Contradictions and Uncomplications
Robert Frost was born on this day in 1874.
"THE GIFT OUTRIGHT" BY ROBERT FROST (INAUGURAL POEM)
Poem recited at John F. Kennedy's Inauguration by Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she will become.
I don't know about you, but I think this is a real crap poem!
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Castle Romeo was detonated in the Bikini Islands on this day in 1954. It was the world's first thermonuclear bomb.
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Born on this day in 1916, Sterling Hayden, who famously had this to say about nuclear war, from Dr. Strangelove:
"Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war? He said, "War is too important to be left to the generals." When he said that, fifty years ago, he may have been right. But today war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
If someone ever says that to you, run!
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I'm about a month into my fifties and there have been some problems. Walking up the stairs yesterday I somehow pulled a muscle in my back. Yes, just walking up the stairs. Today I twisted my left ankle on the same stairs, then twisted my right knee as I tumbled down them, aggravating an old air hockey injury. This is just a few days after getting stuck in an elevator. I think I should aim to stay on ground level for a while. The way it's going, if I don't hop off an escalator on time, it could shred me into confetti.
March 26, 2024
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We interviewed a guy named Elliot today for a driving job. After the interview I sat down back in my office and said in a weird croaky voice, "Ellliooot." I started wondering why the heck I said that and then I realized that I was impersonating ET. Now here's the thing, how didn't my brain know what my brain just had me do???
March 26, 2024
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Shocking to think that history of our country only spans two and a half lifetimes.
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I played wiffle ball tonight with Gretel and one of her friends. I won with 37 and they each had 16. One ball disintegrated when I hit it. Gretel had pieces raining down on her. I don't mess around!
Bob Gibson gave up a grand slam to Pete LaCock in his final major league game. When he faced him 10 years later in an old-timers game, he hit him! Bob Costas asked him about it later and he said, "Robert, the scales must be balanced no matter how long it takes."
Gibson said once that he had played several hundred games of tic-tac-toe with his daughter and she hadn't won yet.
Bob Gibson was a competitor and I'm right there with him! I do seem to value a FRIENDLY competitive spirit just a bit more though. There's a lot to be gained from it, and presumably from teaching it by example. Really though, I'm just having fun.
March 26, 2023
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My kids and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey over the last week and just finished it tonight. I think it made an impression. I particularly liked Zuzu's reaction after this bit of dialogue.
HAL- "I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it."
Zuzu- "Daddy... when I grow up... I don't want to go into space."
Haha. They both really liked it though, and they both seem to understand a lot of the symbolism. Very strange.
March 26, 2021
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Remember when Michael Avenatti was thinking of running for president? Then a few months ago he was arrested for domestic abuse, and now there's this Nike extortion plot. He's really going to have to step up his scandal game if he's going to rival Trump! Maybe tomorrow he could sabotage the Special Olympics or fight to take away tens of millions of people's health care, and then just repeat that type of thing every day until the election.
On the plus side though, his minor scandals do qualify him for a job in Trump's administration.
March 26, 2019
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Trump and his toadies are calling for there to be investigations into the investigation. The implication is clear- the mere accusation of wrong-doing should be punished. I've been critical of the president (not sure if you noticed!) but I don't feel the slightest inclination to backtrack on anything.
First, I've said all along that the evidence will be the evidence, and we'll have to wait to see what it is.
Second, obviously we still have to wait. Imagine that President Hillary's emails were subject of a two year investigation (or were they already?) and Attorney General Weiner put out a short letter absolving her of any wrongdoing. If any of Trump's true believers think they would be placated by that, then they have the right to criticize the criticism of Barr's letter.
Third, Trump said release it, so release it. If it exonerates the president, great! (Seriously.) Everyone should know exactly how innocent he is. If it exonerates him, he should be leaflet-blanketing sanctuary cities with copies of it. (But although he said to release it, they all know what he really meant.)
Fourth, does anybody REALLY think that the answer to why Trump has acted so suspiciously for years ("WITCH HUNT!") will not be explained in it? If not, great! See above.
Fifth, Mueller said Trump is not exonerated to which Trump shouts back- "total exoneration." I can assure you, if you do not already know, that X is not equal to not X.
Sixth, (and again, the evidence will be the evidence, but) with all of Manafort's proven, nefarious ties to Russia why did Trump let him run his campaign for free?
Seventh, what was up with everyone close to him lying about Russian contacts? Shit rolls downhill, as they say.
Eighth, and all of those indicted???
Ninth, why does Trump roll over and let Putin tickle his belly at every possible turn?
