Everything Is Best

Phantom Galaxy, from the James Webb Telescope:

...

I often think about this Zen story:

Everything is Best

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

"Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer.

"Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best."

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

August 31, 2014

Postscript- I've told this to my kids a variety of ways tons of times over the years.

...

Zuzu fixed herself up for her birthday dinner.

August 31, 2021

...

Trump, August 31, 2018- "The want to raid Medicare to pay for socialism."

Ummm, about that...

...

The cream cheese on my bagel tasted funny... turns out it expired in March. I found another in the fridge but that also expired in March... but of 2016! I don't know how this happened but I do have a hazy memory of getting a fantastic deal on cream cheese.

August 31, 2017

...

Off to the butcher shop...

August 31, 2015

...

In the waiting room while they get Emma ready...I just had the idea to post a picture of the ugliest baby I could find in Google images and pretend it was ours. They were all way, way too ugly though. Pages and pages of them. You're welcome.

August 31, 2015

...

The anesthesiologist came in and said our doctor is delayed, "he's been a busy boy!" 

Emma- I hope he's not all worn out by the time he gets to me!

Doctor- Just getting in some extra practice.

Ben- Wait, why does he need extra practice???

The guy didn't know what hit him.

August 31, 2015

...

A nurse came in and asked Emma if she would mind if a student would be present for her c-section. Emma said she'd prefer not. I'm sure almost everyone says it would be fine, even those who would prefer not. You know what that means- Emma would be a bad Nazi. #reichofpassage

August 31, 2015

...

I asked Emma who she thinks this looks like. She got it, first try. Do I even need to tell you?

August 31, 2015

Answer: Karl Pilkington, obviously

...

Charles Bukowski- "I have been alone but seldom lonely. I have satisfied my thirst at the well of my self and that wine was good, the best I ever had, and tonight sitting staring into the dark I now finally understand the dark and the light and everything in between. Peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind. Cry not for me. Grieve not for me. Read what I've written then forget it all. Drink from the well of your self and begin again."

...

How 2 face your fears

https://youtu.be/6DeBfvPiFN0

...

William Saroyan joined us on this day in 1908.

"I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness."

...

Buddy Hackett was born on this day in 1924. Maybe his most famous joke:

A man is in a tragic accident and awakens in the hospital. The doctor and nurse are there and after the basic checks the doctor pulls up a chair.

"I have some terrible news, sir. You were in a terrible accident and you lost your penis."

The man is shocked, and starts to weep, but the doctor continues.

"Since you were unconscious, we did put a replacement in place for you. The only problem is that all we could find in such short notice was a baby elephant trunk."

The man checks it out and is satisfied with the replacement. He's released from the hospital a few days later and returns to his life.

A few weeks later he has his first date since the accident. He's having a nice conversation with his date when he hears the distinct sound of his pants zipper slowly opening. He blushes, hoping his date didn't hear the noise.

A few moment later the end of the baby elephant trunk that is his penis snakes over the edge of the table, snuffing and tapping, searching over the table cloth. His date notices and watches, eyes wide.

Suddenly, it grabs a dinner roll from his bread plate and whips back under the table.

"Was that your penis?" his date asks, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed.

Embarrassed, he can only nod and the color rises in his cheeks.

"That was amazing," she said, "Can it do it again?"

He shrugged, "Probably, but I don't know if my asshole can take another roll."

...

Henry Miller’s advice to a young writer:

“Write honestly even if poorly.

Throw your dictionary away.

If you can’t make words fuck, don’t masturbate them. 

Try to forget everything you learned in college.

First ask yourself if you have anything to say.

Don’t draw the pen unless you are ready for the kill.”

...

Go-Go's drummer, Gina Schock, joined us on this day in 1957. Without her, no focus, no drive, no Go-Go's.

...

Danish physician, Ole Worm, left us on this day in 1654. Can't say that I'd go to a doctor named Ole Worm.

...

Froggy from the Little Rascals left us on this day on this day in 1948 at the age of 16. I believe he was hit by a car while delivering newspapers.

...

John Ford left us on this day in 1973, approximately six months before I was born. He directed my favorite film, a perfect film, My Darling Clementine. 

Interviewer- "Do you think the early settlers would be proud of the America we have today?"

John Ford- "What does that have to do with films?"

Interviewer- "Some consider you one of the foremost, if not the foremost chronicler, of American history."

John Ford- "Hence the question?"

Interviewer- Hence the question."

John Ford- Well right now I think they:d be bloody well ashamed of us. It will get better."

.

William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways- "Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit."

...

Tom Seaver left us on this day in 2020. There's an argument that he could be the best picture ever. He once struck out 19 in a game, including ten consecutive to end the game. Can you believe that?

https://youtu.be/XRLelY2_T-o

...

