A Boston Cream Donut Dies, So We Can Live

Physicist Lawrence Krauss was born on this day in 1954:

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today."

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French grammarian, Dominique Bouhours, left us on this day in 1702. His last words: 

"I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is correct."

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My kids like really good films, but they weren't very impressed with La Dolce Vita. I told them it has a sea monster in it and they were initially very excited. What a world class opening! A helicopter carrying a giant statue of Jesus past ancient Roman ruins. That shadow on the building, wow. How could they not like that??? Yeah well. They would have been so disappointed when we got to the end to find out the sea monster was just a small manta ray or something.

Then I put on Seven Samurai and they both really liked it. It was bedtime though so I paused it about 15 minutes in. Neither of them were too happy to see that we still had three and a half hours to go!

Once neither of them could sleep at 11:00 p.m. or so and I put on Citizen Kane. I couldn't help it, I started telling them everything I knew about it like I was doing the DVD commentary or something. They got really into it! My intent was to get them to fall asleep.

I told them that tonight we will watch the first 5 minutes of The Shining and they each begged me to make it 10 minutes. Okay, 10 minutes, but not one second more.

https://youtu.be/OBNtYyqInik

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The reluctance of many Republican Senators to form a January 6th Commission tells the whole story, in and of itself. If no commission is formed, no commission needed to be formed. Everyone will know who is guilty, and who is complicit.

May 27, 2021

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Do truth-tellers mind being fact-checked?

May 27, 2020

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Abraham Lincoln- "You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry."

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I heard someone say that the NFL football players should not have politicized their job, which is to play football. That's cool, let's ban politics and nationalism then, and quit even playing The Star Spangled Banner. Like anybody even knows what a rampart is anyway! Or let's play all the verses of it... it would be so long that nobody could even stand through the entire thing. Or people can choose to either stand out of respect for the good parts of America, or they can kneel out of respect for our ability to improve the bad parts. Both show respect for the country. There are a lot of win-win scenarios here.

May 27, 2018

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I just held my Boston cream donut back to Gretel in the car, she had asked for a small bite. As soon as she grabbed it, I saw a look in her eyes that I've only seen two places before- a Great White shark feeding frenzy, and Emma Eck at Arby's like 20 years ago. 

She did not take take a small bite. She did not take a big bite. She took two big bites back-to-back. I've only ever seen that type of behavior twice before- a Great White shark feeding frenzy, and Emma Eck at Arby's like 20 years ago.

May 27, 2018

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Idea for the North Korea summit. North Korea abandons their nuclear weapons, and in good faith we do too! That would make things safer right? 

Better include India and Pakistan too. 

And Israel of course. 

Forgot Russia, them too. 

That just leaves China to battle France and England... seems unlikely. Or one of the three of them to blow up everyone. I better keep thinking about this. 

Maybe Trump was right during the campaign... Saudi Arabia, South Korean Japan and others should pursue nuclear weapons. Where is that guy's Nobel Prize anywat? If he doesn't get it for this, he needs if for keeping the peace with his Space Force! What could go wrong? 

I'm just glad we have such a clear thinker in charge. When I get down I just remember:

"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

Trump has the best sentences.

May 27, 2018

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16 Cognitive Distortions, Positive Psychology, by Courtney Ackerman

6. Jumping to Conclusions – Fortune Telling

A sister distortion to mind reading, fortune telling refers to the tendency to make conclusions and predictions based on little to no evidence and holding them as gospel truth.

One example of fortune-telling is a young, single woman predicting that she will never find love or have a committed and happy relationship based only on the fact that she has not found it yet. There is simply no way for her to know how her life will turn out, but she sees this prediction as fact rather than one of several possible outcomes.

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My first day in society with a bloody gash in my head didn't go well. People kept looking at me like... well, like I had a bloody gash in my head. I USED TO BE ONE OF YOU!!! (By the way, does anybody know a good home remedy for a bloody gash in one's head

May 27, 2009

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Bumper sticker idea- WATCH OUT FOR THE IDIOT BEHIND ME

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Thanks to my baloney-skin bottom work shoes, I slipped on the wobbly, wooden bridge at the playground while holding Zuzu, and I split my boxers (the ones that have the pictures of shuttlecocks on them.)*

*I like to say at least one sentence a day that nobody has ever said before.**

**Fun fact- there are so many possible sentences that almost every sentence hasn't been said before. Case in point, if you google, "I like to say at least one sentence a day that nobody has ever said before," you'll find no hits.

