Heaven and How To Get There

Danny Lloyd, of The Shining fame, was born on this day in 1972. Love that sweater.

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I wore a t-shirt with a picture of a shark on it to the beach. That's kind of like wearing a band's shirt to their concert.

October 13, 2021

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I'll bet that a person's level of support for the military and the police is directly proportional to their level of resistance to gun laws that if enacted would limit society's ability to violently overthrow the government, i.e., the military and the police.

October 13, 2017

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Oh the myth of the tough-guy president. He wants NBC news's license yanked cause they said something he doesn't like. He wants a university to investigate a professor who was critical of him. He wants and needs everyone to agree with him or he gets all grumpy. 

Ladies and gentlemen, he's either trying to be a dictator, or he wants the entire country to be his safe space. I guess they are one and the same when you think about it.

October 13, 2017

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Gretel just started yelling to get Zuzu because she was going up the stairs by herself. I told Gretel that she is a very, very good big sister. She said, "I'm a bugcatcher too!"

October 13, 2016

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A friend of Niels Bohr noticed a horseshoe hanging above a door at his house and asked him if he believed in such a pathetic superstition. He replied, "No I don't, but apparently it works whether you believe in it or not." Haha.

October 13, 2016

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Great movies are in the highest echelon because with an investment of two hours they change your life. Terrible movies can be turned off with no loss. Good movies are in the lowest echelon because they steal two ours and leave you the exact same as you were before.

October 13, 2014

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A 40-year old man at work today was wearing a t-shirt and a sweater with overlapping armpit holes. Alright, it was me. Don't laugh though, I bet your shirts have at least four holes, and if you look close enough- trillions.

October 13, 2014

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The "Miracle of the Sun" was witnessed by an estimated 70,000 people on this day in 1917 in the Cova da Iria in Portugal.

From Wikipedia: The Miracle of the Sun, also known as the Miracle of Fátima, is a series of events reported to have occurred miraculously on 13 October 1917, attended by a large crowd who had gathered in Fátima, Portugal, in response to a prophecy made by three shepherd children, Lúcia Santos and Francisco and Jacinta Marto. The prophecy was that the Virgin Mary (referred to as Our Lady of Fátima), would appear and perform miracles on that date. Newspapers published testimony from witnesses who said that they had seen extraordinary solar activity, such as the Sun appearing to "dance" or zig-zag in the sky, careen towards the Earth, or emit multicolored light and radiant colors. According to these reports, the event lasted approximately ten minutes.

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The Seventh Seal was released on this day in 1958.

A moment of serendipity. The second they chop that tree down the squirrel hopped up on the stump!

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Lenny Bruce was born on this day in 1925.

"If you believe there is a God, a God that made your body, and yet you think that you can do anything with that body that's dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer."

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Another notable birthday- Rube Waddell (1876)

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Other notable death days- Roman emperor Claudius, Milton S. Hershey (1945), Ed Sullivan (1974)

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Huh. Popped up in my history, the reason that it's dark at night. I was just wondering about that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxJ4M7tyLRE

October 13, 2012

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The Hill- Barrett declines to say if Trump can pardon himself

How about this for an answer instead? "If presidents can pardon themselves, then they are effectively above the law, but the law must be applied equally."

This goes back to the Magna Carta, predating US law, but providing the foundation for all law that came after it.

http://hill.cm/rCxxIGf

October 13, 2020

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C-SPAN ask for thoughts on the impact of the January 6 Commission. Many were in support of revolution. Here's mine:

It's exposing in detail exactly what we plainly saw with our own eyes- a mob that was incited to violence by the president and others, overtook the capital injuring and killing law enforcement, exactly as the official electoral count was under way, in a coup attempt on behalf of a president who lost in an electoral landslide, supported by 80 lawsuits, all after he refused beforehand to promise a peaceful transfer of power.

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Immanuel Kant- "Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes."

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Woody Allen- “I personally have no interest whatsoever in legacy because I'm a firm believer that when you're dead, naming a street after you doesn't help your metabolism – I saw what happened to Rembrandt and Plato and all those other nice people.” 

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Richard Dawkins- "There's a poetry in the real world; science is the poetry of reality."

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Thomas Sowell- "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

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Confucius- "Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."

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C.S. Lewis- "One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts."

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Bob Dylan- "You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself." 

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Mencken- "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."

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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister."

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Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft- "A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club."

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John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever- "Grammar turns up in the strangest places, and so often in profanity, as we have seen. Did you ever notice that when son of a bitch is used as a slur, the accent is on the bitch, but that when it is used in joy, the accent can be on the son? Son of a bitch, that was my lucky day! Here, too, the original meaning is obscured, and beyond the degree in “sum-bitch” where bitch remains vibrant."

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Rodney Dangerfield:

With my old man I got no respect. I asked him, “How can I get my kite in the air?” He told me to run off a cliff.

I tell ya, when I was a kid I had it rough. Once on my birthday, my old man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.

My parents got divorced. They had a custody fight over me. No one showed up.

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The strangest thing... an old postcard asking, "Is there a heaven for pumpinheads"? They are reading a book titled Heaven and How To Get There with looks of great concern. Who knows, maybe they aren't concerned at all. Maybe that's just the way their faces were carved.