to invest in more real estate and take out another mortgage.  Different strokes.........

Beyond Meat........................


......................Color me doubtful, but this is still pretty interesting.

Rx: A wee bit of healthy self-doubt.....


Why do we demonize those with whom we disagree? The basic reason is that it helps to protect us from having to question or doubt our own beliefs. 

-Arnold S. Kling, as taken from this "How We Polarize Ourselves" essay

Cartoon Saturday.........................


.....................................at Bilbo's aims at guns.  A single sample:

















That one reminded me of this one:


Virtually impossible.................


Myles Udland put it perfectly when he said, “The more accurate formulation of ‘No one knows anything’ is ‘Everyone knows everything.'”Everybody knows everything is the new nobody knows nothing.
In ten minutes you can learn most of what took a lifetime for Darwin to discover. You have to be careful trying to infer something from everything, because in today’s world, it is virtually impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

Bring back the Wooly Mammoth!.........


..................................................................No, seriously.


I wonder if young Wooly Mammoths............


...............................................believed in the Tooth Fairy?

Fifty years ago.....................At Woodstock


Janis Joplin............................................................Ball & Chain

Friday, August 16, 2019

The view from my desk...........................



Ah, science..............................





     via

In case you were not aware.............


The very long U.S. election season is here.  What to keep on mind? Two things strike me as fundamental.

1. Knowledge is complex and dispersed. This means that innovation (and progress) depend on trial-and-error innovation in a competitive environment – one not encumbered by the heavy hand of you-know-who. This is especially important in a season when the candidates have policies, plans and programs for everything.

2. In fact, there will always be a political class (includes their many private sector cronies) working hard on cronyist plans and policies.

Millions of voters have sat through some version of an economic principles class. How many of them have encountered these two fundamental principles? Too few, I worry.

These two fundamental observations are facts of life and in conflict. That’s what makes it interesting. The economist Peter Boettke has elaborated and even imagined a derby involving “Three S’s”.  Smithian gains from trade, Schumpeterian competition, and, third S for stupid.

All three are always in play. And it’s election season.


Fifty years ago.......................at Woodstock


Joe Cocker...........................................Something's Coming On

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


.........................Woodstock:  Three Days of Peace & Music.


Thursday, August 15, 2019

Aging like a fine wine..................


He's still pretty young, but still...............

Garbage time....................


Jerry Seinfeld on Father's Day and parenting:

I don’t need any special days. I mean they’re all special. We spend a lot of time together and I enjoy every second of it. Again, I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about “quality time” – I always find that a little sad when they say, “We have quality time.” I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

The bigger picture....................


"It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. 

"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love.  History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks."

-Will Durant

On self-fulfilling prophesies........













         via

Expectations...............


“There is nothing in nature that blooms all year long, so don’t expect yourself to do so either.” 

-Unknown, from this of five things to stop doing

Fifty years ago...........................at Woodstock


Joe Cocker.................................................Let's Go Get Stoned

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

In praise of..........................


...............................................................................sandstorms?

What was previously thought to be dangerous and destructive turns out to have been clarifying and constructive. The desert needs the sandstorm to stay vibrant and vital. The overturning of the status quo is chaotic and dark, but what is revealed is bright and beautiful. For the desert to bloom, it needs to be cleansed from time to time; sandstorms make space for new growth.

This is asking a lot...............


These articles about the election must be cranked out, and I'm only blogging this one because it is so absurd. Kamala Harris was "briefly sent... into the stratosphere"?! She briefly polled in the teens, and then slipped back into the single digits. Instead of an article asking why she's not more popular, ask yourselves how you ever got caught up into assuming that she was supposed to be so popular. You assume something should be true, then you proceed to inquire why it isn't. How about speaking honestly about your own assumption?