May 27, 2017

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Just heard a thing about altruism on This American Life. Psychopaths have zero altruism, and a significant decrease in amygdala to frontal lobe interaction (the animal instinct part, to the higher functioning part.) They tested people who have the most altruism, those who donated kidneys to strangers, and guess what... significant increase in activity over a control group, and an 8% bigger amygdala. Within that spectrum (psychopath at zero, kidney donater at 100), I'm curious to know where supporters of the $700 billion cut to Medicaid fall.

May 27, 2017

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Here's the good thing about buying a donut for your child- the bigger bite you take, the healthier it is for them.

May 27, 2017

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I told Emma that I got life insurance, so if I die after Thursday she'll be $100k richer. Her response, "That would actually be great." And then she qualified it somehow but I wasn't listening anymore.

May 27, 2017

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Terrible news, we lost one of the good ones today. Sam was the first cat I ever liked, perhaps my best friend while Emma was in Rwanda. The only bad thing he ever did was hiss in a dying cat's face, and now they are underground buddies until the earth gets swallowed up by the sun...or someone does some serious backyard gardening. We'll miss him, but we'll remember him forever. And if we happen to forget him, his endless fur will be turning up forever to remind us of him.

May 27, 2016

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This made my head spin.

Michael Shermer- "Is it Islamophobia to condemn Islamic group that endorses wife beating? As long as we're not also condemning Muslims who do not agree?"

May 27, 2016

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Today a farmer told me he'd be done with something in "one jiffy." I have to start using that.

May 27, 2013

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There should be more dirty tongue twisters. I thought of a good one. It's about ducks.

May 27, 2011

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Kissinger turns 100 today.

For your reference...

http://www.alternet.org/world/top-10-most-inhuman-henry-kissinger-quotes

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McGurk Effect- fa and ba are heard with the same video other person mouthing each one, our brains make us hear what they are seeing. Look it up on YouTube. It's absolutely bizarre. Our brains are so stupid they can't even understand themselves.

https://youtu.be/G-lN8vWm3m0

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The Guardian- Donald Trump's Europe Tour Leaves Leaders Strangely Shaken

"Demonstrating only a vague sense that he knew what was going on..."

He said that NATO money has been rolling in after his speech. Into where? They are to invest a certain amount of GDP into their own militaries. Not that lies matter to Trump, who also happens to be the fattest and objectively ugliest world leader in history.

May 27, 2017

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Washington Post headline from this day in 2017:

Trump said he would ‘take out’ the families of ISIS fighters. Did an airstrike in Syria do just that?

How cautious do you thing this guy is with the bombs? Maybe cautious enough to ensure he's killing the families of terrorists...after all, he's fulfilling a campaign promise. (And thus certain to help create more than he's killing.)

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http://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-son-speaks-out-by-moses-farrow.html

This Moses Farrow blog entry is critical reading for an informed opinion on Woody Allen. Anyone who hasn't read it but has an opinion, well they have a worthless opinion.

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"Vaccination was (and by some still is) objected to as “unnatural.” But there is no consistency in such objections, for no one supposes that a broken bone can be mended by “natural” behavior. Eating cooked food is “unnatural”; so is heating our houses. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tse, whose traditional date is about 600 B.C., objected to roads and bridges and boats as unnatural, and in his disgust at such mechanistic devices left China and went to live among the Western barbarians. Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent." -Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity

From the same book:

"The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system."

And...

"It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve."

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The Onion- NRA Convention Applauds As Gunman Massacres Entire Crowd

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The German battleship Bismarck sunk on this day in 1941, killing almost 2,100 men.

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Mariners third baseman, and quite possibly this smartest man alive, Lenny Randle, attempted to blow a baseball foul on this day in 1981.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1838951146288755

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Terrence Malick's Tree of Life was released on this date in 2011.

