Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

Reuters: Top US spy agency does not back CIA on Russian hacking

Obama Farewell: America still hasn't overcome slavery ...

Google spins off self- driving car business to Waymo

After talking with Trump, Bill Gates likens president-elect to JFK ...

Ivy League [UPenn] students replace Shakespeare's portrait with black feminist poet

More intelligence officials are disputing CIA's claim of Russian hacking

CEO of NYT calls on social media companies to subsidize MSM ...

Records: 37% of Detroit machines COUNTED TOO MANY VOTES ...

Man kicked out of Six Flags for looking like Santa ...

SpaceX pushes back first manned flight until 2018

White House 'deeply disturbed by Aleppo situation

DOE won't provide names of climate change staffers to Trump team

Even More Headlines

Lesbian necrophilia film booed [at Cannes Film Festival]

Asian Americans are the healthiest

Woman tries to climb Mt. Everest to prove vegans can do anything: DIES

Iranian Commander: Can destroy Israel in under 8 minutes

Hot angry camel bites off owner's head

Cash now used for fewer than half consumer payments

Model that correctly predicted every election since 1980 gives 2016 verdict ... [Hillery]

Iranian women dress as men to avoid morality police

12-year-old set for college [biochemical engineering]

Naked ladies perform Shakespeare in Central Park

Eating curry fights dementia

Gun used to kill Trayvon Martin sold for $250,000

Growing Old Is Not For Sissies

This title is a quote from my wife ... possibly recycled ... but it is so, so true. My wife just had a new knee installed and I am scheduled to have the same operation in mid-June. Unlike my wife, I am not looking forward to this bit of bodily reconstruction. (I keep imagining an archaeologist finding my bones in a thousand years and marveling at my metalic knee.) Watching my wife in her current struggles to get through the day have upped my trepidation levels to near sissy-dom ... particularly on top of the stress of my stenosis.

Being of an age, I have watched many of my friends and family go through the geriatric gauntlet ... and so I am we'll aware of the travails that still await. Unfortunately there is no option to forgo this penalty for living ... since Ponce de Leon never found that Nirvana in Florida ... although hordes of oldies are still drawn there in similar pursuits. So I must live out my existence on this big blue marble awaiting that old man sharpening up his scythe.

But as Shakespeare once said "a coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once." And, realistically, I know to which crowd I belong. Moreover, as a young man, I used to read that avant garde publication, The Evergreen Review ... and I still recall a Turkish poet's entry that went something like this:

You lie
When you tell me about this thing called death.
Heaven and earth shall pass away
Before I'll cease to be.

He lied.

"His hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale. Told by [a politician], full of sound and fury.  Signifying nothing."  Macbeth by Shakespeare  Full Text of SOTU Speech

Also see: Krauthammer Comments

Where’s Waldo?

Ralph Waldo Emerson has been generously lauded for his philosophical writings and teachings. One of his most famous treatises is his essay on self-reliance (see: Self-Reliance). In a nutshell, Emerson’s transcendental message there had been previously stated by Shakespeare in Hamlet, “To thy own self be true.” Emerson expounds it (a little more clumsily) thusly, “To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius” … and “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide”. But Robert Pirsig stated it most succinctly in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with his praising of “gumption” as the noble virtue.

In a real sense Emerson wove himself into the DNA of the United States with his writings and his many lectures. During the coming of age of America Emerson stood tall and called for nonconformity with a megaphone. And his message has been reprised over and over again in this country … by the nihilists of the early 1900’s, by the bohemians of the 1920’s, by the beatniks of the 1950’s, by the Woodstock love-children of the 1960’s, and the current anarchists that disrupt the financial summits. The major issue I have with Emerson’s message (and with that of many who followed him) is that, all too often, the tearing–down of societal constructs is done without a thought-through notion of what is to replace them. So the destruction caused by such militant nonconformity often takes another generation to rebuild. Sometimes things are better … sometimes, not.

However, my own life has often been “marching to the beat of [that] different drummer.” So when Emerson says: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist”, I must so comply and, as a result, question the universal wisdom of his teachings. That, after all is the irony of the man. How can he preach nonconformity and expect people to conform to what he says? Besides, take a look at Emerson’s above picture, does he look very much like a bohemian wingnut?