A MEA CULPA.

SOME NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS.

SOME MTTO.

CHARLES MINGUS.

JAMES LEE BURKE.

AND A ROYAL ENDING.

...and the photo on right is apropos of nothing. I just liked it.

Like the Huffington Post, I’ve succumbed to the sin of repurposing (or absconding with?) photos, illustrations, charts and similar elements and posted in ways that might suggest that the content is something other than simply cutting and pasting things I’ve found around the web to complement my content. But in my own defense, I’ve been motivated by a desire to avoid asking readers to go to content via links—which can often lead to inconvenient detours and annoying navigation, so I’ve plucked images and other visuals and replanted them here and then used them to enhance my own commentary and/or interpretation. Wherever such cutting and pasting might lead to confusion, I will henceforth make note and such items will be duly identified and credited.

Speaking of which. My blogging mentor: TeddyVegas.blogspot.com posted this the other day. It’s the 19 year old Isaac Newton’s list of sins (self-admittedly committed before Whitsunday--The Sunday of the feast of Whitsun or Pentecost in the Christian liturgical year, observed 7 weeks after Easter).

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/04/isaac-newton-list-of-sins/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29

And at the above site is a link to another list which is the one here.


It's Woody Guthrie’s 1942 list of New Year’s Resolutions. Click on the photo to enlarge and dig those doodles.


MTTO
The Internet is not great because it provides so many answers, but because it provides an endless thread of connections to so many questions. The Internet is the ultimate Socratic Method.

Arguing about your religion is like arguing about your dreams…

The problem with revolutions is that it requires radicals to lead them and then you end up with the worst possible thing: Radicals with Power.

How would you explain the concept of “comfort food” to a hungry person?

John Updike never wrote a novel I liked, and never wrote a review of someone else’s that I disliked.

Charles Mingus aspired to be a professional cellist in a symphony orchestra but was told at a young age that as a black man he would never be hired, regardless of his abilities. Did he grow up angry? You better believe it.

Mingus’ autobiography Beneath the Underdog, is an underrated memoir masterpiece. Brutally honest, unadorned and untainted by self-conscious egocentricity, and a window on a time in American life and culture when…well, when things weren’t so different than they had been for the underclass and underdog before or since.

“Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”
― Charles Mingus

And only on the internet can you find (so quickly) something like this. It's Mingus giving step by step instruction on how to train your cat to use the toilet. And by that he means; to use it as a human being would. I don't have a cat, but I read the whole thing and thought that it revealed something just as great in Mingus' soul as it did about Feline potential for potty training.

Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program

http://mingusmingusmingus.com/Mingus/cat_training.html

Just finished reading Feast Day of Fools by James Lee Burke. I had read a couple of novels from his popular Dave Robicheaux series, but nothing else. He's great. A glib summation might be that he's Cormac McCarthy with fewer pretenses and more traditional plots. But that's unfair. He's just James Lee Burke and he's terrific. Interesting bit of trivia: he holds some kind of record for the most rejections(111) by Publishing Houses for a single novel. The book was called The Lost Get-Back Boogie and it was finally picked up by the LSU University Press and went on to be nominated for The Pulitzer Prize.

Couple of Burke quotes:

“I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.”

“It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.”

And one more random quote for contrast.

"I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." --Prince Philip