He gave his life for tourism................

Steve Martin..............................................King Tut

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

     "Well, I have my pet answer, and I was very proud of it.  But then, to my horror and disgust, I found that Plato had got the same answer about twenty-five hundred years ago!"  
     The man with the answer -  one he believed to be utterly original when he first hit on it as a teenager - was a mild-mannered and soft-spoken speculative cosmologist by the name of John Leslie.
-Jim Holt, as excerpted from Chapter Eleven, titled "The Ethical Requiredness of There Being Something," in his book, Why Does The World Exist?

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

via

The Execupundit........................

...............offers a great Henry Kissinger quote.  Money line here:

...there are few ultimate solutions and whatever “solutions” there are, more often than not turn into a threshold for a new set of problems.

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

At the movies....Peter Sellers/Elke Sommer in A Shot In The Dark
 "................all part of life's rich pagentry..........."

 

I don't know much about Ukraine..................

..........so I turned to the Oracle Google to find some background.  Tucked in the Wikipedia report on Ukraine was this little tidbit,  "Ukraine is one of ten most attractive agricultural land acquisition regions."  Hmmm. "Land acquisition regions."  Sounds like a battleground to me.  For an interesting perspective of humankind, do yourself a favor and scroll through the history of Ukraine.  Makes one glad to live in a country with two large oceans for borders.  Of course, the history of Ukraine is way longer than the history of the United States.  Be interesting to read the history of the United States 600 years from now.  Just wondering if Iowa will ever become a "most attractive agricultural land acquisition region.

cartoon via

The key question.........................

Greg Sullivan, noting the intricate tapestry of life its ownself, says, "She is gifted. Then again, we all are. What are we doing with our gifts?

A bit dated, but you get the idea...................

INFIDEL, n.   In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion;  in Constantinople, one who does.   A kind of scoundrel imperfectly reverent of , and niggardly contributory to, divines, ecclesiastics, popes, parsons, canons, monks, mollahs, voodoos, presbyters, hierophants, prelates, obeah-men, abbes, nuns, missionaries, exhorters, brahmins, medicine-men, confessors, eminences, elders, primates, prebendaries, pilgrims, prophets, imaums, beneficiaries, clerks, vicars-choral, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, preachers, padres, abbotesses, caloyers, palmers, curates, patriarchs, bonezs, santons, beadsmen, canonesses, residentiaries, diocesans, deans, subdeans, rural deans, abdals, charm-sellers, archdeacons, hierarchs, class-leaders, incumbents, capitulars, sheiks, talapoins, postulants, scribes, gooroos, precentors, beadles, fakeers, sextons, reverences, revivalists, cenobites, perpetual curates, chaplains, mudjoes, readers, novices, vicars, pastors, rabbis, ulemas, lamas, sacristans, vergers, dervises, lectors, church wardens, cardinals, prioresses, suffragans, acolytes, rectors, cures, sophis, mutifs and pumpums.
-Ambrose Bierce,  The Devil's Dictionary

While we grow old.................................

Minnie Riperton.........................................Loving You

 

Learned......................................

"Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself.  Material conditions are secondary:  they only affect us indirectly, by way of experience.  Flow, and even pleasure, on the other hand, benefit the quality of life directly.  Health, money, and other material advantages may or may not improve life.  Unless a person has learned to control psychic energy, chances are such advantages will be useless."
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,  Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience

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

Millie Small.....................................................My Boy Lollipop

 

Longer...............................

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
-Albert Einstein

Mad.................................

REALITY, n.  The dream of a mad philosopher.
-Ambrose Bierce,  The Devil's Dictionary

A singer in a band.....................

The Beatles..............................Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

 

Lost in knowledge..........................

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

-T. S. Eliot
as excerpted from Choruses from the Rock

The only things...........................

Thanks Nan.  If you don't visit the Jade Page Press blog occasionally ... well you should.

Just people..............................

a thousand times..........................

We have thousands of times more available information than Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Yet which of us would think ourselves a thousand times more educated or more serviceable to our fellowmen than they? The sublime quality of what these two men gave to us—including the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address—was not attributable to their great resources of information, for their libraries were comparatively small by our standards. Theirs was the wise and inspired use of a limited amount of information.
-Dallin H. Oaks

thanks bilbo

Sink.....................................

via

Wishful thinking/Fifty years ago.............

Chad  & Jeremy.......................................A Summer Song