April 2013 Quotations

"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and [to] hide it at the same time."
~~ Thornton Wilder [1897-1975]

"Why can't I say 'What needs doing?' and then go do it?"
~~ filmmaker Sara Lamm

"I may be dumb but I'm not stupid."
~~ wrongly attributed to football player & announcer Terry Bradshaw, but predates him by fifty-odd years

"Ninety percent of [baseball] is half mental."
~~ Jim Wohlford

"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something [that] you don't believe is right."
~~ Dame Jane Goodall

"If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?"
~~ Tina Fey

"Intellectual labor tears a man out of society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him toward men."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

"If you don't have confidence, you'll alway find a way not to win."
~~ Olympic champion Carl Lewis

"Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but to see quickly how to make them good."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]

"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
~~ writer Maxim Gorky [1868-1936]

“Peace is something that you only get by war or the threat of war, however tacit the threat.”
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Everything comes to those who wait . . . except a cat."
~~ racecar driver Mario Andretti

"Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is."
~~ author Rebecca Solnit

"The function of man is to live, not to exist."
~~ Jack London [1876-1916]

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
~~ author William Arthur Ward [1921-94]

"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."
~~ French author Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"If you want the present and the future to be different from the past, Spinoza tells us, study the past. Find out the causes that made it what it was and bring different causes to bear."
~~ Will and Ariel Durant

"Tempus sure does fugit."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"Class is very simple in America. You're in the upper class if your name is on the building; you're in the middle class if your name is on your desk; and you're in the working class if your name is on your shirt."
~~ syndicated comedian Argus Hamilton

"Public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else."
~~ Douglas Adams [1952-2001]

"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you won't do anything."
~~ author M. Scott Peck [1936-2005]

"Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."
~~ historian Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1821-81]

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy [that] justice can have."
~~ James Baldwin [1924-87]

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking [that] they can't lose."
~~ Bill Gates

"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."
~~ Julia Child [1912-2004]

"Any compulsion tries to justify itself."
~~ Joan Didion

"Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"Never marry a man [that] you wouldn't want to be divorced from."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
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"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"He who is too eager to preserve his originality is already losing it."
~~ German composer Robert Schumann [1810-56]

"Tragedy is when I get a paper cut on my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die."
~~ Mel Brooks

"Stories happen to those who tell them."
~~ Greek historian Thucydides [c.460–c.395 BCE]

"Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible."
~~ Colin Powell

"Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]

"For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence."
~~ Philip Roth

"If you want to annoy your neighbors, tell the truth about them."
~~ Italian satirist Pietro Aretino [1492-1556]

"We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]

"If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and you would achieve nothing."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]

"Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower from the cliffs of despair."
~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh [1906-2001]

"Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it."
~~ Anthony Trollope [1815-82]

“The trouble with fiction . . . is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1918-2008]

“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”
~~ Anthony Burgess [1917-93]

“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”
~~ Truman Capote [1924-84]

"Every great film should seem new every time [that] you see it."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]

“Life calls the tune, we dance.”
~~ John Galsworthy [1867-1933]

"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
~~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
~~ Joseph Heller [1923-99]

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Just Another Blatant Republican Lie

"The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual."

Also, the lies perpetrated by the Republican Party have no end, it seems.

The accusation that President Barack Obama takes too much vacation time is baseless. Barack Obama took 131 days vacation in his first term of office; double that for two terms, the rate is 260 days in eight years.

President George Dubya Bush took 1,020 days of vacation time in his two terms, which factors out at FOUR times the rate of President Obama.

President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush also exceeded the Obama vacation rate.

“If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

March-April 2013 News Factoids

Two new studies in the journal Science conclude that wild bees, such as the American bumblebee, seem to be disappearing in the Midwest in an alarming manner. There are 4,000 species of wild bees in America and 49 of them are bumblebees. Scientists suspect a combination of disease and parasites for the dwindling of both wild and domesticated bees. Another recent article purports that half of the commercial bee colonies in America disappeared in 2012.

Funniest movie premise in a long time: Disney announced the animated "Planes", a spin-off from "Cars"; the main character is an airplane named Dusty who dreams of winning the pylon air races but is 'crippled by an extreme fear of heights'!

The Federal sequester of 2013 cuts 10,000 teaching jobs, 70,000 spots for preschoolers in Head Start, $43 million for food programs for seniors, $35 million for local fire departments, and access to nutrition assistance for over half a million women and their families. {Thank a Republican, huh?}

ANOTHER BRILLIANT IDEA: Since I have set up a store at Cafe Press to sell hats with the Working Minds logo, I can also design t-shirts whenever I have a couple of hours with nothing to do. The new idea is a t-shirt that has small lettering on the back "this t-shirt intentionally left blank" {hee hee hee}. Second idea, weeks later: KEEP CALM AND KARAOKE - but t-shirts and such are already available.

DROUGHT, ANYONE? Spring seems to be here already (in early March), local temperatures are 70s in the daytime and 40s at night, with only ONE day of snow this winter. (I live at precisely 5000 feet elevation.)

White Americans are five times more likely to commit suicide with a gun than to be shot by someone else. But for each Afro-American who uses a gun to take his/her life, five others are shot to death by other people. – Washington Post

The last automobile dealer in the town of Tucumcari, New Mexico closed in April; Interstate Automotive employed 13 people. (The three car dealers in Belén, New Mexico closed or moved in 2009.)

Spent the day in the waiting room at the Chevy dealer watching TV which was very educational. Learned from "C.S.I." that if you are going to shoot somebody, a cat makes a very good silencer. (LMAO!)

Somebody should write a country-western song with the title
"Tears On My Mousepad (Since You De-friended Me)".

Anonymous Collective April 2013 video
'We Will No Longer Tolerate The Sleep of The Masses' [6:57] at YouTube
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Congressional Reform Act of 2013

This arrived in my Inbox from someone who thought that it was real. Easy to debunk as a viral email slash chain letter, because it originated back in January and July of 2011. A later version added a matching quote from Warren Buffett, and the most recent version is given as a request initiated by Buffett. Sorry, it is an email hoax.

Having said that, it sure would be wonderful if these ideas were indeed passed into law. So I am posting a slightly-revised text of the bogus law here in the hope that some Congressperson will actually put forward such a reform, and get co-sponsors, and so on. And what you can do is forward the proposal – NOT as an edict from Warren Buffett, but as a genuine Good Idea – to your delegate in the U.S. Congress and in the U.S. Senate.

Where is Frank Capra's Mr. Jefferson Smith when we really need him?

1. No Tenure / No Pension: A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.

2. Congress Participates in Social Security: All funds in the Congressional Retirement Fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people. Such funds may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Retirement Plan: Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Pay Raises: Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will increase by the lower of C.P.I. or 3%.

5. Health Benefits: Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Equal Rights: Congress must equally abide by all laws that they impose on the American people.

7. Contracts: All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective at the end of the calendar year. The American people did not make such contracts with members of Congress. Serving in Congress is an honor not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved