Fury At Raisins, and Other Things

On this day in 1993, the 51-day FBI siege of the Branch Davidian building in Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out, killing 76, including 18 children.

Chris Whitcomb, Waco Hostage Rescue Team- "I got up out of Sierra 2 and walked about 307 yards to the burning pile of embers, and there was a rain of paper that had burned, and it had floated up into the thermals of the heat, and there were individual pages of bibles, it was raining bible pages into these embers, and the embers were 1.6 million rounds of rifle ammo cooking off, so they were popping off everywhere you go, and skulls were everywhere and half-burned bodies. I mean it was a apocalyptic carnage. I don't know what hell looks like... maybe that."

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Steven Wright- "I've been dating a red head. She doesn't have any hair, just a red head."

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On this day in 1987, the first appearance of The Simpsons, on Tracy Ullman. All those shorts and early seasons are as funny as Billy Crystal.

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Meet the Press opened with a protester saying, "It's not the government's job to tell us what to do." Interesting take on our form of government! "Trump 2020: No Rules!"

You can see why these people are so mixed up, with the Dear Leader saying protesters should rise up against his own guidelines, that he deserves all the credit while the governors bear all the responsibility, that 2+2=5. 

Try to go through normal life believing one thing and the opposite and see how that works out. See if you can even fill your coffee mug with it upside down. Or stand on your head and try to drink it. Also, it's not coffee, it's toilet water.

April 19, 2020

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These freedom protesters pushing for the right to endanger others... they should have to wear some sort of badge of shame so friends, family and co-workers know to stay 20 feet away instead of the normal 6. I know, how about a red hat?

April 19, 2020

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Why do we eat something up but drink something down? 

 For that matter, why do we chomp something down but slurp something up?

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Neoconservative social commentator Irving Kristol: "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded -- or even if it suspects -- that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."

That's pessimistic but I suspect that's true, but a person CAN still lead a meaningful life in a meaningless universe. Whether or not there is meaning outside of us, there is absolutely meaning inside us. And after all, there's no example outside meaning couldn't be an internal construct anyway, we have no way of knowing the external until it becomes internal.

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Every once is a while I think, "God damn it, Leibniz was right! This is indeed the best of all possible worlds!" Then I come to my senses, of course.

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Here's a tidbit I picked up from Stephen Pinker's, The Blank Slate. There are 5 major ways our personalities differ- we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected. There are 18,000 adjectives tied to personality and they almost all fall in one of those five categories. And here's the thing- each of those five traits are heritable, our genes play a big part in the creation of our personality. 

It makes you wonder to what extent we are responsible for these so-called self-creations we call ourselves.

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I handed Gretel a raisin and she got pissed and threw it on the floor. Then she stepped on it out of spite. It stuck to her foot so she thrashed around and yelled. Next she picked it off and ate it before I could get it from her. She's working through some stuff.

April 19, 2015

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Don Draper's new lady, the waitress... pretty mysterious huh? Her name is Diana (as in the goddess of love and beauty) and her nickname is Di (as in death.) Yes, pretty mysterious indeed...

April 19, 2015

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Nice day out there, for dog and human alike.

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A married couple no longer comes to the LA Fitness racquetball league... and I just found out they are multi-millionaires and built a court at their house. And that, ladies and gentlemen, marked the first time in years that I've felt the emotion of jealousy! 

Kind of sad though... thinking about them alone in their mansion, playing all by themselves. And it gets worse, apparently they made all their money on pop-up ads. What's the opposite of jealousy?

April 19, 2014

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I now have firsthand experience as to why most people don't drive around with their dog on their lap. It's because sometimes that dog will puke in their lap.

April 19, 2013

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Mae West was sentenced to ten days in jail on this day in 1927, for obscenity. I think about things like that, when people think that things are getting worse. We are better off in so many ways that we don't even realize.

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Charles Manson was sentenced to death on this day in 1971, not for murder, but for conspiracy in the Tate–LaBianca murders. All those losers who hold him up as some sort of folk idol, did they forget that his intent was to start a race war?

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Timothy McVeigh bombed The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on this day in 1995, killing 168 people including 19 children. I drove through Oklahoma City in the middle of the night a couple months later, before it was razed, but I didn't stop to see it. Wish I would have, would have made it more real.

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If I catch 10 seconds of the documentary on Charles Manson, Jonestown, Waco, the Oklahoma City Bombing, of Heaven's Gate, I'll be there until the bitter end, regardless of length. I don't know what it is. It is something to do with trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

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Jayne Mansfield was born on this day in 1933. Unless my calculator is broken, that makes her about 6 weeks younger than my grandma. 

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James Franco was born on this day in 1978. I just told the joke yesterday, but seems like this is a good reason to tell it again. At the roast of James Franco Sarah Silverman said, "Seth Rogen rolled a big fatty before the show. That was the only way to get Jonah Hill up on the stage." A perfect joke. I remember Jonah Hill totally cracking up. He gets it.

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The English priest and author, Thomas Bastard, was born on this day in 1618. That's all.

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Charles Darwin died on this day in 1882. It's not an understatement to say that the people who don't believe in evolution, simply don't understand even a basic outline of what it is.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

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Ugh, Daniel Dennett died today, the same date as Darwin, 142 years later. From Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

"If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things."

I've always loved this conversation between these four. Two are now gone.

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Why is it unnecessary to have faith in gravity, Pearl Harbor, and the Lincoln Assassination? Because of all the proof! When you have proof you don't need faith. Therefore, faith is belief in the absence of proof, antithetical to reason. To put it another way- faith is belief in something there is no reason to believe.

