Hero

HST is one of my heroes. This is a great movie about him, his passion, and those heady days of my generation in the late 1960s-70s. This movie captures the excitement, the struggle and the hope of those days. 

Thompson was a true patriot. George W. Bush killed him. We can only imagine his views on Donald Trump and what Trumpism says about America and the American Dream. 

I wish that he could have stood it and was here to put his words to the frustration, fear, loathing and lost hope we have felt since Trump's emergence as a force in the Republican Party. Nobody could do it better.

Quote of the Day

This isn't original but it is appropriate:

"If you don't like wearing a mask, you are definitely not going to like a ventilator."

Troubled Times

Quote for the Times

"It's never too late to do nothing at all." - Allen Ginsberg

Songbird Guards a Twig

Daily Challenge

"To learn something new take the path that you took yesterday."

-- The explorer John Burroughs as quoted by Pico Uyer in "The Beauty of the Ordinary," New York Times, September 22, 2019

Happy Midsummer Night's Eve!

"The course of true love never did run smooth"

- William Shakespeare - Midsummer Night's Dream

"Midsummer Night is not long but sets many a cradle rocking"

- Swedish proverb

Feast of the Epiphany

Excerpts from today's Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac -  

"Today is the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “manifestation” or “striking appearance.” Before Christianity, the word was used to record occasions when Greek gods and goddesses made appearances on earth. . .  

Around the time that Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word “epiphany.” . . .  

He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of “inadvertent revelations” and said they were “little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.” 

He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” the moment when “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.” 

. . . Joyce’s Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, “The Dead,” and the story ends: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”"

One Master to an Up-and-Coming One

"Be natural, be cool."

  -- Sam Cooke to an up-and-coming Otis Redding as quoted by Mark Ribowsky in Dreams to Remember - Otis Redding, Stax Records and the Transformation of Southern Soul

Wisdom from Antiquity

Men grow rich, or take power,

ten thousand men want ten thousand things,

most see their hopes

go to ruin, a few see them all

come true --- but the man whose life

right now, this day

brings joy to his heart – 

is happy beyond harm.

--- Euripides, The Bakkhai (quoted by Ben Giamo in Kerouac, The Word and the Way – Prose Artist as a Spiritual Quester)

Christian Advice

"Pay attention to the nudgings of your heart."

 - Adam Hamilton 12-21-18 Sermon on Christianity and World Religions - Buddhism

My Next Tee-Shirrt

My New Tee-Shirt

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar

A good friend recommended this book to me and it is great.  I am only part-way into to it and I have been laughing out loud since starting it, learning at the same time.

For example, here is one of the jokes they use to illustrate one of Leibniz's philosophical thoughts:

"An optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds.  The  pessimist fears that the optimist is right."

I have a feeling I may be posting more jokes from this book in the future so stay tuned!! Better yet, check out the entire book yourself!!!

Thoughts of Joyce - A Week After Bloomsday

Happy 55th Birthday David Foster Wallace!

From today's Writer's Almanac on NPR:

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

 

"Billy asked him what being in a firefight was like.  Shroom thought for a minute, "It's not like anything, except maybe being raped by angels.  

He'd say, "I love you" to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt or warbly Christian smart in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone's soul."

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Literature Anticipates Quantum Physics

"Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass Weave, weaver of the wind."    

- James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream

 "The course of true love never did run smooth."