On Ravens, Albatwitches, and Psychiatric Ethics

We lost Edgar Allan Poe on this day in 1849. I can't tell you how many times this line has ran through my head over the years, thousands? From The Bells: "What a world of merriment their melody foretells."

Here's a wonderful brain pickings article, on Gustav Dore's illustrations of The Raven.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/05/gustav-dore-poe-the-raven/

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Off to the beach. Zuzu lost another tooth and got a job with the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers.

October 7, 2021

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How did I never hear of this? There are these little bigfoots called albatwitches that live in the woods by Chiques Rock??? I don't know, guess I'll weigh the evidence. Gretel and I just found out that there's an Albatwich Festival every year. She asked if we could go to it, so we looked it up, and it's tomorrow! We'll see you there.

https://unchartedlancaster.com/2021/10/03/haunted-lancaster-meet-columbias-little-bigfoot-the-albatwitch/

October 7, 2022

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Jean Segura played 1328 games before making it to the playoffs, and in his first playoff game today he hit a two-run single that put the Phillies ahead for good. My hat is signed by him.

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Politics aside, I hate when debates get boiled down to who the fly landed on. And setting that aside... they should have enclosed Pence in the plexiglass along with several frogs.

October 7, 2020

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But how could have he ever known, except for the tens of millions of people saying it at the time?

October 19

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Oh my goodness, I can't believe the ad hominem attack Senator Hirono just unleashed on Kavanaugh! When asked if he has legitimacy on the court, she said that he has a huge taint. Off topic, Senator Hirono.

October 7, 2018

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He honestly doesn't get it, which of course makes it funnier! The king who wants to kill the jester. The big misconception on Trump- he's a tough guy. There's never been a more emotionally fragile moron, I mean politician. "Stop making fun of me! I'm not doing anything that can be made fun of!" A go-to campaign point was, "the rest of the world is laughing at us." The worst thing he can imagine... being laughed at. Hahaha, he's providing his own equal time, often funnier than the late night comedians!

President Trump complained that late-night comedians are telling "unfunny" and "repetitive" material and said that he should receive "equal time" on television because comedians tell so many "anti-Trump" jokes.

October 7, 2018

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Maybe there was a simple alternative to the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was actually the worst president for needlessly causing millions of deaths. What if we let the South secede, and the following year the slaves rose up and killed all the plantation owners? All the right people would have died, and the former slaves would have had the psychological boost of having freed themselves instead of being freed by others.

October 7, 2016

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Gretel freaked tonight when she noticed her shadow and couldn't shake it off her feet. Can't wait to teach her that there's a skeleton inside her.

October 7, 2015

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On this night in 1964, Lucille Miller enacted a plan to murder her husband, Cork, for a double indemnity insurance payout, killing him the following morning. It's the first essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem- Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. The first paragraph lights the top of my head on fire. It's perfect.

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”

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A hunter discoveref three gray whales trapped under the ice near Alaska on this day in 1988, starting a multinational effort to free them.

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The poet, James Whitcomb Riley, was born on this day in 1849, the day Poe died.

"When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."

Poe had his raven, Riley had his duck.

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Old-tymy banjo player, Uncle Dave Macon, was born on this day in 1870. Here he is with his son playing Take Me Back To That Old Carolina Home.

https://youtu.be/gicjw5n92qQ

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James Whitcomb Riley's Hoosier brethren, John Mellencamp, was born on this day in 1951.

Jack he sits back, collects his thoughts for a moment

Scratches his head, and does his best James Dean

"Well then, there, Diane, we ought to run off to the city"

Diane says

"Baby, you ain't missing nothing"

But Jack he says, yeah

"Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone"

"Oh yeah"

He's saying "Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone"

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Simon Cowell was born on this day in 1959. He's famous, of course, for working as a runner on The Shining and having the privilege of polishing Jack Nicholson's ax.

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Sherman Alexie was born on this day in 1966.

"I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not."

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Physician author, and poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, left us on this day in 1894. How is that for a combo of labels?

"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization."

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Another notable deathday- Christy Mathewson (1925)

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You want to know what movie you'll like? Anvil! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAxeO-QfmY

October 7, 2009

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NPR- Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk

Talking to yourself in the third person helps take your emotions out of stressful situations. Valuable bit of advice.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/07/353292408/why-saying-is-believing-the-science-of-self-talk

October 7, 2014

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Sam Harris- "My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences—but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people."

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Huffington Post- Pat Robertson: Trump Is 'In Danger Of Losing The Mandate Of Heaven'

Oh my God, it's worse than I thought. Trump's in danger of losing his...MANDATE OF HEAVEN!!!

http://huffp.st/oIEJhqc

October 7, 2019

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Mother Jones- Trump’s Former National Security Adviser Accused Him of Treasonous Conduct. And No One Cared.

I just mentioned this the other day. How was this only in the news for 8 seconds??? For comparison, imagine that Obama's own National Security Advisor, i.e. Susan Rice, was saying that Obama was aiding and abetting our enemies. If I was planning to vote for him, that would break my cognitive dissonance meter. I guess my mind will continually have to be boggled by the fact that many on the right don't even listen to the very serious criticism coming from the right.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/trumps-former-national-security-adviser-accused-him-of-treasonous-conduct-and-no-one-cared

October 7, 2020

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AI Wrote an Eminem-style song about Ben Franklin. It's got that zap.

https://americansongwriter.com/we-asked-ai-to-write-a-song-in-the-style-of-eminems-my-name-is-for-benjamin-franklin/

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If you were placed in a room with Hitler when he was only 6 months old and given gun, how many bullets would you fire into an innocent baby? -Clarke Kant

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Steven Wright- "I'm going to get an MRI to see if I have claustrophobia."

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Alexie again- "He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing."

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Confucius- "Silence is a true friend who never betrays."

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Groucho Marx- "He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot."

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Diderot- "Life is but a series of misunderstandings."

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Stephen King, The Stand- "He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile."

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John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America- "A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect."

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Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion- "It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."

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Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation- "[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News."

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Rodney Dangerfield:

When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.

A girl phoned me the other day and said “Come on over, there’s nobody home.” I went over. Nobody was home.

I told my psychiatrist I was having suicidal thoughts. Now he makes me pay in advance.

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Addendum

A compilation of Poe quotes:

Edgar Allan Poe- "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

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Edgar Allan Poe- "It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."

Edgar Allan Poe- "I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."

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Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia- "The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said."

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Edgar Allen Poe- A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow-

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand-

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep- while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

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Edgar Allan Poe:

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,

In the sepulchre there by the sea,

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

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Edgar Allan Poe, The Bells:

Hear the sledges with the bells -

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

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Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat- "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?"