Baby Philosophy and The Blue Marble

Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, was launched on this day in 1972. The crew took the photograph known as The Blue Marble as they left the Earth.

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Noam Chomsky turns 93 today. He turned 13 on the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

"Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech then you’re in favour of free speech for precisely the views you despise."

December 7, 2021

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Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language- "Chomsky's writings are 'classics' in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

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No worries, if Trump overturns the election results in PA, GA, MI, WI, AZ and NV, Biden just has to overturn FL, TX, OH, IA, NC and oh, I don't know, let's say WY... then it will be back where we started. That's how elections work, right?

December 7, 2020

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Today we were walking down the street and Zuzu emphatically wanted to go back to show me something. I reluctantly agreed... we walked back about 20 feet... we stopped right in front of this guy... Zuzu pointed up at him, looked at me, and asked, "Is that a real man?" The guy burst out laughing. I let Zuzu know that yeah, it was a real man.

December 7, 2019

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Gretel asked me if I knew a good name for her stuffed rainbow narwhal. I said I didn't and a minute later she said, "Her name is Felicia. And she's Jewish." After laughing for about a minute I asked her if Felicia believes in God, or just likes the rituals. She said Felicia does not believe in God, but does celebrate Hanukah. I asked Zuzu if she believes in God.

She said, "No, I'm not a stuffed animal." Gretel and I agreed that wasn't a good enough reason.

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Zuzu picked up the dog medicine syringe and in a flash she stuck it in my mouth. Gretel laughed her head off.

December 7, 2016

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I look away for a second and she goes right for the philosophy books.

December 7, 2014

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The Great Storm of 1703 took place on this day, the greatest windstorm ever recorded in the southern part of Great Britain- winds gusted up to 120 mph, and 9,000 people died.

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On this day in 1982, Charles Brooks, Jr., became the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States. Take a guess in which state.

His last words: 

Ashhadu an lā ilāh illā Allāh,

Ashhadu an lā ilāh illā Allāh.

Ashhadu anna Muhammadan Rasūl Allāh,

Ashhadu anna Muhammadan Rasūl Allāh.

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah.

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

Inna li-Allāh,

wa-inna ilāyhi rajicūn

Verily unto Allah do we belong,

Verily unto Him do we return.

His last meal: T-bone steak, french fries, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, biscuits, peach cobbler and iced tea.

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Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873.

"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

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Ellen Burstyn joined us on this day in 1932, she turns 90 today. Tennessee Williams on her performance in The Last Picture Show:

"In the end we have nothing but our inventory of memories, sensations, colors, sounds, scents, dreams. Ultimately, they are combined into something we call the past, a journal we carry around, then carelessly lose, at which point we find that, like a love letter or a poem or Scripture or a nasty ditty from school, we know it entirely by memory. All that we are and have been are there in our hearts, and when Ellen [Burstyn] stands at the grave of Ben Johnson, you can see and sense that her past, with all its glories, is nothing now but memories, stringy smoke, an oasis she can see and feel but can never reach. I became addicted to her at that point. ...And that camera so slowly and seductively creeps up on her, a metaphor for time and age and decay. All those things come so silently and skillfully. And when, after a failed Communion with the young boy with whom she briefly considers congress, she drives away. Where does she go? What is left for her? Where is there to go?" 

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Benny and Billy McGuire joined us on this day in 1946. You probably never heard of them but you might recognize their picture

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Johnny Bench was born on this day in 1947.

Harry Dalton- "Every time Bench throws, everybody in baseball drools."

Bench- "I can throw out any man alive."

Once a fan wrote to him asking if he could really hold seven baseballs in one hand.

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Tom Waits joined us on this day in 1949 as a middle-aged man, presumably.

I love this story:

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story:

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

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Here's the video of I don't want to grow up, directed by Jim Jarmusch.

https://youtu.be/CWh4xHeFMIQ?si=e37WCU-86Abcos9R

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I love this Tom Waits story:

When told by a critic his voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smoke house for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car, Tom said, “flattery will get you nowhere with me.”

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Tom Waits- "There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap."

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C. Thomas Howell joined us on this day in 1966. Just a perfect performance as far as I'm concerned.

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Cicero left us on this day in 43BC.

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."

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Thornton Wilder left us on this day in 1975.

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten."