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Wild West folk hero, Wild Bill Hickok, was born on this day in 1837, approximately 39 years before getting gunned down during a poker game. He was a wagon master, scout, actor, drover, spy, gambler, soldier, scout, showman, and lawman. He lived a life!

"Harness mules and oxen, but give a horse a chance to run." That advice is perfectly useless to me.

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Hubert Humphrey was born on this day in 1911.

"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."

Not too many baby Huberts running around these days.

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The inventor of Edward Scissorhands and art historian, Vincent Price, was born on this day in 1911. My friend Kenneth Kendall used to say that Vincent Price was the only person in Hollywood who could recognize good art. You might also know him from this:

"Darkness falls across the land

The midnight hour is close at hand

Creatures crawl in search of blood

To terrorize y’all’s neighborhood

And whosoever shall be found

Without the soul for getting down

Must stand and face the hounds of hell

And rot inside a corpse’s shell

The foulest stench is in the air

The funk of forty thousand years

And grizzly ghouls from every tomb

Are closing in to share your doom

And though you fight to stay alive

Your body starts to shiver

For no mere mortal can resist

The evil of the thriller”

(Maniacal laughter.)

Would you believe this is a picture of him as a young man?

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Short story write, John Cheever, was born on this day in 1912.

"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."

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War criminal and Nobel Prize laureate, Henry Kissinger, turns 100 today. Hitchens lamented the fact that he would not be around to write Kissinger's obituary. I'm not going to wish death on any person, but I do secretly wish that Hitchens did write that obituary and that I'm still alive when it is published.

May 27, 2023

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Singer-songwriter, Siouxsie Sioux, was born on this day in 1957.

"I love the ocean. I've always liked the blue, so tranquil and peaceful and gliding. And the fear of it."

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Rachel Carson was born in 1907. She wasn't just an environmentalist, she essentially created environmentalism.

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."

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Harlan Ellison join us on this day in 1934.

“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.”

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Are we simulated? 

https://youtu.be/tlTKTTt47WE

If 5 basic assumptions hold, then we likely are. Pretty big assumptions though.

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John Stuart Mill- “I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”

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Thai monk and philosopher, Buddhadasa, was born on this day in 1906.

“Hell was OK, until some wise guy went to heaven and came back.”

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Christopher Marlowe- "Hell is just a frame of mind." 

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The pastor, John Calvin, left us on this day in 1564.

"The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul."

Yes, and hell is a metaphor. This puts me in mind of this Joseph Campbell quote from The Power of Myth:

"Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible.

Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.

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Washington Post- Duterte jokes that his soldiers can rape women under martial law in the Philippines

I'm sure the president will be swift to denounce his buddy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/27/duterte-jokes-that-his-soldiers-can-rape-women-under-martial-law-in-the-philippines/

May 27, 2017

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Washington Post- Trump said he would ‘take out’ the families of ISIS fighters. Did an airstrike in Syria do just that?

How cautious do you thing this guy is with the bombs? Maybe cautious to ensure he's killing the families of terrorists...after all, he's fulfilling a campaign promise. (And thus certain to help create more than he's killing.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/27/trump-said-he-would-take-out-the-families-of-isis-fighters-did-an-airstrike-in-syria-do-just-that/

May 27, 2017

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William Ralph Inge, Idea of Progress (Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford, May 27, 1920)- "To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy."

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Albert Einstein- "The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth."

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Emerson- "The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."

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Henry David Thoreau- "Renew thyself completely each day."

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Dylan:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn

From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying

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Bertrand Russell, Russell on Religion:

Student question to Bertrand Russell: “If we take away the simple belief in God what will the poor uninformed populace have as the basis for their spiritual life?“

Bertrand Russell’s answer: “I am rather glad to have this question asked, since it illustrates one of the gravest defects of religion. It illustrates the fact that religion can be used to keep the poor contented with their lot, which, needless to say, is very convenient for the rich. Certainly I have no wish that those whose lives are unfortunate should be contented with an unfortunate life. It is not at all necessary that anybody should be poverty stricken. I see nothing but evil in false consolations about the hereafter to people who put up such economic and social injustices.“