"Is Google [still] making us stupid?"

Still a very good question, included in The Best Spiritual Writing of 2010:




Are we ready for 2011? Hard to believe the best is already behind us!

Twain

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself..."

"Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."

torn

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." He also said: "All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world."

'What?!'

That was Philippa Foot's new philosophy. I like it.

What Christmas is all about

It's a pagan holiday, Charlie Brown...

Implausible as it may seem to J&M. It's still a great occasion for festivity and fun, peace on earth, good will etc.

Those are the roots, now let's look to the fruits. (Pass the nutty fruitcake.) Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Happy New Year!

Just remember...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth. 
-The Meaning of Life

writing & thinking

More tips for writers. #6, from Jonathan Safran Foer, is very good. [More good advice]

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." But that's poetically-licensed hyperbole: Emerson collected & wrote about them in the little notebooks he quaintly called "Universe." That's how he came to think for himself and know his own mind: writing, walking, talking, thinking... Simple things. Joy. And endurance.

wise words

Didn't order this for the upcoming Environmental Ethics & Native Wisdom course-- I need a short handle for that, how about EW?-- but maybe I should. There's something very calming, but also damning, in these wise words.

solstice

How about that eclipse? On the solstice, no less! ("First time since 1638...")

“The moon, like a flower
In heaven's high bower,
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.”

William Blake? Whattaya mean, William Blake? 


Garry Trudeau's Dan Asher put it nicely too, in MellowSpeak. "Oh, wow. Look at the moon."

"If you were on the moon during totality, you would look back at the Earth and see a ring of red light around the perimeter—the red light of all the sunsets and sunrises going on at Earth at that moment..." 


I want to go there!

wag more...

A very funny thing happened on our brisk Sunday stroll through the charming old Belle Meade Links neighborhood yesterday morning.

The dogs, sometimes spooked during Halloween season by yard ghosts & ghoulies, ignored the many inflatable Santas & Snoopys (et al) but went ballistic at the site of this guy.

I wasn't quick enough with the phone cam to capture them in his face, teeth bared and growling fiercely, but maybe you can imagine...

This is just the kind of trivial daily ephemera I find myself attending more closely to, during holiday break. Research shows: people who smile at absurdity live longer, and better. Dogs too, I think. A trip to the dog park may be in order. We'll all bark less.