Indomitable Spirits, and Bitten By a Bunch of Bugs
As I was playing racquetball tonight, I thought about Gretel taking taekwondo down at the end of the same strip mall. The tenets of taekwondo crossed my mind, and I lingered on "indomitable spirit." It hit me, that's why I'm good at sports. I have an indomitable spirit! No matter how far I'm down I think I can still win. If I win the first point, I consider that I already won. Indomitable spirit, it'll take you places.
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Mr. Show's take on "indomitable spirit."
https://youtu.be/uvVte_OH4Dk
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Great news, I broke a 4-minute mile!
Bad news, technically I ran 3 minutes and 39 seconds per mile, but only for maybe 10 yards.
More good news, if I was Rerun in the opening credits of What's Happening, I absolutely would have caught up to that pickup truck leaving with Roger and Duane.
February 16, 2022
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Cross-country skiing takes a lot of endurance, but not as much endurance as it takes to watch it.
February 16, 2022
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"Fine-tuned machine" is right, Trump... a perpetual commotion machine.
February 16, 2017
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Emma's mom is the last person on earth that you can still prank call
I just called Emma's mom and said in my best high-pitched voice, "Hi, it's Emma!"
MJ- "Hi honey! It doesn't sound like you."
B- "I have a cold."
MJ- "You sound awful! What's wrong?"
I was shuddering with silent laughter, then shuddered some more... then pulled it together.
B- "I was bitten by a bunch of bugs."
MJ- "Oh no!!!"
That was it, I couldn't hold it together anymore. Her mom is terrified of Emma coming back from Rwanda not quite the same after catching whatever it was that Audrey Hepburn caught. She told me my prank was a "dastardly" thing to do. She's the only person who still uses that word.
I agreed that it was super-dastardly and then we had a somewhat pleasant conversation about multi-vitamins, power bars, cat hyperthyroidism, faulty electronics and whey powder.
February 16, 2010
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Soon-To-Be-Not-President Trump could be a Zen koan that came to life... if the ultimate goal of Buddhism wasn't enlightenment, but rather cognitive dissonance.
Reporter: Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to get you to clarify, because it's a very important point, can you say definitively that nobody on your campaign had any contacts with the Russians during the campaign, and on the leaks, is it fake news or are these real leaks?
Trump: Well, the leaks are real. You're the one that wrote about them and reported them. I mean the leaks are real. You know what they said. You saw it and the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.
February 16, 2017
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Occupy Democrats- Fox News just tore Trump to shreds for lying his way through his first press conference since taking office.
https://fb.watch/iJPweODpyU/?mibextid=NnVzG8
By telling that type of truth, Shepard Smith was on his way out
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I was just eating some delicious lemon ice cream, and I mean delicious. I started wondering why it was only 50 cents a pint. Then I started thinking about the place I bought it...not exactly Whole Foods, more like Trader Amos's. I flipped the pint over...yep, it expired two and a half years ago. Still delicious though.
It might not surprise you to learn that this type of thing happens to me several times a week.
February 16, 2016
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These Senate Democrats are so WEAK! In the spirit of eye-for-an-eye and taste-of your-own-medicine they should say that if Republicans block the nominee for a year, and hold the Senate, and win the presidency, they'll top them by blocking the Republican nominee for 4 years!
And then the years will go by, and the current justices will die off with no replacements, and then in our grandkids' time everybody can decide for themselves what is Constitutional. That would be better, right?
February 16, 2016
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Thomas Edison considered sleeping a waste of time... so he invented the electric light bulb. Some estimate that people get 1-2 hours less sleep a night on average because of it. Well done Thomas Edison! (Unless that's bad for us.)
February 16, 2015
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I just responded to a guy who asked about the snowboard I'm selling on craigslist. He offered me $30 and I wrote back that I'd consider it in a week. He wrote back- "what board is yours i wrote on severe so thanks Nate" It took me a couple minutes to figure out what he was trying to say.
