The tongue of a man is his sword and effective speech is stronger than all fighting.
~Unattributed Author, The Husia of Ancient Egypt, translation by Maulana Kaurenga~
We can be Knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
~Michel de Montaigne
Vegans need no
pricegouging animal abusing Pfizer
Vegans want no domestic
battering accident causing
Budweiser*
Vegans need no services
from corrupt Impermanente Kaiser.
~O Anna Niemus~
Meditation of the week
Many of us, in trying to run away from our essential aloneness, have abused alcohol, work, drugs, food, money, and entertainment. In spite of our frantic activity, we have continued to feel "alone in a crowd," "alone in our dreams," and "lonely in our marriages."
These experiences should prove we cannot successfully avoid coming to terms with our aloneness. The sooner we accept responsibility for our lives, the sooner we will stop inflicting unnecessary pain on ourselves.
In accepting our aloneness, we accept that no one can protect us from ourselves - and that no one can live our lives for us. "Aloneness" simply means that we cannot depend on others for our joy or sorrow. We are the authors of our actions, attitudes, and experiences and not the "victims" of fate or circumstance.
Today I will not be afraid of my aloneness. I will accept total responsibility for my attitudes, actions, or neglects. I will not seek unnecessary pain by relying on what others say or do to make me happy.
It is fortunate that we can think in secret, because our thoughts would quickly get us in trouble if others could read them. In our thoughts, we can choose what we wish to reveal to others before we speak or act.
In the long run, however, we do not really conceal our true thoughts and feelings. The nature of our thoughts shapes our character and becomes part of us. It even affects our appearance. It is not difficult at all to identify people who are fearful, angry, or jealous.
This process has its good side, because kind thoughts and feelings also affect our appearance, and in positive ways. Norman Vincent Peale wrote that "God runs a beauty parlor," meaning that plain people with gracious thoughts tend to become more attractive as years wear on.
As AA members, we need not fear our own thoughts and feelings if we are continuing to work the program. As the sober years stretch out, we will be improving our thoughts and feelings, and this will tell others what the program is doing for us and through us.
I'll remember today that I don't really keep my thoughts and feelings secret. I will think well of myself and all others. I know that there are no hidden thoughts in the long run.
Quotes of the week
You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go... Don't ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.
~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Meditation of the week
It was during this week in 1873 that Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, the pants that came to be known as "blue jeans."
But the story of blue jeans began about 500 years ago, in the port city of Genoa, Italy, where a special thick cloth was used to make pants for fishermen and sailors in the Genoese navy. The cloth came from the Italian town of Chieri, a town known for its weaving and textiles. The fabric started out brown, but was eventually dyed blue with gualdo, or wode, a plant that was popular for its blue dye before indigo. The pants were designed to be heavy-duty, to stand up to wet and dry, to roll up easily when the deck got wet, and to be quickly removable if the wearer fell overboard. Our term "blue jeans" comes from a bastardization of the French "bleu de Genes," or "blue of Genoa." In 2009, Genoa held a three-day conference celebrating their role in the history of blue jeans.
But the fabric that Levi Strauss ended up choosing was serge, from the city of Nîmes, in France. It may have been copied from the Italian version, or it may be a similar fabric that was created independently, but it was this "serge de Nîmes," that Strauss chose for his pants, and "de Nîmes" eventually turned into plain old "denim."
Levi Strauss was an immigrant from Bavaria, born Loeb Strauss in 1829. His family had a dry goods business, and when he was 24 years old, he saw an opportunity in the California Gold Rush and headed west. He had some canvas that he had intended to use for wagon covers and tents, but when he discovered that the men out there had trouble finding sturdy work pants, he started making pants out of canvas. And when he heard that the pants were good but they chafed, he switched fabric, to the "serge de Nîmes."
One of his customers was a tailor named Jacob Davis, from Reno, Nevada, who bought cloth from Strauss and sewed his own work pants from it. Davis had heard from customers that the pockets kept ripping, so he had the idea to reinforce them with metal rivets at their weak points. He decided that he should get a patent for this idea, but he didn't have enough money. So he wrote Strauss and asked if he would be interested in sharing a patent for sturdy work pants with metal rivets, and Strauss agreed. On this day in 1873, the two men received U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings."
By the 1920s, jeans were the most popular men's work pants, although still used only by laborers — with one notable exception being the Santa Fe Artists Colony, whose members wore blue jeans in the 1920s as an artistic statement. In the 1930s, Hollywood Westerns portrayed cowboys in jeans, and they became a novelty fashion item for East Coasters who went to dude ranches. During World War II, jeans were considered suitable work pants for both men and women to wear in factories. For women's jeans, the zipper went down the right side instead of the front.
