Web Log Archive, July 8th through July 15th, 2007
Sunday, July 15th, 2007
“They
just showed up, and they’re now beginning operations in full, and in
Washington you've got people saying, ‘Stop!' ”
Alfred, speaking in
Cleveland on July 10th, exactly six months after he announced 'The Surge',
and more than four years after 'Mission Accomplished'.
I'm outta here for the next two weeks!
The next Blog entry will be on Sunday, July 29th.
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
Happy Birthday, Alexander!
"I never meant to say that the
Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are
generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted
a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873
Friday, July 13th,
2007
Happy Birthday, Big O!
"I
never thought my toilet could be an oasis of comfort and happiness!"
click photo for Flash animation
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
Yesterday's history.
Tomorrow's a mystery.
Today is a gift.
That's why they call it 'the present'!
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Yet true it is as cow chews cud,
And trees at spring do yield forth bud,
Except wind stands as never it stood,
It is an ill wind turns none to good.
Thomas Tusser, 1524?-1580, from Five
Hundred Points of Good Husbandry
The
quatrain above is ordinarily quoted as "It is an ill
wind, indeed, that blows no one any good." Where there's a
rotting corpse, there'll be a vulture's banquet. For every hapless home owner,
drowning in debt, there'll be ten circling "investors", whose Financial
Future Is About to Come into Focus!
Consider TeachMeForeclosure.com,
a Web site by which you can learn to profit from the misery of others.
Yes! You might as well learn to:
Negotiate & Buy Real Estate Substantially
Below Market Value,
Find Foreclosures Fast & Beat the Competition and
Use Other People's Money. And why not? If you don't,
someone else will!
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
“Every
dog has his day, unless there are more dogs than days."
"There
are many in this world who hold that things break about even for all of us. I
have observed, for example, that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get
it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.”
Legend has it that those three sentences,
above, were among the last ever composed by the hunter turned lawman turned
newspaper columnist. They were found on the paper still in the typewriter
on the day that he slumped over at his desk: dead - in New York
City - not quite sixty-eight years old - of a heart
attack.
William Barclay ('Bat') Masterson,
(1853-1921)
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Remember
you are not alone
in proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry
and leave us nothing but grief and pain for promised joy.
Robert Burns at age 26
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
Fascinating
and thought-provoking are good terms to characterize a rather
lengthy article in today's NYT Magazine.
'Williams Syndrome', named after New Zealand cardiologist
Dr. J. C. P. Williams (who mysteriously vanished from his London office in the
late 1960's), has an incidence in the general population of about one in 7500.
When I told my baby sister about the article, she wondered aloud if it were the
'Robin Williams Syndrome' because people so affected tend to be annoyingly
gregarious - extroverted, talkative - articulate, even, yet conspicuously
lacking in cognitive skills.
Dr. Williams' classification of the condition was made simply on the basis of
his observation of clusters of "young cardiac
patients [who] were small in stature, had elfin facial features and seemed
friendly but...mentally slow." It was not until the 1990's that the
syndrome was conclusively shown to have a genetic basis (an "accident
during meiosis")
and its study has recently offered researchers some insights concerning the
social evolution of our species:
"To survive we
must relate and work with others, but we must also compete against them, lest we
get left behind. Like the TV show Survivor, this requires a finely
calibrated display of smarts, savvy, grit and hustle. Show too little, and
you’re voted off the island. Show too much, and you’re ousted as a conniving
threat."
Click photo, above, for video.