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Darby Crash crashed and burned on this day in 1980.

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Chuck Yeager left us one this day in 2020.

"You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done."

With an outlook like that, how did he live to be 98 years old???

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Trump at George H.W. Bush's funeral.

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Check out this hot new track by Good Religion.

https://youtu.be/pB2l6UESSyo

December 7, 2013

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"His hunger for approval means he's likely to keep surrounding himself with those who tell him what he wants to hear and flatter him—the engine of Shakespearean tragedies. His belligerence and volatility, that hair-trigger temper, are the last qualities you want to see in someone holding a position of power, particularly when they're coupled with a childish us-versus-them view of the world: xenophobic nationalism and compulsive competitiveness. His disorder leaves no room for consensus and collaboration. How can one not tremble at the thought that someone like this will command the military and have access to nuclear weapons?"

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/narcissist-chief-psychopathology-explains-donald-trumps-depravity

December 7, 2016

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New York Times: Opinion- Trevor Noah: Let’s Not Be Divided. Divided People Are Easier to Rule

"The past year has been so polarizing and noxious that even I find myself getting caught up in the extreme grandstanding and vitriol. But with extremes come deadlock and the death of progress. Instead of speaking in measured tones about what unites us, we are screaming at each other about what divides us — which is exactly what authoritarian figures like Mr. Trump want: Divided people are easier to rule. That was, after all, the whole point of apartheid."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/trevor-noah-lets-not-be-divided-divided-people-are-easier-to-rule.html

December 7, 2016

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Psychology Today- Factor That Can Predict Your Life Span

"The most sensitive measure of longevity was the individual’s own subjective evaluation of how healthy he or she felt. In other words, a person reporting that he or she feels healthy outweighed any other single predictor of a long life, including any medical measures such as cholesterol levels and blood pressure."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-ooze/201605/the-surprising-factor-can-predict-your-life-span

December 7, 2016

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The Onion, destroying Roy Moore and the Republicans, HAHAHA!

RNC: ‘We Warned You Gay Marriage Would Be A Slippery Slope Toward Accepting Pedophilia’

https://trib.al/0ZQupIg

Dec 7, 2017, 5:28 PM

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Indiewire- Cahiers du Cinéma Names ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ the Best Film of the Decade, TV Be Damned

Agreed! There were times when I was watching it that I felt like I was witnessing a new religion being created.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/12/twin-peaks-the-return-cahiers-du-cinema-best-film-decade-1202194901/

December 7, 2019

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Schroedinger's Immigrant

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Spade told Norm that he used to look like Paul Newman and asked what happened? As if on cue, Norm asks, "But have you seen Paul Newman lately?" Now come on, that's a perfect joke.

They discuss their favorite Weekend Update jokes. I knew my favorite in 1 second... 

https://youtu.be/thHWvoYfNyo

The Lights Out segment:

https://youtu.be/EbanVqLk1lQ

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I compulsively jot things down. I'm glad Joan Didion was around to explain why. I'm sure this also explains why I compulsively copy and paste quotations. 

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

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Voltaire- "One great use of words is to hide our thoughts."

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John Stewart- "Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake."

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Woody Allen- "It's a match made in heaven...by a retarded angel."

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Churchill- "From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."

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Twain- "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."

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Sarah Silverman- “I give , you know, in my way. I give. I sent, this past summer, fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa. In just really fun colors-and expecting nothing, by the way. They sent me a postcard thanking me and it said thank you, and that there were enough sweaters for every member of the village to get one… And that they were delicious.”

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Garry Shandling- “Humor is a wonderful way to deal with our suffering because if we can laugh at our troubles, we can feel better. Thich Nhat Hanh is a special man who has helped millions with their suffering with incredible technique. But he doesn't know real suffering, because he has not dated as much as I have.”

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Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions- "Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."

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Sagan- "I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls."

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Chomsky again- "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies."

People don't like that quote.

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Steven Wright:

"Why is it a penny for your thoughts but you have to put your two cents in? Somebody’s making a penny."

"All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand."

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines."

"I love to go shopping. I love to freak out salespeople. They ask me if they can help me, and I say, “Have you got anything I’d like?” Then they ask me what size I need, and I say, “Extra medium.”"

"If I melt dry ice, can I take a bath without getting wet?"