Friday, November 30, 2018

Within You

"Your sickness is from you, but you do not perceive it, and your remedy is within you, but you do not sense it. You presume you are a small entity, but within you is enfolded the entire Universe. You are indeed the evident book, by whose alphabets the hidden becomes manifest. Therefore you have no need to look beyond yourself. What you seek is within you, if only you reflect." ~Imam Ali (AS)

Something

"It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month-old son to come here. How we respond when she arrives tells us something about ours." ~Beto O'Rourke

Thursday, November 29, 2018

The Epiphany of Truth

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."  ~Azar Nafisi, in Reading Lolita in Tehran ©2013

What You Need

"It’s not always easy to know what skills a guru has. Some very academic gurus can tell you which page number you should read in which edition of a text, and can remember exact dates. This is impressive if you are a university student, but if you’re following a spiritual path, it may not be what you need. What you need is someone who can actually turn knowledge like that into something useful for your path, someone who can teach you how to learn. A guru must also have the skill to work with your temporary defilements, because even though the defilements are temporary, they have existed since beginningless time, and they will not be easy to eliminate."  ~Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (source)

Focus

"If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to focus on who profits from that problem, not who suffers from the problem." ~Dr. Amos Wilson

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

66

Sonnet 66
by William Shakespeare


Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:


Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.


If you have trouble with Ye Olde English, SparkNotes has a wonderful little site that translates it into modern language.  (You do lose the rhythm and the rhyme, of course.)  Have a look HERE.

Dorothy

In this excerpt from his autobiography Have Tux, Will Tavel, ©1954, Bob Hope is discussing the successful Road To… movie series:

When Bing (Crosby) and I are working out our lines for the next take, she (Dorothy Lamour) just stands there and listens. Once in a while she'll say, "How about a line for me?" This usually brings a fast "Quiet, Honey," from us. "All we want you to do is to look beautiful and twirl your sarong!"


I realize that it was a different world 80 years ago when these movies were being made, but that's still a jarringly dismissive way to treat a friend and costar.

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

3

Three autobiographies I've read that made me intensely dislike the author:

  1. Time Enough To Win by Roger Staubach

  2. Have Tux, Will Travel by Bob Hope

  3. It's in the Book, Bob by Bob Eubanks

Monday, November 26, 2018

:-)

…and

“To live means : to cry and shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to even experience horrible, frightening things… and to laugh.”  ~Genki Kawamura, from If cats disappeared from the world

All The Way

[embed]https://youtu.be/5avqUu6E17k[/embed]

Fats Domino's Christmas Gumbo has become one of my favorite holiday albums.  They're all traditional songs in his own inimitable style- and you can feel his smile while you're listening.  :D

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Busted

[embed]https://youtu.be/q8w1d01Y2vY[/embed]

Jump ahead to 3:33 in Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal video, and you'll see him leaning at impossible angles, using an exclusive system he claimed to have invented-- and patented!-- himself.

But in this excerpt from Bob Hope’s autobiography Have Tux, Will Tavel, Hope describes using the exact same system in 1936:

In the same show, Jimmy (Durante) and I had a scene in which we leaned out over the orchestra pit at an impossible angle without falling. This gimmick is especially effective for drunk acts. You wear a cleat in your heel with a slot in it. There's a screw in the stage, you slip the slot over the head over the screw, and after that you can lean at any angle you like.


I suppose he just considered it a marketing ploy, but I wish he had just admitted he resurrected a forgotten vaudeville trick.  That's pretty cool, too.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Subtle

From Bob Hope's autobiography Have Tux, Will Tavel, ©1954:

I'd discovered that I was a success if could lead with a joke the audience didn't grab right away-- a good, solid, big joke with a certain amount of subtlety to it, one that would challenge the audience and let them know right away that they had a fight on their hands.


That's an odd statement.

"Subtlety" has never been a quality I associated with Bob Hope, and I don't think I've ever bought a ticket hoping to have "a fight on my hands."

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Same As It Ever Was

[embed]https://youtu.be/iFm7hQh-8t4[/embed]

Drug of Choice

I don't know what it's like in other places, but here in East Texas the anti-abortion activists are quite a spectacle.

They begin by creating a tiny fake cemetery alongside a busy road, with foot-tall wooden crosses painted white. Then they kneel down in the center of it and begin to wail, to cry, to scream, to rage, to "pray." Then they pack up their signs and go home.

