I Am Still Alive, Murder, Eternity, and Crossroads
The Grapes of Wrath came out on this day in 1940, directed by John Ford. It's one of my top favorites. After it's release it was considered the best American film for decades until Citizen Kane gained a following among filmmakers. I could watch it any night of the week.
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Fun day with the kids. We visited the graves of their great-great-great-great-great grandparents, Christian and Susanna Hershey. Their grandparents (my kids 7th great-grandparents) immigrated here from Switzerland in the early 1700's to escape religious persecution and live in peace. Every one of my immigrant ancestors came from either Switzerland or Germany for the same reason.
One of Christian and Susanna's great-grandchildren was Milton Hershey, who founded Hershey Chocolate, making him my 2nd cousin, 3 times removed.
We have at least 29 direct ancestors buried at Hershey Mennonite near Pequea, and the nearby Old Hershey Mennonite cemetery.
We also saw cows that became very interested in Gretel, her highlight.
January 24, 2021
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When there's a murder it's not a good idea to have a trial. It would only serve to anger murderers at a time we need to be unified against murder.
January 24, 2021
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The Democrats' case for Trump's removal from office has been devastating. It's airtight, rock solid, seemingly endless- and maybe it is, because there's new evidence each day. Should it make a difference? Yes! Will it make a difference? I'm not too hopeful.
MSNBC has been covering it without commentary, and said they will also cover Trump's lawyers' side the same way.
What about Fox News? Any time I checked they were not showing the trial, they were just talking about the trial. Once I flipped over and it was a commercial, and they were playing a live thumbnail of Schiff speaking, but without sound. After the commercials, it was back to their pundits. They're trying to present the illusion that they are covering it, but their viewers are denied the original source, not even a moment of unbiased reflection. It would be as if the president gave the State of the Union, and MSNBC just played compilation of his verbal flubs instead- inconceivable.
So if there's a point that you can't understand where the other side is coming from, ask yourself if they have the same frame of reference as you. If they don't, draw your own conclusions.
January 24, 2020
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Orwell- "The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity."
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The American insult industry certainly is booming under this president.
Philip Roth- "I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”
January 24, 2018
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Dear, dear, poor, sweet Sean Spicer... I feel for him. He has the exact worse job in the world. He had to come to work today and repeat over and over to a room full of competent, probing journalists that Trump believes 3-5 million voted illegally because... because he believes it. He believes it because he believes it. Sean Spicer must come to work and try to legitimize a conspiracy theorist. It's the first week. This is unsustainable.
January 24, 2017
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From Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's, Betraying Spinoza:
What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her — just let her try to figure out The Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.
Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she — that is that I — can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else, or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself — were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself— would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?
Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day?
January 24, 2017
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If Trump is so down on the mainstream news and many of his supporters are looking at alternative news to get their info, what's going to happen after Wikileaks publishes all of the info they hack from his phone??? Answer: execute Julian Assange in the middle of 5th Ave., and he won't even lose any support.
January 24, 2017
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Looks like for the next few days my car is going to continue it's impersonation of Han Solo encased in Carbonite.
January 24, 2016
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Republicans never should have had their rebuttal read off by Governor Blandy McBorington.
January 24, 2012
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Note to Obama- less content, more jokes. Americans want to be ENTERTAINED!
January 24, 2012
Postscript- Trump knew!
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Got excited by the headline "Obama to Heckle the Economy in State of the Union," but sadly, upon closer inspection, the headline actually read "Obama to Tackle the Economy in State of the Union." The state of the union will be... bored.
January 24, 2012
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On this day in 1961, cartoon voice actor Mel Blanc had a terrible auto crash and lingered in a coma for several weeks. Each day the doctor would say: “Hey Bugs Bunny! How are we today?” One day Blanc replied in character:” Ehhh…fine, doc!” He went on to make a full recovery.
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Quasi-Buddhist Edith Wharton was born on this day in 1862.
"There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time."
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Sharon Tate joined us on this day in 1943. We probably don't think about her birthday enough. I loved the Megan Draper / Sharon Tate intrigue in Mad Men.
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John Belushi joined us on this day in 1949. This is humor hold up? For some reason I can't imagine actually laughing at anything of his.
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The great fashion icon Adrian Edmondson was born on this day in 1957.
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Nastassja Kinski was born on this day in 1961. I'm due to watch Paris, Texas again.
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Other notable birthdays- Ed Helms (1974), Kristen Schaal (1978)
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The Roman emperor, Caligula, died on this day in 41 AD. I love his last words: "I am still alive, I am still alive." True! But not for long. He was taunting his assassins who were in the middle of stabbing him 30 times.
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Winston Churchill left us on this day in 1965.
"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
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The Three Stooges' Larry Fine left us on this day in 1975, the only stooge to overlap with my own life.
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Ted Bundy was executed by lethal injection on this day in 1989. He kidnapped, raped, and murdered young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. He confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. Since he refused a last meal, he was given the usual Florida death row meal- steak, eggs, hash browns, toast with butter, jelly, juice, coffee, and milk.
His last words:
"I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends."
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Other notable deathdays - L. Ron Hubbard (1986), Thurgood Marshall (1993), Mark E. Smith (2018)
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I have new respect for Prince Randian with every passing day.
https://youtu.be/66Pgw_nUlMw
January 24, 2011
Postscript- Recuperating from Achilles surgery.
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MSNBC- Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza hit with violating federal election laws
He's written about the virtues of empire, i.e. subjugation resulting from force... it's not like he believed in democracy to begin with.
http://t.co/nzPK9R7ZiK
January 24, 2014
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I can't shake ABBA out of my soul. Every morning I wake up with a different one of their songs playing in my head. I think they play over and over all night long while I'm asleep. Here's Ring Ring:
https://youtu.be/TL0EoXdpOqg
January 24, 2015
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It is rumored that ABBA have been offered a billion dollars to reunite! I'll chip in $100.
January 24, 2016
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As a company we drove a million miles last year! Cue the Plimsouls.
https://youtu.be/DAJsFMQHolI
January 24, 2017
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New York Magazine- Trump Aides Keep Leaking Embarrassing Stories About How He Can’t Handle Embarrassment
I believe this is just going to get more and more interesting. (And worse and worse and worse.)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/trump-aides-cant-stop-blabbing-about-how-hes-a-madman.html
January 24, 2017
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Tomorrow things are for tomorrow.
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Simone de Bouvier- "The age of men is over."
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Ernest Hemingway- "No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist."
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Muhammad Ali- "It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."
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Hawking- "Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end."
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Asimov- "I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don’t travel. I really don’t, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back."
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T. S. Eliot- "Humor is also a way of saying something serious."
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Dave Attell- "Sex is not that important; it's the afterward part when you're naked and it's warm. Watching the sun come up through the windshield you look in her good eye and you help strap on her leg and you know: you fucked a pirate."
He proved T.S. Eliot wrong!
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Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath- "A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east."
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That's all, folks.
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