Monday, April 15, 2024
Pathways
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Truman's Swans
Saturday, January 13, 2024
Sunday, October 1, 2023
Downfall of Our Forebearers
Cicero Denounces Cataline --Cesare Maccari, 1889 |
Saturday, July 1, 2023
Saturday, April 1, 2023
More Groucho Marx Quotes
- The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
- I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
- I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
- Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
- I intend to live forever or die trying.
- A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
- All people are born alike-- except Republicans and Democrats.
- Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
- A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
- She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
- Either he's dead, or my watch has stopped.
- Why, a four-year-old child could understand this. Run out and find me a four-year-old child: I can't make head nor tail out of it.
- Before I speak, I have something to say.
- Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.
- Humor is reason gone mad. --Groucho Marx
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Happy Veteran's Day
Here are some patriotic photos you may find moving this Veteran's Day... or any other patriotic holiday. They were all taken in the fall in Northern Arizona.
Friday, July 1, 2022
Patriot of Another Country
July, of course, celebrates American Independence Day. Demonstrations of patriotism will abound. If you wish to see old July 4th related posts on this blog, please choose the "Fourth of July", "patriotism", or "politics" links on the left sidebar (on the desktop version).
- That which is imposing here on earth has always something of the quality of the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his conceptions and exertions but without success, proud and lonely.
- Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
- A generation that has taken a beating is always followed by a generation that deals one.
Saturday, June 25, 2022
What the Heck?
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
More Choices
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Unity
Culture Wars
"I think there’s an adrenaline rush or dopamine hit from engaging in full-fledged culture wars that otherwise thoughtful souls on both sides of the political spectrum can find intoxicating. For some, life is worth living only when ‘the soul of America’ is at stake. So the soul of America is ALWAYS at stake."
--Phil Vischer, creator of the Christian cartoon series VeggieTales, on evangelical Eric Metaxas, whom he once employed as a writer.
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Exceptional?
What's the point in arguing about the term "American exceptionalism?" We're a nation of imperfect people, founded on some amazing ideas of a democratic republic, enshrined in our Constitution. We've done some very noteworthy things; we've done some things that were stupid and even cruel. Accepting all these facets doesn't make us [1] less American, nor [2] less willing to accept or work on problematic parts of our past. Can we unify on this, too? --Marie Byars
Sunday, January 3, 2021
Try a New Tool
It's well past time for the "sides" [mostly referring to the culture wars] to think they can use the political system as a sledgehammer to "smash" their opponents into oblivion.
No one's going anywhere, folks. You're wasting a lot of energy, a lot of political capital, and a lot of your ability to try persuasion, instead. --Marie Byars
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Changes Prompted by 1918 Flu Pandemic
The 1918 global flu pandemic, coming in the wake of WWI, was a travesty. So many people were shaken by it, and by their responses (sometimes more selfish than they would have thought of themselves), as well as their survivors' guilt, that first-hand accounts of the flu largely disappeared.
However, the whole tragedy prompted some positive changes that stay with us. Here is a slide show accounting of some of those changes:
Daily Mail: 10 Major Changes Resulting from the 1918 Flu Pandemic
I was really surprised this event was given so much credit for countering "eugenics." Eugenics was the study of how to arrange human reproduction to increase the passing down of "desirable" inherited characteristics. That meant so-called less desirable people were forcibly sterilized (including in the U.S.) There were attempts to promote abortion more heavily among the poor. The 1918 pandemic helped people realize that the conditions of poverty, not personal "defects", allowed diseases to spread more rapidly among the poor.
Francis Galton, an Englishman, was largely responsible for first developing this line of thinking. In the U.S., Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came to believe in eugenics. (It's not true, however, that she did it for racially motivated reasons. In "The Eugenic Vale of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she wrote that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." Eugenics was finally dealt its death blow after the Nazi's abhorrent use of it.
Friday, June 5, 2020
Juneteenth
Juneteenth -- a blending of the words June and nineteenth -- is the oldest known US celebration of the end of slavery. It commemorates June 19, 1865. That's the day that Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told slaves of their emancipation from slavery.
"In accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," Granger read to the crowd that day. It came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1980, Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth a state holiday, although it had been celebrated informally since 1865.
Friday, May 1, 2020
Luckiest Man Alive
MLB is out right now. Normally, I don't give a lot of attention to sports, first-run movies or basically any entertainment that make the rich richer. I have one exception: I follow the Yankees somewhat and buy a little of their gear. This is due to how impressed I was with Pride of the Yankees, the Lou Gehrig story, when I was a kid.
Here's a clip with both the real Lou Gehrig with an animated story behind it. There is not much of the original speech surviving. In fact, it had to be crafted from various memories.
Lou Gehrig, Class Act
Here's a version that has that short amount of Gehrig footage plus the movie version of his famous speech, starring Gary Cooper:
Gehrig's 4th of July Farewell Speech
Here are some fun photos as an homage.
Friday, July 5, 2019
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Walking, American Style
An American author for this Fourth of July, from one of his lesser-known works:
"He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river... No wealth can buy the requisite leisure freedom, and independence which are capital in this profession... You must be born into the family of Walkers... the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called... but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day... "
---Henry David Thoreau in "Walking", from the Atlantic Monthly, 1862.