Quotes of the week
The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. ~Frances Willard
Weirdly, GOP candidates who hate big government just spent billions to get a job in it. Andy Borowitz
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day. (thanks Brother Rob!)
Teach him how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day. (thanks Brother Rob!)
Meditation of the week
How we look at the world.The world we live in has much that is good and much that is bad. Each day we can seek out the positive or the negative. If we choose to dwell on the negative, then that is what we will experience. But if we dwell on the positive, then that is more likely what we will experience.
The choice today is ours. We are the only ones who have the power to change how we look at the world.
How do I view the world today?
Thought for the Day
It is remarkable how things change when I decide to change the way I look at them.
Poem of the Week
Losing Steps
1
It's probably a Sunday morning
in a pickup game, and it's clear
you've begun to leave
fewer people behind.
Your fakes are as good as ever,
but when you move
you're like the Southern Pacific
the first time a car kept up with it,
your opponent at your hip,
with you all the way
to the rim. Five years earlier
he'd have been part of the air
that stayed behind you
in your ascendance.
On the sidelines they're saying,
He's lost a step.
2
In a few more years
it's adult night in a gymnasium
streaked with the abrupt scuff marks
of high schoolers, and another step
leaves you like a wire
burned out in a radio.
You're playing defense,
someone jukes right, goes left,
and you're not fooled
but he's past you anyway,
dust in your eyes,
a few more points against you.
3
Suddenly you're fifty;
if you know anything about steps
you're playing chess
with an old, complicated friend.
But you're walking to a schoolyard
where kids are playing full-court,
telling yourself
the value of experience, a worn down
basketball under your arm,
your legs hanging from your waist
like misplaced sloths in a county
known for its cheetahs and its sunsets.
It's probably a Sunday morning
in a pickup game, and it's clear
you've begun to leave
fewer people behind.
Your fakes are as good as ever,
but when you move
you're like the Southern Pacific
the first time a car kept up with it,
your opponent at your hip,
with you all the way
to the rim. Five years earlier
he'd have been part of the air
that stayed behind you
in your ascendance.
On the sidelines they're saying,
He's lost a step.
2
In a few more years
it's adult night in a gymnasium
streaked with the abrupt scuff marks
of high schoolers, and another step
leaves you like a wire
burned out in a radio.
You're playing defense,
someone jukes right, goes left,
and you're not fooled
but he's past you anyway,
dust in your eyes,
a few more points against you.
3
Suddenly you're fifty;
if you know anything about steps
you're playing chess
with an old, complicated friend.
But you're walking to a schoolyard
where kids are playing full-court,
telling yourself
the value of experience, a worn down
basketball under your arm,
your legs hanging from your waist
like misplaced sloths in a county
known for its cheetahs and its sunsets.
Video of the week
Websites of the week
And finally, the culmination of millennia of scientific endeavor
It's the birthday of singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell, born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod in Alberta, Canada (1943). As a kid, she got a bad case of polio, and in the hospital the staff told her she couldn't go home for Christmas, and she was so upset that she started singing Christmas carols at the top of her lungs, and she decided that she was a good performer. She recovered from the polio and taught herself to play the guitar by using a Pete Seeger instruction book.
She was going to be an artist, but after a year of college she changed her mind and headed to Toronto to try and make it as a singer, and it was on the train to Toronto that she wrote her first song. She had a slow start, performing in coffeehouses and writing songs for other people. But finally she made it as a singer, with songs like "Both Sides Now," "Carey," "Chelsea Morning," "Woodstock," and "Circle Game."
She said: "We Canadians are a bit more nosegay, more Old-Fashioned Bouquet than Americans. We're poets because we're such reminiscent kind of people. [...] My poetry is urbanized and Americanized, but my music is influenced by the prairies. When I was a kid, my mother used to take me out to the fields to teach me birdcalls. There was a lot of space behind individual sounds. People in the city are so accustomed to hearing a jumble of different sounds that when they come to making music, they fill it up with all sorts of different things."
