I got my cast taken off last week. Actually, I took it off myself. I was tired of wearing it.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Quotation from Thomas Paine
The economy is stuck in an unvirtuous cycle.
Quotation from Mark Vitner, Wells Fargo Bank economist
I am soon joining the ranks of the unemployed. My department will shut down in six to twelve months and my “separation package” is contingent on my staying to the very end.
Imagine standing atop a train going 120 mph, and the train goes through a tunnel but you do not. You hit the wall above the opening at 120 mph. That’s how fast you will be going at the end of your fall. Yes, it’s discouraging, but proper planning requires that you know the facts. You’re used to seeing things fall more slowly. You’re used to a jump from a swing or a jungle gym, or a fall from a three-story building on TV action news. Those folks are not going 120 mph. They will not bounce. You will bounce. Your body will be found some distance away from the dent you make in the soil (or crack in the concrete).
Quotation from David Carkeet, Unplanned Freefall? Some Survival Tips
“Nun’s Farts” are little dessert pastries that look like cinnamon rolls. These wee confections are also called bourriques de soeurs nuns ‘belly buttons’ or more politely rondelles ‘slices’ or hirondelles ‘swallows.’ Inching a little higher up the obscenity scale, one finds a doughnut-like roll made from leftover home-made bread dough called trous de soeur ‘nun’s holes.’ They are usually eaten with molasses—to sweeten the experience.
Quotation from Bill Casselman, Acadian Food Words & New Origin of the Word Acadia
Eleanor Roosevelt said “Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.” But wow, if things end badly, does that mean I’m a failure?
It turns out that rumors — or, more precisely, those rumors that continue to be passed along office grapevines — tend to be substantially true.
Quotation from Joel Lovell, Workplace Rumors Are True (The New York Times)
But for most Ugandans, word of doomsday cults brings bitter memories of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, which burnt hundreds of members alive in a church in Kanungu, near the Congolese border, in March 2000. Police believe leaders systematically killed hundreds more followers after their judgment day forecast failed to happen, and corpses were found in mass graves across the country.
Quotation from Daniel Wallis, Police raid doomsday cult born from floods (Reuters)
Yesterday wasn’t a good day. I misjudged a step, fell down and broke my thumb. When I got home from the emergency room, my sister called to tell me Aunt Lucille died. Sometimes, there isn’t any choice but to accept whatever happens.
Well why do the hands of time
So easily unwind?
Some lessons we learn the hard way.
Some lessons don’t come easy and
That’s the price we have to pay.
Song by Melody Gardot, Some Lessons
I’ve felt i could do anything, even with one hand tied behind my back. If i put my mind to it. If I worked hard enough. If i got the chance.
I went to Springfield. There I met a lush,
Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.
He married me when drunk. My life was wretched.
A year passed and one day they found him dead.
That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago.
After a time met Tyler Rountree, villain.
I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate
Went mad about me—so another fortune.
He died one night right in my arms, you know.
(I saw his purple face for years thereafter.)
There was almost a scandal. I moved on,
This time to Paris. I was now a woman,
Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich.
Poem by Edgar Lee Masters, Dora Williams
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby