Quotes of the week

I realize that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred toward any one.

~Edith Louisa Cavell, quoted by the newspapers as before being shot by Germans in Brussels, Oct. 15, 1915

To murder character is as truly a crime as to murder the body: the tongue of the slanderer is brother to the dagger of the assassin.

~Tryon Edwards~

William Shakespeare quotes

Hamlet

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool". - (Act V, Scene I).

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". - (Act II, Scene II).

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry". - (Act I, Scene III)

"Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind". - (Act III, Scene I).

As You Like It

"All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - (Act II, Scene VII).

"Can one desire too much of a good thing?". - (Act IV, Scene I).

King Henry IV, Part II

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown". - (Act III, Scene I).

Meditation of the week

It was on February 4th in 2004 that Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook (at first called "the facebook"). The Web site's name comes from the student directory book with names and photos that is distributed to incoming students at many universities. Harvard sophomore Zuckerburg, a comp-sci major, had gotten the idea for doing an online facebook when he was slightly drunk on a Tuesday night. He'd just been dumped by his girlfriend, he was looking for a distraction, and he hacked into a Harvard database and copied student names and photos from dorm lists and put them online into a site for which he'd written the code. It was immensely popular: In the first four hours it was up, 450 Harvard students used it to look at 22,000 photos of their classmates. A few days later, the site was shut down by Harvard and Zuckerburg was charged with a number of disciplinary things, including violating privacy rules and breaching security. Eventually, the university dropped the charges, and Zuckerburg moved to Palo Alto set up Facebook, Inc. without graduating from Harvard. Today, about 350 million people around the world actively use Facebook as a social networking tool.

Poem of the Week

Small Town

by Philip Booth

You know.
The light on upstairs
before four every morning. The man
asleep every night before eight.
What programs they watch. Who
traded cars, what keeps the town
moving.
The town knows. You
know. You've known for years over
drugstore coffee. Who hurts, who
loves.
Why, today, in the house
two down from the church, people
you know cannot stop weeping.

writer of the week

Richard Brautigan, (books by this author) was born in Tacoma, Washington (1935), best known for his 1967 book Trout Fishing in America, which has sold millions of copies around the world. It's only 112 pages long, it's abstract, it doesn't have much of a plot, and characters in the story reappear in seemingly unrelated incidents.

An idyllic book, but Brautigan's own childhood in the Pacific Northwest was from idyllic. His father abandoned his mother while she was pregnant with him, and his mother was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. Brautigan had a string of stepfathers. He was extremely poor and often went without food.

On a chilly mid-December night when he was 20, a year and a half after he'd moved out of his mother's house and into a Quaker boarding house, he filled his pockets with rocks, walked up to the Eugene Oregon police station inside City Hall, announced, "I am a criminal. I am going to break the law," starting throwing rocks through the police station window, and asked police to put him behind bars. He was literally starving trying to be a writer, and he figured that if he went to jail he would at least get fed three meals a day.

After a stint at the Oregon State Hospital, Brautigan left for San Francisco. He wore his blond hair long and shaggy, sported old-lady eyeglasses, walked hunched over because of scoliosis, worked on underground newspapers, went to acid-plied rock concerts, and hung around with people in the Beat movement — some people called him "the last of the beats" — but he insisted that he was never one of them. His writing is classified as part of the counterculture movement. During the 1960s, he published a number of books: the poetry collections The Octopus Frontier (1960), All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967), which he handed out for free on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), and Please Plant This Book (1969), which was made up of seed packets that had his poems printed on the sides of the packets. But it was his novel Trout Fishing in America, published in 1967, that made him famous all over the world and an icon of the 1960s counterculture movement.

Brautigan continued to write through out the 1970s, though he was severely depressed. He shot himself in 1984.

A poem by Richard Brautigan:
"30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love"

Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone.

Audio of the week

Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?  (Click “listen”)

Websites of the week

How to Hang On to Your Job

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

Antidepressants don’t work

Drug war- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cefoV_A878 (Bad f**king language alert)

The President stood in front of a gathering of House Republicans today and took questions for more than an hour, urging them to put aside partisan games and work with him for the good of the country.
He was inspiring. Make sure you check out the highlights:
http://my.barackobama.com/ObamaGOP-Email

And finally, the culmination of millennia of scientific endeavor

Flying cat