From an obscure movie - words to think about.
"Life is like licking honey from a thorn."
Genius!
More things to think about: Yesterday's entry was #7,001 on this blog. That number is almost hard to believe. How much time have I wasted in the last 23 years and to what good? I think it's good for me.
There is a big difference bewtween Fathers Day and Father's Day. It could mean a number of things. Think about this one...a great song I just love.
Salvador Dali was one of the most renowned artists of the 20th century. He lived from 1904 to 1989. To say that he was a little quirky is an understatement.
Dali's artistry is mostly in the category of surrealism. It can most easily be described as unreal. This led him also into cubism which can most easily be described as making everything out cubes. He also had a period of Dada art work which puts the subject into political bounds.
His quirkyness wasn't displayed solely in his art. He kept pets that might be called abnormal. He loved cats and kept an ocelot. Ocelots do not make great pets. They tend to be mean and artists need all their fingers to do their work. He took that creature into restaurants to eat along side him. It's said that he was seldom seen without it. He loved that cat. He called it affectionately, Babou.
He also kept an anteater. He would take it for walks on a leash. One time, he took it onto a television talk show. The anteater was mostly for show. I don't think it had a name. He didn't love it like the ocelot.
I'm a sometimes - artist. I have no pets.
Isn't all trivia, trivial? Maybe, maybe not.
Elon Musk has a reported net worth of about $380 billion (give or take) these days and, maybe, he is the richest man in the world.
I just saw where famous American Industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, had a net worth, in today's dollars, at the same level. He was also known as the richest man in the world. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company in the 1860s. Around the turn of the century, while he controlled most of the gas/oil market in our country, he became the greatest philanthropist in our country's history. A great legacy was built. He died in 1937. His good works go on.
What final note will we find next to the Elon Musk bio?
I hope y'all were able to pray on Wednesday without my help. It's not a hard thing to do and a very good habit to get into. Don't feel silly. No one needs know what you're doing but you. . . and your God.
Here is a wonderful prayer Catholics say to the mother of Jesus - asking her help. She, a go-between for you and the Lord. It is usually used as the final prayer of the rosary. It may be a little overly dramatic and outdated in it's use of language for some but it conveys the message that we are asking for her help with her son.
What would Americans do without their cars? We love 'em, we hate 'em. Right now we gotta have 'em. Maybe someday we wont need them - but not while I'm alive. Man, I would love to be able to fly an airplane.
You can laugh at me if you like but I've acquired the exact same kind of car the last four times I've had to deal with a dealer. Eleven years in a row, all white, Honda CRVs. I know, "How boring!" Oh well, I'm just a boring guy.
The first ever car that I purchased was a red Chevy Corvair, 1963 (I think) purchased in 1965. Black interior, bucket seats, four on-the-floor. I loved it. In a few years, Ralph Nader wrote a book titled "Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile blah blah blah." In it he told how the Corvair should be taken off the road because it's going to kill anyone who drives it. That was the end of the cute little Corvair - Chevy stopped making them.
The Corvair was just one of a large number of small cars the American automobile industry attempted to sell as a fix for high gasoline prices from 1960 thru 1990. Mostly, they were all junk. Toyota and Honda came to this country and taught our industry how to make a car. Our auto industry has never really recovered.
Here is a list of the small ones that I remember.
I took a ten-day vacation and filled the blog with retreads while I was gone. When I came home, I started my vacation from the blog. It was relaxing. Mostly, I layed in bed and when I got up I layed on the couch. Except for frequent visits to the refrigerator, I layed on the couch until it was time to lay on the bed. Nothing much caught my interest except food, of course. So here is some information I picked up about our food supply. Just which foods do we import, how much and from where. The answer is that we import a lot of food from a lot of places. I made this list and limited it to foods we imported that added up to more than a half billion dollars worth. Yes, billion with a 'b'.
Here's another from the past. I think it's really good.
Thomas Jefferson was a statesman, a farmer, a lawyer, a diplomat, an architect, and a philosopher. He was a writer of the Declaration of Independence, organizer of the Louisiana Purchase, the first Secretary of State, a President of the United States after being the Vice President. He was one of our Founding Fathers.
The Jefferson Memorial stands in his honor in Washington D.C. It is a large structure made of marble and limestone with a statue of his likeness in the center of the interior. The four sides of the domed and pillared monument have quotations and excerpts of his writings carved into them. Along the facing under the dome is carved this special quotation:
"I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of a man."
Do you get it? Jefferson was decrying anything that subverts our minds, makes us believe lies, leads us astray the truth. It was a solemn feeling for him.
He advocated all the freedoms he wrote into the 'Declaration' and admired in the Constitution but more than that, he wanted everyone to have an independent mind. Free to make one's own choices. Free to make well-informed decisions.
He wrote this two centuries ago but it is current today. It would be aimed at today's press and media or at today's educators or at those who monopolize the internet - all these and more.
I say, resist their control as best you can. Guard your children. Educate and re-educate yourself. Challenge your own beliefs. Pray for our country and the world.
My thursday night dinner group is intending to dine at the Exemplar in Mariemont this evening. I've been there many times and have always been happy with the food and service. Of course, some of my children and grandchildren live, have lived and are or were schooled there. With outsiders, it often comes up about how to pronounce the Village's name. I wrote this a few years ago.
Again, I'm digging into old entries I've made. These fit my mood this Memorial Day week.
We are nearing Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. Never forget our military and veterans. Here is a prayer I found on the back of handout given at the church service memorializing a friend.
Memorial Day got me in this mood. I searched and found this in my older entries in this blog. It's an important fact to remember. Play the YouTube video at the bottom.
Here is one I wrote a few years ago. It is interesting if you haven't seen or heard of it before.
Ten (10) prisoners escaped from a New Orleans jail. Five were captured almost immediately. Now, the number of jail employees who assisted the escapees has risen to about the same number as the escapees. It almost always requires inside help to make a prison break. Only in the movies do the criminals do it all by themselves.
You've all heard that Qatar has offered, or given, a Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet to the U.S. for use as Air Force One. It'll take a little while to bring it up to AF One standards on the interior - some people think it will cost about $1B to do it. We forget but the government has had two 747s on order from Boeing for use as Air Force One for over five years. Boeing had promised delivery by 2022 but now has said it expects them to be delivered by 2027 - just before President Trump leaves office. Lets hope the doors don't fly off during flight. Maybe Boeing is still trying to figure out why their space capsule was faulty.
The P. Diddy trial is fulfilling the national desire for lascivious reports from normally rational (semi-rational) press sources. It's a freakin' mess. I'm guessing the first book about the trial will be published before the end of the trial - and, it will only be sold with a brown paper bag over it.
The big winner at the movie theaters last weekend was "Final Destination: Bloodlines". Of course, it's in the Horror genre. I never heard of any of the cast. I think they tried to hide in the lean-to with all the power saws instead of taking the running car.
The stock market indices are in the red for the week but still way up for the past month. The market is not for the faint of heart - it jumps or falls every time Trump expounds on new investments or threatens a new tariff .
Tornadoes have been ravaging southern Kentucky and others. Insurance becomes a larger portion of a family's costs every day. The fires in California have had a huge impact there and other weather phenomena will everywhere.
Posts
All Comments
Posts
All Comments
