Laughter, Zen, Space, Truth, Death, Love, Freaks, Silence, Eternity, and Wabi-Sabi

Thomas Paine, Essay on Dreams:

"When we behold the mighty universe that surrounds us, and dart our contemplation into the eternity of space, filled with innumerable orbs, revolving in eternal harmony, how paltry must the tales of the Old and New Testaments, profanely called the word of God, appear to thoughtful man! The stupendous wisdom and unerring order that reign and govern throughout this wondrous whole, and call us to reflection, put to shame the Bible!"

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Herzog dictum- "The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot."

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John Steinbeck, Grapes if Wrath- “Ever’body’s askin’ that. ‘What we comin’ to?’ Seems to me we don’t never come to nothin’. Always on the way.” 

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Robert McNamara, recounting the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis:

"My deputy and I brought the Five Chiefs over and we sat down with Kennedy, and he said, "Gentlemen, we won. I don't want you ever to say it, but you know we won, I know we won." LeMay said, "Won hell... we lost... we should go in and... wipe 'em out today."

Then McNamara laughs.

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I think Trump will easily beat Biden, and I think Trump knows that he will easily beat Biden, so why is he attacking Biden to make him look even weaker? That raises the likelihood of Democrats replacing him, which is the outcome Trump doesn't want. 

There's a simple answer. It's because Trump is stupid, acts strictly on impulse, and enjoys attacking people for its own sake... you know, universally acknowledged qualities of great leadership.

July 12, 2024

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What is it with all the pictures of Trump this weekend that make me think he's more handsome than I've ever seen him? Maybe it's that I can only see 20% of his face, or maybe it's the extraordinary leadership abilities exuding from him. You know, the leadership abilities that finally got him to follow all 330 million of us. Wait... as a world leader, he waited to follow all 7.8 billion of us. Job well done, better late than never.

July 12, 2020

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Thoreau's birthday- "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." He was born on this day in 1817.

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Is it worth killing these lantern flies? Perhaps our best efforts could only kill a billionth of them and we'll only collectively save a few branches of some shrub.

July 12, 2020

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It's disheartening to go to Lowe's and Giant and see these maskless wonders who don't care about spreading their germs to others. On the other hand, it's oddly comforting to be able to simply look at someone and know how stupid they are.

July 12, 2020

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A farmer left me a message saying that the driver who picked up from him Tuesday was not very good. He said that there was plenty of room, but he went up over this embankment and almost flipped the truck over on its side. I called the farmer and left him a message with the good news... that the driver quit yesterday anyway, that we would have had to fire him if he didn't, that it wasn't his first mistake, that I was glad to hear it was him and not someone else, and on and on and on. I hung up and to my horror I saw that I did not call that farmer. I called the driver instead!

July 12, 2018

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Stephen Pinker, on humor, from How the Mind Works: 

Not only is convivial humor not particularly aggressive; it's not particularly funny. Robert Provine did something that no one in the two-thousand-year history of pontificating about humor had ever thought to do: he went out to see what makes people laugh. He had his assistants hang out on the college campus near groups of people in conversation and surreptitiously note what triggered their laughter. What did he find? A typical laugh line was, “I'll see you guys later,” or “What is that supposed to mean:?!” As they say, you had to be there. Only about ten to twenty percent of the episodes could be classified as humorous, and then only by the most indulgent standards. The funniest lines in twelve hundred examples were, “You don't have to drink; just buy us drinks,” “Do you date within your species?” and “Are you working here or just trying to look busy?” Provine notes, “The frequent laughter heard at crowded social gatherings is not due to a furious rate of joke telling by guests. Most pre-laugh dialogue is like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.”

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Gabba gabba, Freaks director Tod Browning, was born on this day in 1880.

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Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was born on this day in 1895. "Laughter is the language of the soul."

I read about 50 quotes to get to that one, and they were all from sappy love poems.

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Milton Berle was born on this day in 1908. I'm not sure if he has one joke that's still funny. If he does, let me know what it is. 

"Laughter is an instant vacation."

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Bill Cosby was born on this day in 1937, and will certainly be dead soon. Norm Macdonald recounts Patton Oswald reflecting on Bill Cosby and saying the bad thing about it was the hypocrisy. Norm disagrees. Norm thinks that the thing that was wrong with Bill Cosby was the raping.

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Richard Simmons was born on this day in 1948.

John Waters- "Everyone has limits. Even Divine had limits. The first time he met Richard Simmons, he felt homophobic."

Norm MacDonald- “After months of speculation, the sitcom star Ellen DeGeneres admitted that yes, she’s gay. Inspired by her courage, today, diet-guru Richard Simmons admitted that he is really, really, really, really gay.”

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Secular saint, Malala Yousafzai, was born on this day in 1997.

"We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced."

Much depth in that quote. It's simultaneously a call to action and a warning.

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$10 dumbass Alexander Hamilton died on this day in 1804, a victim of stupidity.

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Zen author, D. T. Suzuki, left us, in a sense, on this day in 1966. From An Introduction to Zen Buddhism:

"The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand ; I take a book from the other side of the desk ; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighbouring wood: — in all these I am practising Zen, I am living Zen. No wordy discussions is necessary, nor any explanation. I do not know why — and there is no need of explaining, but when the sun rises the whole world dances with joy and everybody’s heart is filled with bliss. If Zen is at all conceivable, it must be taken hold of here."

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The Bisbee Deportation occured on this day in 1917, as vigilantes kidnap and deport nearly 1,300 striking miners and others from Bisbee, Arizona.

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Other notable birthdays- Julius Caesar (100 BC), Buckminster Fuller (1895), Joe DeRita (1909)

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Onion headline- Elderly Man Can’t Wait For Senility To Erase Lifetime Of Regretful Memories

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The Most Elaborate Final Meals In Death Row History, by Weird History

Robert Dale Conklin, executed on this day in 2005 at age 44.

Crime: While on parole for armed robbery, he killed a man by sticking a screwdriver in his ear and twisting it around. He then dissected the body and put select parts of it down the garbage disposal.

Last Meal: Filet mignon wrapped in bacon, de-veined shrimp sauteed in garlic butter with lemon, a baked potato with butter, sour cream, chives, and real bacon bits, corn on the cob, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, French bread with butter, goat cheese, cantaloupe, apple pie with vanilla bean ice cream, and an iced tea.

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How have I never heard of this before?

Wabi-Sabi: In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete." It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印 sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常 mujō), suffering (苦 ku) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空 kū).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

July 12, 2019

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Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past- "There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man."

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Faulkner- "Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest."

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Vladimir Nabokov- "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."

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Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms- "No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."

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Bertrand Russell- "Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

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E.B. White- "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

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Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children- "We all owe death a life."

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