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

The Beatles......................................It Won't Be Long

 

On changing lightbulbs..........................

....the definitive, and peer reviewed, answer to "how many" is here.

thanks mungo

Continuing the theme.....................

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I thought it was about time.........................

........to update my Webster's New World College Dictionary.
Victor Davis Hanson gets us off to an interesting start.

If.......................................................

Tim Hardin..........................................Reason to Believe

 

Time tested and Sweetie approved.............

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Us pesky humans...........................

We just refuse to succumb to Malthusian nonsense, regardless of how many books it will sell.  WRM reports on human ingenuity and the water "crisis".............

One of the biggest feeders of Malthusian fears in recent years has been the body of literature predicting the threat to our fresh water supply. Book after book after book has described the water crisis facing the planet. History has shown that human ingenuity has allowed us to overcome challenges thrown at us by geography, the elements, and alleged overpopulation. Could it be that this time it may be no different?

Full essay is here

Choose.........................................

"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits"
-Baruch Spinoza

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

McLintock..........................................John Wayne and friends 
They just don't make movies the way they used to.
 "Good party, but no whiskey. We go home."

   

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

                                            Chapter 1

                                         I AM BORN

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by someone else, these pages must show.  To begin my like with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night.  It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
-Charles Dickens,  David Copperfield

Is it just me.................................

................or has the national news media totally lost its way?

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Veneration..............................

"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious."
-Albert Einstein

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I'll never grow up.................................

The Zombies......................................Time of the Season

 

The more things change.............................

     Burke's other goals included abolition of the Board of Trade, a perennial target of opposition politicians over the centuries, and of the office of the Third Secretary of State, responsible for the colonies, and specifically America.  But more interesting are the obvious targets that he omitted.  Pensions were known to be widely abused, as were sinecures within the Exchequer itself, yet Burke proposed only modest changes to them.  Politic in seeking consensus, he was also respectful of what he saw as private property, and personally reluctant to deprive any many of what might be his livelihood.  More than this, he believed that it was greatly to the benefit of the nation as a whole that long and disinterested public service be rewarded, and so encouraged, with honours and property.  His goal was a balance between the twin evils of an ossified aristocracy and a politics of court favorites, drones and placemen eagerly shimmying up the greasy pole.
-Jesse Norman,  Edmund Burke:  The First Conservative

On enthusiasm.........................

"There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs."
-Edmund Burke

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

Cleopatra...................Taylor,  Burton, Harrison, et. al.

 

Budgets?  Budgets?  We don't need no stinking budgets!  Originally slated to cost $2,000,000, the final 1963 production cost $44,000,000 (equivalent to $323,000,000 +/- today).  It was the highest grossing film in 1963, yet still lost money.  Go figure.  You can read more than you want to know about the film here.

Unexpected..................................

"If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one."
-Karl Popper

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Profound mysteries............................

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
-Charles Dickens

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A verse for Sunday....................

36  "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

37  “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 

38  "Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Luke 6:36-38

The Holy  Bible

New International Version

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

                                                   Chapter 1

     TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING TO HIS BIRTH

     Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small;  to wit, a workhouse;  and in this workhouse was born;  on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
-Charles Dickens,   Oliver Twist