February 16, 2010
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On this day in 1916 anarchist author Emma Goldman was arrested for lecturing on... birth control. Without the birth control laws of the time though how many of us wouldn't be here to behold their absurdity?
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Hezbollah was founded on this day in 1985.
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John McEnroe joined us on this day in 1959. Yes, I'm serious. Forty plus years later, he's still haunted by his Wimbledon final boss to Borg. Such a competitor, I can't help but love him.
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Other notable birthdays- Kim Jong-il (1941), LeVar Burton (1957), Keith Haring (1990)
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George "The Animal" Steele left us on this day in 2017. The nation's turnbuckles rejoiced. In 2012 he threw out the first pitch of a Boston Red Sox game and pretended to take a bite out of the ball beforehand.
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Other notable deathdays- Brownie McGhee (1996), Gary Carter (2012), Lesley Gore (2015)
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Language as a window into human nature
https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU
February 16, 2011
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Huffington Post- The Sun Orbits The Earth, According To 1 In 4 Americans: Survey
Keep up the good work America!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/16/americans-science-survey_n_4798244.html
February 16, 2014
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NPR- Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
Nice work science...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/12/275896094/scientists-say-their-giant-laser-has-produced-nuclear-fusion
February 16, 2014
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Jiujitsu Times- How To Defend Against Donald Trump’s Arm Drag Handshake
"Now, we here at the Jiu-Jitsu Times are NOT suggesting that you physically assault the 45th President of the United States. However, you may be in a situation where someone who isn’t the “leader of the free world” tries to grab you by the hand or the wrist and pull you in. That is where this move comes in quite handy (pun intended)."
https://www.jiujitsutimes.com/defend-donald-trumps-arm-drag-handshake/
February 16, 2017
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Mother Earth- My Job Just Got a Lot Easier
Wow, I suppose all of these Trump/Russia ties are true! Why? To quote Trump- "I've seen that information around." I've seen a lot of information around that concerns Trump. To flatter Trump through imitation, I'll just assume it's ALL true.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/my-job-just-got-lot-easier
February 16, 2017
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Mother Jones- Here Are Your Highlights of Today’s Trump Press Meltdown
Save your sanity, don't read this.
QUESTION: Let’s talk about some serious issues that have come up in the last week that you have had to deal with as president of the United States. You mentioned the vessel — the spy vessel off the coast of the United States.
TRUMP: Not good.
QUESTION: There was a ballistic missile test that many interpret as a violation of an agreement between the two countries; and a Russian plane buzzed a U.S. destroyer.
TRUMP: Not good.
....QUESTION: So when you say they’re not good, do you mean that they are...
TRUMP: Who did I say is not good?
QUESTION: No, I read off the three things that have recently happened. Each one of them you said they’re not good.
TRUMP: No, it’s not good, but they happened.
QUESTION: But do they damage the relationship? Do they undermine...
TRUMP: They all happened recently.
Fact check: True. These are all things that happened recently.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/here-are-your-highlights-todays-trump-press-meltdown
February 16, 2017
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The Atlantic- THE BILLION-DOLLAR DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN TO REELECT THE PRESIDENT
Long article, but worth it. Under the assumption you might not want to spend the time, how about the last three paragraphs?
One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”
The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/
February 16, 2020
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New York Times- A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled
"As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html
February 16, 2023
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Vivian Maier
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Alfred Hitchcock- “I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one.”
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Hemingway- "Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man."
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Sartre- "Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you."
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Thomas Sowell- "Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence."
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Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth- "Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs."
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H.L. Mencken- "Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
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Lincoln- “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
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Kant- "If the truth shall kill them, let them die."
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Jim Jefferies- "The curious are always asking questions, and that's like fucking cancer to religion."
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"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."
Ojibwe saying, hanging from the wall of Tony Soprano's hospital room
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After this torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun, Galileo reportedly muttered- "Albeit, it does move."
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