They say their beliefs are based on Science™, but that veers towards the absurd. Science is not in a position to determine the moment that inanimate matter becomes animate, or life becomes sentient.

They say their beliefs are based on religion, but that's not quite true, either. Their bible, although oddly specific in some respects (they can't eat lizards, for instance), doesn't bring up the topic of abortion. They're taking a few verses and extrapolating them out to get the result they want. Other people, fooled by Satan no doubt, extrapolate out and get different results.

And the thing is, they've already won. Christian terrorists murdered a few doctors and torched a few clinics, which scared most doctors out of the business, and legislators have made the process so onerous and expensive that it's virtually impossible to get an abortion in Texas. There are no clinics at all in East Texas. Republicans have packed the court with partisans, so soon they'll be able to outlaw abortion openly, but that's just awarding the trophy after the contest has been decided. It doesn't really matter anymore.

It's not really about the issue, anyway. What this is really all about is their addiction to Outrage. They get high from Righteous Indignation.

Once Roe v. Wade is overturned, they aren't going to go away. They're going to pick a new issue to dwell on. My money is on The Homosexual Agenda, but they may have a go at restoring mandatory prayer in public schools. We'll see.

They're going to talk about science, and they're going to talk about religion.

They should be talking about dopamine and serotonin.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Probably the worst place to build a house would be directly over the North Pole or the South Pole, because literally every room would be in a different time zone.  It would be impossible to coordinate anything, because everybody's watch would say something different.

I'm experiencing terrible insomnia lately, but the payoff is in thoughts like that one.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

"Wearing of Sandals"

From a May 27, 1968 memo on the counterculture movement, directed to the head of the FBI:

"nonconformism in dress and speech, neglect of personal cleanliness, use of obscenities (printed and uttered), publicized sexual promiscuity, experimenting with and the use of drugs, filthy clothes, shaggy hair, wearing of sandals, beads, and unusual jewelry, tend to negate any attempt to hold these people up to ridicule."


It's interesting to me that "ridicule" was apparently something they considered to be a weapon in their arsenal.

 

Sail On

[embed]https://youtu.be/zg-ivWxy5KE[/embed]

It was plain to see that a small town boy like me
Just-a wasn't your cup of tea
It was wishful thinkin'…


A lot of their songs have a small-town feel to them, not really surprising since they formed in a small town in Alabama.

Full lyrics HERE.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Pinkos

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.  (Acts 4:32-35)

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Marie-Marie La-voodoo-veau

[embed]https://youtu.be/YIKCIwy6WUk[/embed]

When I was nine-years-old I thought this was the greatest song ever written.  I  had never heard a baseline like that before.  I loved it and played it over and over and over, until one day the 45 mysteriously disappeared.

Full lyrics HERE.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The Most Materialistic Age

In this excerpt from Winesburg, Ohio, published almost a century ago in 1919, Sherwood Anderson predicts the future with a depressing degree of accuracy:

That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the Civil War and he, like all men of his time, had been touched by the deep influences that were at work in the country during those years when modern industrialism was being born. He began to buy machines that would permit him to do the work of the farms while employing fewer men and he sometimes thought that if he were a younger man he would give up farming altogether and start a factory in Winesburg for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the habit of reading newspapers and magazines. He invented a machine for the making of fence out of wire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing that was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about him. The greedy thing in him wanted to make money faster than it could be made by tilling the land. More than once he went into Winesburg to talk with his son-in-law John Hardy about it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I never had," he said and his eyes shone. "I am thinking about it all the time. Big things are going to be done in the country and there will be more money to be made than I ever dreamed of. You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your chance." Jesse Bentley walked up and down in the bank office and grew more and more excited as he talked. At one time in his life he had been threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back home and when night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and who might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the things read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to be made almost without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold.


Winesburg, Ohio, and most other Sherwood Anderson works, are in the public domain and may be downloaded freely from Project Gutenberg, HERE.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Pillars of the Community

"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral."  ~Abbie Hoffman

The city in East Texas where I live has over 100,000 people, but we only have two grocery stores to choose from: Walmart, and Brookshire's.

Brookshire's is ungodly expensive, and I believe that has more to do with the local social strata than anything else. There's a saying here, only partly in jest, that if you're less than third-generation then you're still the new kid. Brookshire's customers are willing to pay more not because of better quality or better choices, but simply because the higher prices keep out the riff-raff.