Tenth, if collusion is unproven, but there's been obstruction of justice... is it within the realm of reason that the obstruction could have prevented potential collusion from being discovered? Sure, that's why obstruction is a big deal. If the conclusion is no collusion, we need to be able to trust it, and we can only trust it through transparency.
There is clearly something going on here, but what??? I don't know but I'm excited to find out.
March 26, 2019
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The president just backhandedly called for Ryan to be replaced as Speaker of the House. It's a very real possibility, and if I'd be Ryan right now I'd be considering two options- be replaced and tempt falling into political obscurity, or step up investigations on Russian collusion and possibly become president... the hero who rescued his own party (and country) from a tyrrant.
March 26, 2017
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A detail that's been lost in the weekend healthcare debate... sure, the House wouldn't vote for the bill, but even if they did, it wouldn't have passed the Senate. It would have been political suicide for a handful of senators to pull Medicare and healthcare subsidies from their poor constituents who were relying on them.
March 26, 2017
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The president said that Obamacare will implode. He also said it will explode. Maybe it will split the difference and remain the same.
March 26, 2017
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"Piece of poop, piece of pee."
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02weQ8xCxv293yakR2F5x7sFVDwty8BunRM5LrYHJsKasqAAXAtLhVvriGxYYKvY9Xl&id=741063511&mibextid=irwG9G
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Zuzy, trying to blend in.
March 26, 2016
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Today would have been Joseph Campbell's 110th birthday. Star Wars wouldn't exist without him. His hours of conversation with Bill Moyers on the subject of mythology brought clarity and a voice to wordless thoughts I'd seemingly had my whole life.
March 26, 2014
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My current favorite logical fallacy is "the fallacy fallacy"- just because an argument is unsound does not necessarily make the conclusion untrue. Who's with me on this???
March 26, 2014
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A political cartoon in the Boston Gazette coined the term "gerrymander" on this day in 1812.
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The Book of Mormon was published in Palmyra, New York. You can't say this about almany 200-year-old books, but it is as true today as it was then.
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The Biological Weapons Convention went into force on this day in 1975.
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Today is the birthday of Joseph Campbell, born in 1904. He spent his life studying mythology and comparative religion, and has an interesting definition of God:
"God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery."
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One year to the day later, Viktor Frankl was born. From Man's Search For Meaning:
"Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."
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Tennessee Williams was born on this day in 1911. From Streetcar Named Desire:
"If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels."
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Born on this day in 1936 in Naperville, Illinois, Harry Kalas- "Swing, and a long drive."
Some things are not so complicated.
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Hungarian-Polish mathematician Paul Erdős was born on this day in 1913. The professor of mine was a student of his. He said something about him that always stuck with me- he was a theoretical genius I couldn't actually do anything himself. He could write a hundred page paper on the physics of buttering a piece of bread, but in practice he would talk other people into doing it for him.
Some uncomplicated things can be made very complicated.
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Todd Barry was born on this day in 1964. A quote from his website:
"That guy who manages the vegetarian restaurant got a pretty severe haircut."
— Todd Barry, on the vegetarian restaurant manager’s new haircut.
Tons more in the addendum.
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Michael Imperioli was born on this day in 1966. With how good he was at playing Christopher Moltisanti, people forget that he wrote some of the Sopranos episodes, including one of the greatest TV episodes of all time, The Pine Barrens.
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Other notable birthdays- Sandra Day O'Connor (1930), Leonard Nimoy (1931), The Terrible Twosome, James Caan and Nancy Pelosi (1940), Bob Woodward (1943), Martin Short (1950), Jennifer Grey (1960)
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And it's my dad's birthday, born in 1949. I should call him...
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Also on this day, in 1997, the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. These were 39 intelligent people, just totally lost in what cult experts call one of the most stringent cult programs ever devised. They just simply had no way to break loose. Devastating.
They had a rule against any sexual thought, and any time one popped up (so to speak) they had to report it and it was then analyzed (so to speak.) One member who left the cult for good was named Dick Joslyn. I'll just let that hang there (so to speak.)
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Also born on this day, in 1941, biologist and champion of rational thought, Richard Dawkins. He could have been talking about Heaven's Gate when he said, "Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness."
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The Heaven's Gate cult members genuinely thought they were going to paradise. Dawkins' buddy Hitchens would have this to say:
"Do I think I'm going to paradise? Of course not. I wouldn't go if I was asked. I don't want to live in some fucking celestial North Korea for one thing. Where all I get to do is praise the dear leader from dawn to dusk."
Their idea of paradise was my version of hell, look at those videotapes. I do remember seeing the Halle-Bopp comet every night though, and I'll admit that one could legitimately see it as a symbol of transcendence and mystery.
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On this day in 1969, John Kennedy Toole took his own life. He was the author of Confederacy of Dunces, which wasn't published until 1980. In it, he wrote, "My life is a rather grim one. One day I shall perhaps describe it to you in great detail."
Incidentally, a perfectly contradictory conviction was written by Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow. I'd like it to be read at my funeral:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
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Speaking of eulogies, BoJack Horseman's eulogy of his mom in the Free Churros episode might be remembered hundreds of years in the future as a perfect episode of TV. Shakespeare could have written it. Heck, God could have written it!
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Walt Whitman left us on this date in 1892.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
I've always simultaneously loved and hated that quote, which makes sense.
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Poet, Jim Harrison, left us on this day in 2016.
God I am cold and want to go to asleep for a long time and only wake up when the sun shines and the dogs laugh.
I passed away in my sleep from general grief and a seven-year hangover. Fat angels wrapped me in traditional mauve.
A local indian maiden of sixteen told the judge to go fuck himself, got thirty days, died of appendicitis in jail.
I molded all the hashish to look like deer & rabbit turds and spread them in the woods for rest stops when I walk.
Please consider the case closed. Otis Redding died in a firestorm and we want to put him together again somehow.
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Gregory Corso- "If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved."
He joined us on this day in 1930.
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Diana Ross was born on this day in 1944. She saying I will survive at a super bowl halftime show and flew out of the place on helicopter. We have to admit, if she plunged to her death, that would have been a hilarious way to die.
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Other notable deathdays- Ludwig van Beethoven (1827), Max Ophüls (1957)
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This is one of the best collections of before and after photos!
http://www.irinawerning.com/back-to-the-fut/back-to-the-future/
March 26, 2011
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The Onion- I Feel Very Strongly About The Issue Of Same Sex Marriage Because I Have A Gay Son
"Did it make sense to deny loving, consenting gay couples, like my son and his life partner, a liberty that other couples enjoy, and which, if exercised, wouldn’t harm anyone? Would gay marriage actually compromise the sanctity of an institution that I believed to be the bedrock of society? Knowing that my son was gay forced me to evaluate the issue from a different angle—not simply as a Supreme Being, but that of a concerned father who simply wants His children to have the same opportunities for health and happiness that He’s enjoyed."- God
http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-feel-very-strongly-about-the-issue-of-same-sex-m,31820/
March 26, 2013
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IFLScience- What Makes Us Conscious?
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/what-makes-us-conscious
March 26, 2016
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TED Talk- Taryn Simon, Photographs of secret sites
Ben Kreider shared a link.
Great talk...leaves you feeling like every one of her pics could almost be a full documentary subject.
http://www.ted.com/talks/taryn_simon_photographs_secret_sites
March 26, 2016
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Daily Kos- Dem Rep Calls Out Trump's Tweet Hoping Obamacare Will 'Explode' As Unconstitutional—And Evil.
So here's this guy wishing for our health care system to fail. Instead, how about we fix it in a way that drops the price per person and doesn't give 24 million the boot? (Single-payer.)
If our president wishes for our health care system to fail, is it cool for us to wish for him to fail? As with all moral questions, we should wish for the outcome that minimizes suffering and maximizes flourishing.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/3/25/1647327/-Dem-Rep-Calls-Out-Trump-s-Tweet-Hoping-Obamacare-Will-Explode-As-Unconstitutional-And-Evil
March 26, 2017
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John Lurie on Basquiat:
Jean Michel Basquiat and I were very stoned and were slow motion boxing each other. I stepped backwards into a tray of paint and then onto the painting on the floor. He just laughed. But years later, the painting I had stepped on was at the Whitney with my footprint still there. I reached forward to show someone and the guard came rushing forward - "MOVE AWAY FROM THE PAINTING!"
"But, I already stepped on it."
The full story is even better, on Painting With John, s2e4.
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This is not something I normally think, but that is one cute picture!
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Errol Morris said in an interview that he once read a National Enquirer article titled, How To Look Smart When You're Really Very Stupid.
"I've tried to follow several of the recommendations: drink a lot of coffee, carry around a book with you wherever you go, and smile and nod as often as possible. These suggestions have been invaluable."
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"This is why I don't swim in the ocean."
https://www.facebook.com/reel/886118115915244?mibextid=9drbnH&s=yWDuG2&fs=e
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Vivian Maier
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Flannery O'Connor- "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."
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Mark Twain- “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”
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Marcus Aurelius- “Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.”
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Honore de Balzac- "Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives."
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Dumb Short Joke of the Day:
What's the difference between a hippo and a zippo?
One is really heavy, and the other is a little lighter.
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