The Graveyard Statue of the Little Girl

Perhaps my favorite 10 seconds from Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It goes through my head all the time:

Tracy Morgan: 

Richard Pryor... mother's a prostitute, father's a pimp, grandmother's a madam. How does he go from that to being one the funniest motherfuckers on the planet?

Seinfeld: 

I think those are advantages.

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Johnny Cash and June Carter met for the first time on this day in 1956, backstage during his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry.

June later reflected- "I can’t remember anything else we talked about, except his eyes."

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I interviewed a guy yesterday who said that he is really into reading. I asked him what he likes to read. Well... he had the last line of Ulysses tattooed on his forearm, his favorite book. Has there ever been a better answer to an interview question?

July 7, 2023

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Jeffrey Epstein was finally charged for sex trafficking of minors. Look at the comments of any post and you'll see two types... "He is good buddies with Trump" and some variation of, "He has close ties with the Clinton Foundation." He is a billionaire financier, so he will know both Trump and the Clintons. No crime there, but let's all admit at the outset that if there's proof that either of them used that relationship to participate in any way with his sex trafficking, we need to send them to the slammer. 

Why do I get the feeling we won't be able to find 19 Republican Senators who agree with that argument?

July 7, 2019

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Cousins.

July 7, 2019

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Perhaps the Rosebud of this whole Trump-separating-families thing, is that Trump's own parents separated themselves from him when they sent him away to military school.

July 7, 2018

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Did you ever notice that the "Deep State" is something fomented by the Shallow State?

July 7, 2018

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Great news, the economy gained jobs again for the 92nd straight month. I don't know how Trump does it!

July 7, 2018

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Wow! Sarah Silverman:

"When I woke up 5 days later I didn't remember anything. I thanked everyone at the ICU for my life, went home, and then slowly as the opiates faded away, remembered the trauma of the surgery & spent the first two days home kind of free-falling from the meds / lack of meds and the paralyzing realization that nothing matters. Luckily that was followed by the motivating revelation that nothing matters."

July 7, 2016

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Three fans of My Neighbor Totoro.

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My refrigerator stopped working. 

My first thought: "Crap, that's going to cost a lot of money!" 

Emma's first thought: "We get to eat all the ice cream!"

July 7, 2014

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I just saw a kid standing by the side of the road with two adults sitting behind him. He was holding a blackboard that read "I AM DISRESPECTFUL OF MY PARENTS." I have a suspicion there are two sides to that story.

July 7, 2014

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Here's a Thoreau expression I just discovered- "Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed."

July 7, 2013

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We just found a FOOSBALL COFFEE TABLE at a yard sale and Emma won't let me buy it!

July 7, 2012

Postscript- a tragedy.

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Just caught myself eating yogurt and watching a cat take a crap, as if it was entertainment.

July 7, 2012

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Sliced bread was sold for the first time on this day in 1928, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri. That means that two of my grandparents were older than sliced bread.

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Howard Hughes nearly died on this day in 1946 when his XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft prototype crashed in a Beverly Hills neighborhood.

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On this day in 1953, Che Guevara set out on a motorcycle trip that would take him through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

"I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be."

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On this day in 1959, Venus occulted the star Regulus, a rare event that was used to determine the diameter of Venus, and the structure of the Venusian atmosphere.

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Boris Becker won Wimbledon on this day in 1985, at age 17.

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Austrian composer, Gustav Mahler, joined us on this day in 1860.

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."

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Satchel Paige was born on this day in 1906.

"I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation."

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Robert Heinlein joined us on this day in 1907. 

"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh."

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Ringo Starr was born on this day in 1940. 

"I'd like to end up sort of unforgettable."

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Shelley Duvall was born on this day in 1949. Was Kubrick's treatment of her in The Shining worth the performance it elicited? I think so. Of course, I'm not her. If I remember right, she thinks so too.

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Jim Gaffigan was born on this day in 1966. When the pope visited philadelphia, Jim Gaffigan opened for him. 

"I was watching the Animal Planet. Did you know that the male seahorse has the baby? Why don't they just call that one the female?"

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Arthur Conan Doyle left us on this day in 1930. "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

I put this into practice once. I visited a haunted graveyard in Chicago, and then later that night in total darkness, I was driving across northern Indiana and I distinctly felt something hit the side of my leg. It felt exactly like someone sitting in the backseat reaching up and patting my leg. I was petrified, I refuse to look in the rear of your mirror, imagine I would see that little girl's statue, the one that supposedly gets out of the glass case and wonders around the graveyard. Did she get into my car? I wasn't eager to find out. I thought and thought. I ruled out ghosts pretty quick. But there was no other possible solution. Nothing could have fallen over that would have done it. It's not like there was anything spring loaded in the car. Then it hit me. The only possible solution was that one of the stems of the glasses I had in a glass case above the passenger side sun visor, must have broken, fallen off, bounced just right on the seat next to me, and hit me inside of the leg. I reached up and checked. That was what happened!

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The adorable Veronica Lake left us on this day in 1973 at the age of 50.

In 2004, some of her ashes were reportedly found in a New York antique store. Imagine that.

Ethereal.

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The lawyer and civil rights activist, William Kunstler, was born on this day in 1919. He was known for defending the Chicago Seven, Revolutionary Communist Party, Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters, and the American Indian Movement. I swear he turned up in every single documentary I watched between 2005 and 2015. He crosses my mind a lot. If he were around today defending anarchists in court, he'd be defending the Republican party.

"I only defend those whose goals I share. I'm not a lawyer for hire. I only defend those I love."

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I've been playing racquetball with a guy for 7 years and tonight he reminded me of the first time he saw me play. He noticed me beating somebody at the racquetball league and asked the director about me. She said, "That's Ben. He doesn't lose." He knew then that I was his competition. A few months later he was beating me regularly. Haha, I love that. 

July 7, 2022

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Excellent short letter on the free exchange of ideas- a bedrock foundation of enlightenment principles. Signed by quite a few respectable public intellectuals. In part:

"The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty."

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

July 7, 2020

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Cacodemonomania- The pathological belief that one is inhabited by an evil spirit.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters- “I have a new plan : to go mad”

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Vladimir Nabokov- "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

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Hemingway- "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."

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Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children- "Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."

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Weisel- "There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you."

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Robert McNamara- "I'm not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature any time soon. It isn't that we aren't rational. We are rational. But reason has limits. There's a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love: "We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration, we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time." Now that's in a sense where I'm beginning to be.

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Addendum 

William Kunstler, again:

“And that’s the terrible myth of organized society, that everything that’s done through the established system is legal and that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life, and an order to a system, and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted, has gotten all that is due him. And therefore society can turn its conscience off, and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials, is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them, have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich? Legal. Sacco Vanzetti? Quite legal. The Haymarket defendants? Legal. The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where black men were condemned to death? All legal. Jesus? Legal. Socrates? Legal. And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretense.”