Public Service/Disservice, The Wallenda Credo, and the Rest

Public Service Announcement: Kids are more likely to get killed in a car accident on the way to school than get kidnapped while walking to school.

Public Disservice Announcement: Yeah but how many get hit by cars while walking to school? And even when kidnapped they probably have at least an even shot at survival, right?

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In Istanbul, Turkey, they made a statue to honour a stray cat that used to sit in that spot, in that position, watching the passersby.

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I was just waiting in line at FedEx Express while the clerk did about 50 things at once- scanning stuff, moving stuff, ripping stuff off, putting stuff in different places, etc. Slightly out of breath she looked at me and ask how she did, proud of her expertise. I said it was impressive but that for all I knew she could have totally messed everything up. People don't like this kind of joke, but I'll never learn that lesson.

March 22, 2019

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I was just putting my ancestors' birthdates and death dates into a spreadsheet and I recognized one of my great-great-grandfather's death dates as the exact day that John Dillinger broke out of Crown Point. Incidentally that was the same day my grandma turned 1.

March 22, 2019

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It's going to go down, people. Wall Street Journal turning on Trump is the equivalent of Cronkite turning on the Vietnam War. From the article:

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The editorial also slams Trump for refusing to back off his administration's unsubstantiated allegations that President

"He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence," writes the editorial board. "Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims."

Translated: America’s Republican business establishment is finally seeing the light: Trump has to go.

March 22, 2017

Postscript- False hopes!

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Every time you hear someone use the Bible to say gay people can't get married, remember that Leviticus 20:13 says gay people must be killed! THAT'S the book that defines their moral code??? Let's all hope (and pray, if you like) that they are simply hypocrites!

March 22, 2015

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The Jamestown Massacre took place on this day in 1622, when Algonquians killed 347 English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia, a third of the colony's population.

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On this day in 1933, Nazi Germany opens its first concentration camp at Dachau, in 1963 the Beatles release their debut album Please Please Me, and in 1978 Karl Wallenda of The Flying Wallendas dies from... you guessed it... falling off a tight-rope suspended between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was a thing with that family. You know what he used to say? "The dead are gone, and the show must go on." 

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On this day in 1997, Comet Hale–Bopp reached its closest approach to Earth.

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William Shatner was born on this day in 1931. That's in the past, so his name is past tense. If you ever talk about him in the present tense, refer to him as William Shitner.

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Matthew Modine joined us on this day in 1959. His war cry will be with us forever 

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe left us on this day in 1832. "The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."

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Uncle Dave Macon left us on this day in 1952.

Bob Dylan had this to say about his song, Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy:

"This is a blast furnace of a song and it climbs all over you- smokes your meat and steals your brain-and it's free with the bottle. The granddaddy of all cooking shows- a real pot boiler. Greased-up, well oiled, slippery as can be and ready to sizzle."

https://youtu.be/4bkLnWN9WSA

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Oh boy.

The Marginalian- Asylum: Inside the Haunting World of 19th-Century Mental Hospitals

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/09/08/asylum-christopher-payne/

March 22, 2014

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Good for Monica Lewinsky- "Shame cannot survive empathy." Great TED Talk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/20/monica-lewinsky-ted-talk-2015_n_6910564.html

March 22, 2015

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Woody Allen, on how to handle Nazis.

https://youtu.be/ptxkVhDYog8

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Hunter S. Thompson- "Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that claim a God, and the only living things that behave like they haven't got one."

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Arthur C Clarke- "I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?"

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Roger Ebert, Go Gentle Into That Good Night- "I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.”

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Søren Kierkegaard- "The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it."

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We are

Born like this

Into this

Into these carefully mad wars

Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness

Into bars where people no longer speak to each other

Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

Born into this

Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die

Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty

Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed

Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

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Nick Cave on Bukowski:

I don’t like him. I just don’t. Not even a bit. No, not at all.

He once said, poetry was ‘like taking a shit, you smell it and then flush it away … writing is all about leaving behind as much a stink as possible’, which is all very well, except I think he was applying this to all poetry when he should have been applying it to his own poetry exclusively.

His poems are indeed do-do – silly shit – and cloyingly sentimental about his own place in a world he held in absolute contempt. His is a particular view of humanity as abjection which I find difficult to stomach, especially in poetry, beautiful poetry, lover of life and the world that I am.

Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude.

A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.

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Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire- "How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard."

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Dumb Short Jokes

I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with, but I've been tripping all day.

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