Delete Me First!

Quotes of the week

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

~Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

Jesse Ventura

And this week from Alaska Rob: “Carrying a loaded firearm into a bar is like driving a combat-ready military force into a foreign country. There's no guarantee that war might break out, but...”

Favorite bumper sticker this week:  Have a nice day, somewhere else

Meditation of the week

New feelings may seem uncomfortable at first. I may be used to feeling afraid and anxious, or depressed and alone. In my new life, I may begin to feel joy or happiness, or peace and calm.

These new feelings are signs that I'm changing and learning how to accept my new way of thinking. Feeling peaceful means I'm healing from all the crises in my past. If I confuse feeling peaceful with feeling bored, I need to remind myself that the absence of fear or crisis takes awhile to get used to.

I am glad to welcome my new feelings and emotions; they are one way to know how well I'm doing.

Poem of the Week

My Name

by Mark Strand

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Author of the week

It was on May15th in 1886 that Emily Dickinson (books by this author) died at the age of 55. She wrote:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

Good Idea of the week

It was on this day (May 12^th) in 1935 that the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous first met, in Akron, Ohio. Recovering alcoholic Bill Wilson (books by this author) was on a business trip, and he felt the need for a drink. But he wanted to stay sober, so he looked for support from someone who would understand what he was going through. He was introduced to Dr. Bob Smith, a member of an evangelical Christian movement called the Oxford Group. The two men spread the word about starting a support group for alcoholics. Wilson wrote a book in 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism. The book described the 12-step program that the support group used. The first three steps listed in the original book were:

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Many other types of groups today follow the 12-step model developed by Alcoholics Anonymous, including Clutterers Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Online Gamers Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Workaholics Anonymous.

Video of the week

Have you noticed that Dick Cheney seems to be everywhere these days?

Websites of the week

Polish photographer documents four years of drunken revelry in Cardiff

Murphy’s laws site

Your weekly address and much more is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/

The funniest truth on TV is www.thedailyshow.com

And finally, the culmination of millennia of scientific endeavor

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