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If you listen to one 60's French pop song tonight...

https://youtu.be/XPkBMqehr5k

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B. J. Rosenmeyer, "Edgar Allan Poe walking in High Bridge" (1930 ca.)

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I'm back from Rwanda. You guys have no idea how fast this internet connection seems.

Desmond Dekker- Take Me Back To Africa

https://youtu.be/JaozOjFzWOg

April 19, 2010

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NPR Blogs- What David Lynch And Tylenol Can Tell You About The Brain

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/16/177475222/what-david-lynch-and-tylenol-can-tell-you-about-the-brain

April 19, 2013

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5 Things You Don't Know About Your Brain: A Conversation With Neuroscientist Rafael Yuste

1. The brain might not be as complicated as we think.

2. Human brains probably aren't that different from other brains.

3. We don't only use 10 percent of our brains.

4. The argument for a brain-mapping initiative isn't that different from the Human Genome Project.

5. No one understands how the brain works.

My favorite quote:

"Most people think of the brain as very complex, but I think we're just ignorant. It could be very simple."

Well THERE'S a complex thought, to try to comprehend with my simple brain.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/rafael-yuste-brain-mapping-tedmed-2013_n_3104426.html

April 19, 2013

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Wow, a knock-out!

RogerEbert.com- An amazing video: 1,001 Movies You Must See (Before You Die)

http://bit.ly/1lmdovY

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The Onion- Left Fielder Thinking About The Ways A Triple Play Could End With Him

http://onion.com/1G8lLVD

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Tides go in, tides go out, and appently O'Reilly's tide is going out. Just the way God intended.

https://youtu.be/HABNe7_D22k

April 19, 2017

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What do we do about North Korea? Noam Chomsky has an idea, look at the historic record.

http://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/extraordinarily_dangerous_chomsky_on_how_trumps

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Stanley Kubrick's NY Street Pictures

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Thomas Aquinas- "The things that we love tell us what we are."

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Joseph Heller- “I spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years. I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch-22. I couldn't imagine what Americans did at night when they weren't writing novels."

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Graham Greene- "We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts."

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Marlon Brando, interview with James Grissom- "There was no mystery to James Dean. I mean he was talented and he was beautiful and he was charismatic, and those were all great gifts we got to keep unwrapping and enjoying, and the tragedy is we only had a short time to do that. A brief but beautiful Christmas morning."

Photo by Roy Schatt

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Confucius- "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."

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John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters- "The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness."

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Charles Bukowski- “This birth thing. And this death thing. Each one had it's turn. We entered alone and we left alone. And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives. An incomparable sadness descended up on me. Seeing all that life that must die. Seeing all that life that would first turn to hate, to dementia, to neuroses, to stupidity, to fear, to murder, to nothing - nothing in life and nothing in death.” 

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Daily Stoic:

Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor, observed three universal facts about human existence. He said, “There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die.” It is this “Tragic Triad” that defines every one of our lives, does it not? That might seem like reason for despair. Suffering, failure and death.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​What Frankl found was that the Tragic Triad was where meaning comes from. Without death, life just is. Without failure, there is no learning. Without suffering, there is no pleasure or purpose.

Instead of judging this reality or trying to cheat it, we should say instead, “Ok, if that’s how it is, I will try to make the most of my lot.” If we do this, we will find — though certainly not easily — that it is from failure, struggle and death that meaning is produced. It’s death that gives life urgency. It’s failure that teaches us lessons. It’s suffering that shows us who we are.

Don’t run from these three facts. Don’t label them tragic. Face them.

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Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion- "Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'."

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Sam Harris- "If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?"

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea- "If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company."

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Einstein- "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

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George Carlin- "It's important in life if you don't give a shit. It can help you a lot."

Addendum

Myspace Blog

April 19, 2008

I’m quite the transportation manager

Quarter of six yesterday morning one of my drivers called and said that the keys for his truck weren't hanging in the office where they were supposed to be. Fuck! I had fueled up his truck the day prior and figured I must have left the keys in my pocket rather than hanging them back up. I frantically searched my pockets- they weren't there. I searched them eight more times. Still not there. I figured I locked them in the truck. Some transportation manager I am.

I called Wallace back and told him to look around carefully to see if they fell off the thumb tack. He said they were nowhere. Red-faced and nearly in tears I called our truck rental place- turned out they had a spare. Whew! They asked me what happened to the spare they gave me. "It's still on the ring with the other one." Now they were red-faced and nearly in tears. Laughing. Some transportation manager I am.

I drove to Penske, picked up the key for truck 57 and pulled out. I remembered that my truck was number 57 this way- Wallace wouldn't know that 57 is not a prime number and I do, so 57 is my truck. I caught myself before I left the premises... I just got the wrong key. With my head in the mathematical clouds, I forgot the most important thing- 57 is my truck and I needed Wallace's key, 56! I went back in and exchanged it. They had another laugh. What qualified me for this job again?

I got to work and walked to the truck with Wallace, opened it, and the keys weren't there. Where the hell could they be? I told him- "You know they're going to turn up in the strangest place."

While I was with him I explained the new fuel card system. His response surprised me. He said, "I have some more bad news, I'm not going to be working for you guys anymore after today." He was offered more money, and decided that it was his last day.

"Well then I guess you won't need to know all that stuff I just told you about the fuel cards."

Originally he was up for my job and perhaps he was bitter about not getting it. He said he was tired of just driving- he wanted to use his brain more. So he quit with us to take another job driving… getting paid a little more an hour, but with no security. Come fall he'll be asking for his job back, but he won't be able to find it, just like those keys, that were hanging on the bulletin board, exactly where they were supposed to be.

By the way, I got Wallace's call & called Penske & picked up the key & drove to work & arrived only an hour after I awoke. Some transportation manager I am!