Be....................................

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be.  Be one."
-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations,  Book Ten: 16

The difference..............................

thanks

tenuous thread......................

“Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.” 

-Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time

thanks john

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

Neil Diamond............................................Cherry, Cherry

Wonder how that's working..............?

"Asian observers try to understand American politics in rational terms."
-David P. Goldman

The quote comes from this post, wherein Spengler takes the gloves off.

(In related news:  try this one out as a campaign slogan.)

This seems about right................

thanks jess

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

     The sun had just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise.  The sand was the color of cinnamon and spiked with green grass and felt cool on his feet, even though they were bruised and threaded with lesions that were probably infected.  He got to his knees and wiped the bugs off the water and cupped it to his mouth with both hands, then washed his face in it and pushed his long hair out of his eyes.  His skin was striped with dirt, his trousers streaked with salt from  the dried sweat of the horse.  For an instant he thought he saw his reflection in the surface of the pond.  No, that was not he, he told himself.  The narrow face and the shoulder-length hair and the eyes that were like cups of darkness belonged on a tray or perhaps to a crusader knight left to the mercy of the Saracens.
     "Venga!" he said to the horse.  "You have to be instructed to drink?  It is no compliment to me that the only horse I could steal is probably the dumbest in Pancho Villa'a army, a horse that didn't have the courtesy to wear a saddle."

-James Lee Burke,  House Of The Rising Sun

Jetboy............................

...............................................is playing dedications.  Sweet.

Think I'll just keep the one I have...........................

via

Each step is moving..................

Arthur Russell.................This Is How We Walk On The Moon




via

Dialin' 'cross the radio..................

Randy Travis......................................................Storms of Life



thanks kurt

While I was away......................

..............one of the world's best at the fine art of bloggery reached a significant milestone.  Congratulations Michael!  Please allow me to echo this and this.  Thank you for everything.

I was going to host................

................an introvert party, but Scott beat me to it.   Called down to the bullpen and they sent this one up:

Life would be a lot less interesting without Doug Savage.

a long-standing human tradition.............

"...there is a long-standing human tradition to become so enthusiastic about a favoured scientific, religious or superstitious explanation for the world as to close your mind and come to hate those who disagree.  We have seen it far too often to ignore it, and scientists have shown themselves no better than the rest of us at resisting the urge."

-Matt Ridley

Taking time................................

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

Cher (written by Sonny).........................................Bang Bang

Reading with a dictionary................

So, I started reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America.   It didn't take me long to figure out that his vocabulary makes mine look a bit inchoate.

Here is a start to my list of words that needed to be looked up:

afflatus

belletrist

aperçus

peripeteia

meretricious

frisson

Have you used any of these words lately?  Just wondering.

Certainty............................

     In the midst of this mutilation and mayhem, Holmes (Oliver Wendell Jr.)  did an extraordinary thing:  he road tested his beliefs.  Lying in a hospital on Harrison's Island, watching his comrades dying around him and listening to rumors that the building was about to be shelled, he interrogated his philosophical convictions in order to discover whether there were any he now might want to revise.  He was undergoing an experience of terror that nothing in his life had prepared him for, and he decided to solicit his own reactions to it...He found he did not require a religious faith.  Uncertainty - "I am to take a leap in the dark" - turned out to be all the certainty he needed.  The assurance that he had done his duty was a wholly adequate consolation.

-Louis Menand,  The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America

On a regular basis........................