Other notable birthdays- Eldridge Cleaver (1935), Frank Robinson (1935)

...

Another notable deathday- Diana, Princess of Wales (1997)

...

Spirited Away was released on this day in 2002. Here's an Atlantic article on its rewatchability.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/09/rewatching-spirited-away-hayao-miyazaki/671486

"After watching it in a Japanese cineplex, I stumbled out into a wall of late-summer heat, shaken by what I had just seen: the grotesque transformation of parents into pigs, the vomiting faceless monsters, the evolution of a sniveling girl to a brave heroine. The way a dragon could be a boy magician and also a river, how the story seemed held together by association and magic. Yet I also felt the compulsion to return to the cool dark, to plop down in the upholstered seat and submerge myself in the director Hayao Miyazaki’s world, taking it in again and again."

.

Miyazaki- "My process is thinking, thinking, and thinking- thinking about my stories for a long time.

...

Edward Abbey- “Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”

...

Simpsons:

Mobster- Johnny Tightlips, where'd they hit you?

Johnny Tightlips- I ain't sayin' nothin'.

Mobster- But what do I tell the doctor?

Johnny Tightlips- "Tell him to suck a lemon."

....

Ricky Gervais

Just went up to my mate who was sitting in his car. I pressed my face against the window pulling a stupid expression. He wound the window down. Wasn’t him. Bloke said “Are you Ricky Gervais?” I said “Sorry, I thought you were someone else” & ran away.

...

I was standing in line at the bank today and Billy Idol's Dancing with Myself came over the speakers. For a moment I was no longer in the bank at all, but at a 1992 rec dance. It almost confused me when I looked over and saw my kids sitting in chairs eating their lollipops. Wait, who am I?

August 31, 2019

...

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow- "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

...

From Roger Ebert's Blog- 100 Greatest Moments from the Movies

Buster Keaton standing perfectly still while the wall of a house falls over upon him; he is saved by being exactly placed for an open window.

The computer Hal 9000 reading lips, in "2001: a Space Odyssey."

The singing of "La Marseillaise" in "Casablanca."

...

H. P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales- "No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace."

...

Howard Zinn- "Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world."

...

Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot- "It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with."

...

Truman Capote- "I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."

...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities- "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

...

John Mulaney- "I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video, which is a very old-fashioned sentence."

...

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein- "Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."

...

William James- "We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition."

...

There once was a fellow named Glantz

Who on entering a toilet in france,

Was in such a heat

To paper the seat, 

He shit right into his pants.

Addendum 

Myspace Blog 

August 31, 2006

Here's a letter to the editor I sent to the sunday news today. Don't know if they'll print it.

Rumsfeld is on the ropes. He knows that he is in serious political trouble if the Democrats take back Congress this November and hes trying to undermine the debate on his wisdom and competence by evoking the Nazis. For anybody who hasnt heard, he accused the two-thirds of the country who think the war was a mistake of moral and intellectual deficiencies and said we would have been Nazi appeasers in the thirties.

If Rumsfeld wants to talk about the Nazis, lets talk about the Nazis. I was against the war from the beginning because it is a textbook example of the supreme war crime of aggression, as defined by the Nuremberg trials, that condemned the Nazis.

Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, were the originators of The Big Lie. To get people to go along with you, tell a lie so big that nobody would think you "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". The Big Lie of today is that our war on terror is making us safer. By any measure, except Bushs gut, its increasing terrorism and strengthening its roots.

Look at the US-backed Israeli war on Lebanon where we gave Israel diplomatic support and supplies to bomb hospitals, wheat silos and population centers. If Palestinians did it wed call it terrorism. Since we did it, we call it fighting terrorism... even though a thousand civilians died. There are many more non-controversial examples such as our illegal use of cluster bombs in civilian areas in Iraq, which the International Red Cross has condemned.

The direct and indirect killing of Palestinian civilians, particularly women and children, not only causes terrorism, it is terrorism. One way to decrease terrorism in the world would be to stop participating in it. Rumsfeld would be hard-pressed to make it easier for al Qaeda to find new recruits if he tried. The way we are conducting the war is making the world a more dangerous place, but Rumsfeld and the others won't entertain that debate. They want us to think it's absurd that our country could possibly make the world more dangerous. This is all part of the Big Lie.

It does a disservice to the public discourse to evoke the Nazis, doesnt it? Somebody would have to be crazy to compare Bush and Rumsfeld to Hitler and Goebbels, wouldnt they? The Nazis killed six million Jews and weve only killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. The difference is clear right? Yes, of course. I wouldnt want to sink to Rumsfelds level and sabotage the debate.