Still haven't come across where..............

.......................................................Shakespeare wrote this:

Sean Carpenter........................

……..wants to know how you're going to finish out 2019:

Take a deep breath, grab a sip of water, and remind yourself that the actions you take over the next 30 days will have a huge effect on how the year will end.

Make sure part of your plan includes building relationships, solving problems and having fun. After that, the rest of the actions you take should be pretty easy to figure out.

On the importance of alibis....................

……………………………...Unfortunately, I don't have one.

Truth is elusive, although alcohol helps..........

The basic question that a lot of us have is why capitalism is such a boo-word among young people and why socialism is such a yeah-word. Young people sympathetic to socialism seem determined to believe that when they observe things they don’t like, capitalism is at fault; when they observe things that they do like, socialism deserves the credit. Yet the book drives home the point that the truth is the opposite.

-Arnold S. Kling, as he reviews this just-now-available book

All I want for Christmas...............

.........is to spend a day or three checking out his library, or his.

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

Country Joe...........................I-feel-like-I'm-fixing- to-die-rag

Not the version you hear on the radio....

Joni Mitchell....................................................Woodstock

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me

I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm 
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free 

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning

Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
       Billion year old carbon
We are golden
       Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden

Culture, as mirrored in advertising..........

     English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in the United States, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust.  From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated Northeastern industrial town), I recognized commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America.  Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M & M's chocolate candies.  A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise lounge, said in a twanging Southern drawl:  "I'm an M & M peanut/Toasted to to a golden brown/Dipped in creamy milk chocolate/And covered in a thin candy shell!"  Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly toweled in her monogrammed candy wrap.  I felt then, and still do, the the M & M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.

-Camille Paglia,  Break Blow Burn:  Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three Of The World's Best Poems

Couldn't find the exact advertisement she was talking about on YouTube.  This compilation might serve notice though that the M & M creative team are indeed folk artists.  Enjoy:

Hope you have a Road Runner kind of day.....

Never heard this one before..............

Consider what life would have been like for a farmer in New England in 1700.  In the winter months the sun goes down at five, followed by fifteen hours of darkness before it gets light again.  And when that sun goes down, it's pitch black:  there are no streetlights, flashlights, light bulbs, fluorescents—even kerosene lamps haven't been invented yet.  There's just a flickering glow of a fireplace, and the smoky burn of the tallow candle.
     Those nights were so oppressive that scientists now believe our sleep patterns were radically different in the ages before ubiquitous night lighting.  In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a remarkable study that drew upon hundreds of diaries and instructional manuals to convincingly argue that humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods.  When darkness fell, they would drift into "first sleep," waking after four hours to snack, relieve themselves, have sex, or chat by the fire, before heading back for another four hours of "second sleep."  The lighting of the nineteenth century disrupted this ancient rhythm, by opening up a whole array of modern activities that could be performed after sunset:  everything from theaters and restaurants to factory labor.  Ekrich documented the way the ideal of a single, eight-hour block of sleep was constructed by nineteenth century customs, an adaptation to a dramatic change int he lighting environment of human settlements.  Like all adaptations, its benefits carried inevitable costs: the middle-of-the-night insomnia that plagues millions of people around the world is not, technically speaking, a disorder, but rather the body's natural sleep rhythms asserting themselves over prescriptions of nineteenth century convention.  Those waking moments at three a. m. are a kind of jet lag caused by artificial light instead of air travel.

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

Sunrise.............................

     I had always loved sunrise:  was always renewed in spirit.  For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn.  The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.

-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses

photo via

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

Mountain.........................................................Blood Of The Sun

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

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” 


-James Thurber

Puzzles.................................

          via

Purging..........................

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exultation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end, we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for, in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

-Matthieu Ricard

David Kanigan......................

...........................................don't start your day without him.

Achievable goals...........................

Gratitude.............................

........................................................and the "grand old journey."

There's a time or three...............

..................................when this would have made life easier.

via

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

Mountain...........................................................Southbound Train