So those of us in the working class don't really have a choice. We have to go to Walmart because it's the only place we can afford.

The local Walmart recently remodeled, and only have three manned checkout lanes now. All the rest are self-checkout. The cashier told me that the last remaining three are going to be phased out, and everyone will have to scan and sack their own groceries.

I asked about my 88-year-old father. She said he'd have to learn to do it himself. I said he can't. She said he'll have to.

Walmart is one of the most profitable chains in America, and they're going to lay off their most underpaid workers.  They are counting on their customers to do their work for them, for free, so the stockholders can enjoy larger dividends.

Be super careful as you check out your own groceries. You sure don't want to make a mistake.

Occasionally Unavailable



Zippy the Pinhead is on the web HERE.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Need an ark? I Noah guy.



Noah’s Ark
Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César, Kingdom of Jerusalem (Acre) before 1291
British Library, Additional 15268, fol. 7v

(via)

Saturday, November 10, 2018

I watch it all roll by...

[embed]https://youtu.be/j0wCPXpRoWQ[/embed]

Standing on the moon
With nothing left to do
A lovely view of heaven
But I'd rather be with you…

Full lyrics HERE.

Friday, November 9, 2018

Me and Sherwood and Billy Pilgrim

From Malcom Cowley's introduction to the Penguin Classic's edition of Sherwood Anderson's Windesburg Ohio, © 1919:

One characteristic of the subconscious is a defective sense of time: in dreams the old man sees himself as a boy, and the events of thirty or forty years may be jumbled together. Time as a logical succession of events was Anderson's greatest difficulty in writing novels or even long stories. He got his tenses confused and carried his heroes ten years forward or back in a single paragraph. His instinct was to present everything together, as in a dream.


I have the same problem.  Time just doesn't seem linear to me.

I've had the experience more than once of finding a date on a ticket stub or an old letter which proves conclusively that the order of things as I remembered them could not be true.  It's always a little disorienting.

I've thought of making an autobiographical blog, but it couldn't possibly be chronological. The memories would be more like a series of colored panes that wouldn't necessarily fit together to make a stained glass window.

Most of Sherwood Anderson's novels and short stories are in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, HERE.

 

Thursday, November 8, 2018

I'm very leery of the movement to legalize marijuana.

The same people with the power to improve our lives are instead offering to sell us-- at a substantial profit-- a few moments relief from the world they have created.

That's not nearly good enough.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

"The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak."  ~Hugh Romney, aka Wavy Gravy

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

That That Those

"Wherever you have friends, that is your country; wherever you receive love, that is your home; whoever gives you love, those are your parents." ~Tibetan Saying (quoted by the Dalai Lama in The Book of Joy by Douglas Abrams, © 2016)

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Benefit

Excerpted from the article Advice on Benefiting Animals by Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche:

It’s not enough that you keep the animals and they give you comfort. You must do something of practical benefit for them. This is what you can do every day:


Take them around holy objects -- circumambulate. Everyday you can put on a table many tsa-tsas and statues, and take the animal around chanting mantras at the same time. This way it also helps the person who carries the animal around.


Recite prayers in their ears, verbally, to plant the seed of all the realizations of the path to enlightenment.


This makes a huge difference. It has inconceivable result, unbelievable result. That makes them have a good rebirth next life, to be born as a human being and meet the Dharma.


But I've always kind of thought just the opposite.

Being a human being is hard.  I like to think if we live a good life and do our best, perhaps the gods will take pity on us and let us live our next life as a nice woman's lap-cat, to give us a chance to catch our breath.

I'm not really convinced that being human is the top of the pyramid, anyway.  As Don Marquis once pointed out, to a mosquito we're just something to eat.

And I'm pretty sure cats think that they are the species to aspire to.

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Grief

I can't make the BBC embed code work with WordPress, but here's the link:  LINK

If you have eight minutes, it's a really helpful little video.

Friday, November 2, 2018

Better

From what I can see of the people like me
We get better
But we never get well

~from Allergies by Paul Simon

Jimi



(It says "Sharp" on his pant leg, but the rest of the artist's name has been lost in a series of reposts.)

Playing

"I have found that in life, playing dumb and innocent can get you a long way."  ~Howard Bellamy