My Life Story Through Miscellany

Fran Lebowitz- "Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try."

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Dorothy Parker- "The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."

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Top comment on a Breitbart article about McCain ending treatment for brain cancer, hundreds of likes, hearts and laughs: 

"The man is so evil, god will most likely turn his back on him. It’s time to pay up on your pact with the devil. I wonder, was it worth it? The pits of hell are opening, TA TA 👋🏻"

These lunatics need to crawl back back under their rocks. What was McCain's crime, defying Trump, i.e. God?

August 24, 2018

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Live-commenting The Lady Eve on TCM.

Haha... Henry Fonda is a herpetologist reading a book titled "Are Snakes Necessary?"

The mirror scene is from another planet... the height of writing/directing. You can really see the influence it had on Woody Allen.

"Well I'll be a cock-eyed cookie puss." You don't hear that too often anymore.

"Who's the funny-looking gink watching us?" Don't hear that either.

Whoa... just missed 10 minutes, watching our baby squirm around in Emma's belly. That was some 4 star squirming.

August 24, 2013

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In Crimes and Misdemeanors, after the protagonist confides to his friend that he's considering having his mistress killed, his friend warns "God sees all." The protagonist responds- "God is a luxury I can not afford." Great line.

August 24, 2011

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Six thousand Jews were killed in Mainz on this day in 1349 after being blamed for the bubonic plague.

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On this day in 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the United States non-stop, from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey.

Her records always strike me as a little boring. Of course she made strides for women as being seen equal to men and all that, but I always read them as, "First person with female genitalia to do X." I wonder who the first atheist was to fly cross-country non-stop with a kidney disease and pigeon feet. That's MY person!

August 24

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On this day in 1967, Abbie Hoffman lead the Yippies to temporarily shut down the New York Stock Exchange by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing pandemonium among the brokers.

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I walked past one of those little front yard libraries today and noticed The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. I scan through Wikipedia every morning to see whose birthday it is (and whose deathday it is), and I remembered that he was born on this day in 1899. I opened it to the middle and this is the first entry I read:

Toenails

Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice. All they’re interested in is turning out toenails — semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against — whom? Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten pointless projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips of a Solingen. By the ninetieth twilit day of the prenatal confinement, my toes had cranked up that extraordinary factory. And when I am tucked away in Recoleta, in ash-colored house bedecked with dry flowers and amulets, they will still be at their stubborn work, until corruption at last slows them — them and the beard on my cheeks.

A keeper! But that doesn't sound like fiction.

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Howard Zinn's 100th birthday! From A People's History of the United States:

"TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

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Kenny Baker was born on this day in 1934. He played R2-D2.

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Stephen Fry was born on this day in 1957. He played Lord Snot on The Young Ones, and he's also an intellectual.

"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."

And below is a better, non-Young Ones, picture.

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Cal Ripken Jr. Was born on this day in 1960. Bill Clinton said this of him.

"I admire him not only for his talent, but for his constant determination day in and day out. He's been loyal to his team, his fans, the community and professional sports every phase of his career. His determination and talent has been great for baseball and America."

Sidenote, when Bill Clinton makes statements like these, I always get the feeling he's talking about himself in a symbolic way.

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Actor and fist-fighter, Jared Harris was born on this day in 1960.

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Comedian, and husband of a Filipino-American woman, Dave Chappelle, was born on this day in 1973.

"And just when that car can’t get any more tense, the Q’s are a hitchhiker that they pick up on the road. Some white dude in booty shorts just walking in the freeway. The G’s see him. “Hm, that guy might be one of us. Hey, are you okay? You need some help?” And he come over there with them booty shorts, leaning on the window. “Hey, what’s going on, fellas?” Lady. Whatever pronoun makes you feel comfortable in the back. Yeah. I don’t really know where I’m going. I don’t know if I’m gay or I’m straight or whatever. All I know for sure is that, um… I really want to get in this car.” And they make him get in and sit between the B’s and the T’s. I feel bad for T’s. But they’re so confusing. And it’s not all my fault. I-I feel like they need to take some responsibility for my jokes. ‘Cause I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, this idea that a person can be born in the wrong body. But they have to admit that’s a fucking hilarious predicament. It’s really fucking funny. If it happened to me, you’d laugh. Wouldn’t you? That wouldn’t be funny if it happened to me? I think it would be. What if… What if it did? What if… What if I was… What if I was Chinese? But… But born in this (xxxxx) body. That’s not funny? And for the rest of my life, I had to go around making that face. “Hey, everybody, I’m Chinese!” And everyone gets mad. “Stop making that face. That’s offensive.” -“What?” “This is how I feel inside.”

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John Green, the author of one of my favorite podcasts, The Anthropocene Reviewed, was born on this day in 1977. From the podcast:

At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, 'I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can't stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.'

He said, 'I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world.'

It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from the feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

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Another notable deathday- Julie Harris (2013)

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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross left us on this day in 2004, and I've come to accept it.

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28-year-old Marcy Borders, known as The Dust Lady, photographed on September 11, 2001. She worked at the Bank of America located in the World Trade Center and survived its collapse. She died of cancer on this day in 2015.

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Borges again- "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."

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The Hill- Trump meets with promoter of ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theory in Oval Office

I saw the headline and knew it might be a Onion headline and it might not be. I was only moderately surprised that it wasn't. Things are going to get very interesting.

http://hill.cm/DPIHQL6

Aug 24, 2018, 9:46 PM

Postscript- As if I saw the future...

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Esquire- August 24, 2018- 'Eat Shit' is The Singular Insult of These Profoundly Stupid Times

Great article!

"It wasn’t always king, even recently. Eat shit is, of course, another way of saying fuck you. But for all its ubiquity, there’s still something oddly personal about saying fuck you. Brandishing a fuck you typically comes with an implied emotional investment in the interaction on your behalf, one that eat shit is unburdened by. To be compelled to say fuck you means you have at least, in some way, been made to care in a manner that eat shit does not."

http://esqr.co/p37MPzH

August 24, 2018

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Thatcher Effect

Look at the picture upside down.

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You know why people say to hold your horses? It's because they want you to be stable.

Know why they say "be there or be square?" Because you are not a-round.

Know why people say you should break a leg in an audition? So you end up in the cast.

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Bukowski- "I started drinking before you people were born and I'll be drinking after I bury you."

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Three Jewish Auschwitz survivors meet again after 73 years.

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Borges, yet again- "Don't talk unless you can improve the silence."

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Louise Hay- "When we create peace, and harmony, and balance in our minds, we will find it in our lives."

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H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories- "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

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Steve Martin- "Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes."