A thought on going to war over religion

You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.

Age Barometer

Do You Remember

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottles
5. Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive - 6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM >records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with levers
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulbs
20. Beanie and Cecil
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!




careermudgeon

The death of the butterfly is the one drawback to an entomological career
Margaret E. Fountaine (1892)

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an
intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James Baldwin

Careers, like rockets, don't always take off on schedule.
The key is to keep working on the engines.
Gary Sinise

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to
combine marriage and a career.
Gloria Steinem

Beware of a misfit occupation. . . . Consider carefully your natural
bent, whether for business or a profession.
Marshall Field

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some
occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords
a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.
John Burroughs

The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil
of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil.
An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student,
who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a perparation for his
future career.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), _Monthly Review_, May, 1949

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a
big fv
players and electrical tin openers... choose DIY and wondering who the
fv
mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your
mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a
miserable home, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish,
fv
Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing lke that? I chose not
to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no
reasons. Who need reasons when you've got heroin? "
"Renton" from the movie Trainspotting
Screenplay by John Hodge, Based on the Novel by Irvine Welsh


whatisrealitymudgeon

We live in a hallucination of our own devising.
Alan Kay

Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.
W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911)

Common sense imagines that when it sees a table it sees a table.
This is a gross delusion.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be
ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to
make life more livable.
Louise Nevelson

When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be
stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you CAN imagine.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-)

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth
or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of
intellectual responsibility.
Hu Shih

Matter is less material and the mind less spiritual than is
generally supposed. The habitual separation of physics and
psychology, of mind and matter is metaphysically indefensible.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues,
so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost
more potent, in which most men live.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink
blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion,
each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from
the shape and color of the blot itself.
Lewis Mumford

tidyingupmysmillassenseofsnowmudgeon

Note: All the following quotes occur in Peter Hoeg's
_Smilla's Sense of Snow_ (Tiina Nunnely, tr.), Danish (c) 1992,
English translation (c) 1993, Dell, ISBN 0-440-21853-5 (paperback)

If you limit earthly things, you set your thoughts free for the spiritual.
Peter Hoeg -"spoken by "Elsa Lubing" p 130

A bureaucrat in the prosecutor's office must never doubt that he's right.
Peter Hoeg -"spoken by "The Mechanic" p 225

To travel you have to have a home to leave and come back to. Otherwise
you're a refugee, an exile ...
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 313

It's rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being.
Usually you have to fight for the floor.
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 122

I've seen it on long journeys. When someone is burned out, he suddenly
discovers within himself a landscape of cheerful cynicism.
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 225

There is one thing that is forbidden on journeys by sled, and that is
whimpering. Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.
Peter Hoeg -"spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 198

Language is a hologram ... In every human utterance lies the sum total of
that person's linguistic past.
Peter Hoeg -"spoken by "Andreas Fine Licht, Ph.D.,
Professor of Eskimo Languages and Culture," p 158

. . . untalented listeners . . . cheat themselves out of experiencing a
fascinating law of nature ... the transformation of the speaker the minute
she becomes absorbed in her story.
Peter Hoeg -"spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 170

Under certain circumstances, the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even
in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease.
While the little things ... seem so important.
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 263

. . . we thought that wristwatches were cute. Some of the hunters wore them
for decoration. But we would never dream of being _regulated_ by them . . .
we are guided by the weather . . . we are guided by animals. By love. And
death. Not by a piece of mechanized tin.
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 298

The first requirement is _loyalty_. You also have to have a high score on
your exams. And a desire to achieve which is far beyond the ordinary. But in
the long run, the important thing is whether you are loyal. Common sense is
not a prerequisite, on the other hand. Might even be a drawback.
Peter Hoeg -"spoken by "The Mechanic" p 225

One of the signs that your life needs cleaning up is when your possessions
gradually, overwhelmingly consist of things that you borrowed a long time
ago but now it's too late to give them back because you would rather shave
your head than confront the bogeyman who is the rightful owner.
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 124

The moment the bear stops and turns around, you get a good look at it. Not
one of those living carcasses that amuse you at the zoo, but a _polar bear_,
the one from the Greenlandic coat of arms, colossal, three-quarters of a ton
of muscle, bone, and teeth. With an extreme lethal ability to explode. A
wild animal that has existed for only 20,000 years, and in that time has
known only two types of mammals: its own species and its prey.
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Smilla Jasperson" p 250

. . . when you're tracking something a systematic approach will only take
you so far. Whenever I lose my glasses, first I search for them
systematically. I look in the john and next to the coffee machine and under
the newspaper. But if they're not there, I stop thinking and sit down on a
chair and survey the scene to see whether an idea will come to me, and it
always does; an idea always comes to me. We can't just go around [tearing
everything up] . . . we have to think things through and take note, we have
to discover the crook inside ourselves and figure out where we might have
stashed it . . .
Peter Hoeg - spoken by "Jorgensen" p 306


humormudgeon

I don't know what humor is.
Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
Leo Rosten

Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness its poison.
Stanislaus I (1677-1766)

Humor is just another defense against the universe.
Mel Brooks

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.
Mark Twain (1835-1910), in Albert B. Paine,
_Mark Twain: A Biography_, vol.3, p.1556, 1912

A sense of humor is a gift from God, but like any gift, it can be abused.
Cal Samra

This is a feminist bookstore. There is no humor section.
John Callahan

Fortune and humor govern the world.
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Do you know why God withheld the sense of humor from women?
So that we may love you instead of laugh at you.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell

The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.
There is no humor in heaven.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest
earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost."
James Thurber (1894-1961)

Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain
things in public, but they itch in public.
Tom Walsh

There are three rules for creating humor, but unfortunately no
one knows what they are.
Laurence J. Peter

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at
different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James

A sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the
unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the unbearable.
Moshe Waldoks

Humor should always lie uder the check of reason, and it requires
the directon of the nicest judgment, by so much the more
it as it indulges itself in the most boundless freedoms.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719), _The Spectator_
New Dictionary of Thoughts

Humor has a way of bringing people together. It unites people.
In fact, I'm rather serious when I suggest that someone should plant
a few whoopee cushions in the United Nations.
Ron Dentinger

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will
keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those
that are worth committing.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Analysts have had their go at humor, and I have read some of this
interpretive literature, but without being greatly instructed. Humor can
be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the
innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
E.B. White (1899-1985), "SOME REMARKS ON HUMOR"

generalwisdommudgeon

If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
General George Patton (1885-1945)

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
General William Westmoreland

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.
General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)

There is no security on earth; there is only opportunity.
General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)

The girl and boy are bound by a kiss,
But there's never a bond, old friend, like this:
We have drunk from the same canteen.
Gen. Charles G. (Miles O'Reilly) Halpine (1829-1868)

A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does,
and about two years after he thinks he does.
General Lewis B. Hershey

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do.
The hard part is doing it.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

A good student can learn any place, any time. This is the secret
of knowledge.
General Choi Hong Hi (1918- )

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will
surprise you with their originality.
General George Patton (1885-1945)

Oh yes, I studied dramatics under him for twelve years.
Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
when asked if he knew General Douglas MacArthur,
quoted in Quenton Reynolds,_Quenton Reynolds_

I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be
rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed
of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares.
General George Washington (1732-1799), Letter, 20 July 1794.

last page
next page
index..
home
call me?