-from this Althouse post

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


It was Beatrice Kenton who first questioned the identity of the new girl.  She did so in the staff room, at a quarter past three, on a Friday in late November.  The mood was festive and faintly rebellious, as was the case most Friday afternoons.  It is a truism that no profession welcomes the end of the workweek with more anticipation that teachers—even teachers at elite institutions such as the International School of Geneva.  The chatter was of plans for the weekend.  Beatrice abstained, for she had none, a fact she did not wish to share with her colleagues.  She was fifty-two, unmarried, and with no family to speak of other than a rich aunt who granted her refuge each summer at her estate in Norfolk.  Her weekend routing consisted of a trip to the Migros and a walk along the lakeshore for the sake of her waistline, which, like the universe, was ever expanding.  First period Monday was an oasis in an otherwise Empty Quarter of solitude.

-Daniel Silva,  The New Girl

Fifty years ago......................at Woodstock


Joe Cocker.............................With A Little Help From My Friends

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

I would vote........................


...........................................for some sustained incremental tinkering, before embarking on some grand plan:

Such problems are easier to diagnose than to cure. Reforming American healthcare will require an almighty effort. With politics gridlocked and soaking in lobbyist money, it’s not obvious that the US government is capable of running the kind of healthcare system that works elsewhere — even if Congress decides to try. But try it must, because the status quo is a tragedy.

Praying..........................


................................................................for another success story.

thanks

With apologies.....................


.....................................................to Mark Knopfler.














cartoon via

Doesn't matter the stimulus............


................I have a hard time subscribing to this reaction:

Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.”

Fifty years ago...................at Woodstock


Arlo Guthrie........................................Coming Into Los Angeles
(music starts around 2:26)

Monday, August 12, 2019

Sunday, August 11, 2019

As diets go...........................



via        via

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


     Three tellers were working the morning Isabel Roland was kidnapped.  Clark Davos, a sweet guy whose third baby had just been born; Dana Chin, who was funny and wore fabulous shoes; and Isabelle, the youngest teller on duty.  Isabel began working at the bank a little over a year ago, three months before her mother died.  Five customers were in line, but more customers entered the bank every few seconds.

-Robert Crais,  A Dangerous Man

Seth Godin..................


............................................Sometimes excerpting from one of his blog posts is just not enough:


Plato believes....................


      Plato believes that a nation cannot be strong unless it believes in God.  A mere cosmic force, or first cause, or elan vital, that was not a person, could hardly inspire hope, or devotion, or sacrifice;  it could not offer comfort to the hearts of the distressed, nor courage to embattled souls.  But a living God can do all this, and can stir or frighten the self-seeking individualist into some moderation of his greed, some control of his passion.  All the more so if if to belief in God is added belief in personal immortality:  the hope of another life gives us courage to meet our own death, and to bear with the death of our loved ones;  we are twice armed if we fight with faith.  Granted that none of the beliefs can be demonstrated; that God may be after all only the personified ideal of our love and our hope, and that the soul is like the music of the lyre, and dies with the instrument that gave it form:  yet surely (so runs the argument, Pascal-like,of the Phaedo) it will do us not harm to believe, and it may do us and our children immeasurable good.

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy

Fifty years ago...................At Woodstock


Tim Hardin....................................Simple Song of Freedom

Disappointment........................


     Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations, it is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God.  The first disciples were disappointed because Jesus turned out not to be the kind of Messiah they wanted.

-Simon Tugwell O. P., Ways of Imperfection:  An Exploration of Christian Spirituality

Saturday, August 10, 2019

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


'You know I don't like to meddle in things,' Conte Falier told Brunetti.  'But since, in this case, he's so close to me, I feel I don't have a choice, not really.'  Brunetti, seated opposite his father-in-law in one of the over-ripe armchairs that filled Palazzo Falier, had been listening to the older man for some time, aware of how difficult il Conte was finding it to begin telling the story he obviously wanted Brunetti to hear.

-Donna Leon, Unto Us a Son Is Given:  A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

(If you haven't started reading Leon's Brunetti stories, well, start now.  Much enjoyment awaits you.)