The 1950s saw the biggest change for jeans, as they became a teenage status symbol. James Dean wore jeans in Rebel Without a Cause, and along with leather jackets, they became the quintessential clothing of bad boys and juvenile delinquents. Jack Kerouac wore blue jeans and work shirts as early as the 1940s. In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, jeans became the outfit of choice for bohemian artists, preferably with a black turtleneck and sandals. In 1960, the word "jeans" was finally used in advertising (teenagers had been using it for years). By the late 1960s, bellbottom jeans were taken up by the flower children of the counterculture, and by the 1970s they were a staple of mainstream American culture. And there are some people who can always wear jeans — John Grisham said: "Writers can wear anything. I could go to a black-tie dinner in New York City with blue jeans on and boots and a cowboy hat and a bow tie, and people would just say, 'Oh, he's a writer.'"
Go now into summer, into the backs of cars,
into the black maws of your own changing,
onto the boardwalks of a thousand splinters,
onto the beaches of a hundred fond memories
in wait, where the sea in all its indefatigability
stammers at the invitation. Go to your vacation,
to the late morning cool of your basement rooms,
the honeysuckle evening of the first kiss, the first
dip and pivot, swivel and twist. Go to where
the clipper ships sail far upriver, where the salmon
swim in the clean, cool pools just to spawn.
Wake to what the spider unspools into a silver
dawn dripping with light. Sleep in sleeping bags,
sleep in sand, sleep at someone else's house
in a land you've never been, where the dreamers
dream in a language you only half understand.
Slip beneath the sheets, slide toward the plate,
swing beneath the bandstand where the secret
things await. Be glad, or be sad if you want,
but be, and be a part of all that marches past
like a parade, and wade through it or swim in it
or dive in it with your eyes open and your mind
open to wind, rain, long days of sun and longer
nights of city lights mixing on wet streets like paint.
A poor person isn't he who has little, but he who needs a lot.
~German Proverb
"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."
Naguib Mahfouz
Meditation of the week
Real friends are those who, when you've made a fool of yourself, don't feel that you've done a permanent job. --Erwin T. Randall What kind of friends do we have? Are they people who complain a lot? Are they people who laugh at us or put others down?
The kind of people we want to be will decide what kind of friends we have. If we want to feel sorry for ourselves, we will choose friends who will tell us how rotten their lives are. If we want to think we're better than others, we will hang around people who laugh at others' mistakes.
But if we want to be the best we can be, we will pick friends who see the good in life, people who will encourage us to be ourselves and who will help us try harder at things that are difficult for us.
How can I be a better friend today?
Author of the Week
It's the birthday of the man who wrote one of the best-known tales in America, The Wizard of Oz. L. Frank Baum(books by this author) was born in Chittenango, New York, on this day in 1856. The tale, which he wrote as a children's novel, was first published in 1900. He dedicated it: "To my good friend & comrade, My Wife," Maud Gage Baum.
L. Frank Baum was a socialist. And he wrote: "There were no poor people in the land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do."
Video of the week
REally!?!
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You can’t make up such a thing as that, I dare you to even try
Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. --Joseph Addison
Having someone to bestow our love on - a child, friend, or lover, perhaps a pet - will provide us with a time each day for intimacy, a time for sharing affection, a time, which assures us our presence is counted on.
But having someone to love is not all we need for happiness. We must have dreams for the future, reasons for getting out of bed in the present, and the well-earned glow that accompanies past achievements. Dreams lose their glamour if that's all we have. If the reasons for rising don't excite us any longer, or the achievements ring hollow, we'll not come to know the happiness for which we've been created.
Happiness is our birthright so long as we live fully and love truly.
The speaker points out that we don't really have
much of a grasp of things, not only the big things,
the important questions, but the small everyday
things. "How many steps up to your back yard? What
is the name of your district representative? What
did you have for breakfast? What is your wife's
shoe size? Can you tell me the color of your
sweetheart's eyes? Do you remember where you
parked the car?" The evidence is overwhelming.
Most of us never truly experience life. "We drift
through life in daydream, missing the true
richness and joy that life has to offer." When the
speaker has finished we gather around to sing
a few inspirational songs. You and I stand at the
back of the group and hum along since we have
forgotten most of the words.
It was on this day in 1611 that the first edition of the King James Bible was published in England. An epidemic of the black plague had struck London so severely that the year before work began on the King James Bible, 30,000 Londoners had died of it. At the same time, Puritans in the country were beginning to agitate against the monarchy as a form of government. And a group of underground Catholics were plotting to assassinate the king.
King James I thought that a new translation of the Bible might help hold the country together. There had been several English translations of the Bible already, and each English version of the Bible had different proponents. King James wanted a Bible that would become the definitive version, a Bible that all English people could read together. Previous versions had been translated from Latin. The King James Bible would make use of those previous translations, but it would attempt to be more accurate to the original Hebrew and Greek.
King James assembled a committee of 54 of the best linguists in the country. They believed that the most important quality of the translation would be that it sound right, since it would be read aloud in churches. So when the committee would gather, each man read his verses aloud, to be judged and revised by the other men.
The translators also deliberately used old-fashioned language. At the time they were working on the Bible, words like "thou" and "sayeth" had already gone out of fashion. Some scholars believe that the translators wanted to give the sense that the language in the Bible came from long ago and far away. And when the meaning of a particular word or phrase was mysterious, they tried to choose English words that would be just as mysterious, just as strange.
Many of the turns of phrase in the King James Bible came from previous translations, but it was King James Version that set them all in stone. Many of those phrases have some of our most enduring English expressions, such as "the land of the living," "sour grapes," "like a lamb to slaughter," "the salt of the earth," "the apple of his eye," "to give up the ghost, and "the valley of the shadow of death."
One of the few sections that was translated almost entirely anew for the King James version was the Book of Genesis, which begins: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and blackness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
The first edition came out on this day in 1611, but for decades, most people preferred the Puritan Geneva Bible, because of its plainer language. It was only after England went through a civil war that the King James Bible came into fashion. People were nostalgic for the period before the war, and they saw the King James Bible as an artifact of that simpler time. The King James version went on to become the English symbol of God and country, and it influenced the way writers have used the English language for hundreds of years.
You can’t make up such a thing as that, I dare you to even try
EMBARRASSING MEDICAL EXAMS
1. A man comes into the ER and yells, "My wife's going to have her baby in the cab!" I grabbed my stuff, rushed out to the cab, lifted the lady's dress, and began to take off her underwear. Suddenly, I noticed that there were several cabs - and I was in the wrong one.
Submitted by Dr. Mark MacDonald, San Antonio , TX
2. At the beginning of my shift, I placed a stethoscope on an elderly and slightly deaf female patient's anterior chest wall. "Big breaths", I instructed. "Yes, they used to be", she replied.
Submitted by Dr. Richard Byrnes, Seattle , WA
3. One day, I had to be the bearer of bad news when I told a wife that her husband had died of a massive myocardial infarct. Not more than five minutes later, I heard her reporting to the rest of the family that he had died of a "massive internal fart".
Submitted by Dr. Susan Steinberg
4. During a patient's two week follow-up appointment with his cardiologist, he informed me, his doctor, that he was having trouble with one of his medications. "Which one?", I asked. "The patch, the nurse told me to put on a new one every six hours, and now I'm running out of places to put it!" I had him quickly undress, and discovered what
I hoped I wouldn't see. Yes, the man had over fifty patches on his body! Now, the instructions include removal of the old patch before applying a new one.
Submitted by Dr. Rebecca St. Clair, Norfolk , VA.
5. While acquainting myself with a new elderly patient, I asked, "How long have you been bedridden?" After a look of complete confusion, she answered...."Why, not for about twenty years - when my husband was alive."
Submitted by Dr. Steven Swanson, Corvallis , OR
As Lester recounts his memories, we see the immediate (and subsequent) reactions to his murder (Ricky & Jane (Thora Birch), Ricky's dad (Chris Cooper), Angela (Mena Suvari), and Carolyn. And we see his memories (beautifully photographed) as he speaks about them. The monologue ends with a beautiful aerial shot of the neighborhood)
Lester: (voice over) I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches forever, like an ocean of time....for me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout Camp, watching falling stars...and yellow leaves, from the maple trees that lined our street...Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper...and the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird. And Janie...and Janie. (twice we see his memories of Jane, the second when she was younger, dressed as a princess) And...(with love) Carolyn. (we see a younger happier Carolyn shrieking happily in a carnival ride; we've seen a photo from this long-ago family activity before -- he was looking at one right before his death) I guess I could be really pissed off about what happened to me...but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain. And I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...(amused) You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry...(cut to black)
You will someday.
Meditation of the week
Attitudes and Limitation
To a large extent, the way we think determines who we are and what happens to us.
We cannot harbor poisonous thoughts without their effects visibly showing in our lives. If we dwell on our inadequacy and ineffectiveness, for example, circumstances will prove us correct because we will invite self-defeating events to us.
On the other hand, replacing destructive thoughts with hope-filled, optimistic ones brings peaceful and confidence-producing circumstances to us. We will radiate competence and joy.
Today I will make it a habit to continually replace pessimistic thoughts with optimistic ones. I will dwell on what is uplifting so that I may increase my courage and confidence as well as better my circumstances.
Stop buying unnecessary things.
Toss half your stuff, learn contentedness.
Reduce half again.
List 4 essential things in your life, stop doing non-essential things.
Do these essentials first each day, clear distractions
focus on each moment.
Let go of attachment to doing, having more.
Fall in love with less.
Video of the week
Jon Stewart: How Not to Do Interviews
"No, don't leave it there! Why would you leave it there? There is a terrible place to leave it!"
—Jon Stewart, railing against CNN's penchant for giving guests free reign to make wild, contradictory, unchecked assertions — then ending the interchange with an abrupt "We'll have to leave it there"
