Sunday, August 29, 2010

Again I Have No Title


While walking with me out on the back deck Eva suddenly scampered over to the swimming pool's edge and excitedly reached down to the surface and grabbed up a lashing-tailed six-inch long lizard that was swimming rapidly away. After much coaxing I persuaded Eva to drop the furiously writhing creature onto the graveled ground at the outer fence. I then later fetched the pool skimmer and launched the hapless invader out into the remorseless desert.

Case closed.

. . .

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."



. . .

Last night just before I fell asleep a seemingly profound thought occurred to me:

From the instant of The Big Bang's beginning until the instant of the universe reaching total entropy, many changes will have taken place, one of them being the emergence of biological life on Earth and its eventual demise long before the Earth's Sun will have unavoidably expired.

A day later, I still remember the thought. But I no longer am excited by it. Ho hum.

. . .

Chicago is . . .



. . .

YouTube has some video-recorded messages to Christopher Hitchens who is now suffering from esophageal cancer which can be viewed at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNARwNOTrMw&feature=player_embedded#!

. . .

I found the word naivety as I was reading in an informal journal and was delighted to learn that this word actually now exists in the English language. I looked it up in an online dictionary and found:

(nah-EVE-tee) Noun: the state or quality of being naive; ingenuousness; simplicity; gullibility Alternative spelling of naïveté. naivete, naiveté, naïvete, naivety

Now that is a word I can use, and will -- probably much too often.

. . .

Do you see the cube below as if you are on its left side looking up into it or as if you are on its right side looking down into it?

Necker Cube

Can you alternately realign your eyes and view the cube as if from each perspective?

Curious, eh? And thought provoking.


Also thought-provoking is a paragraph I read at The Buddha Is Not Serious blog:

Ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality. And we go from birth to death, unless we wake up, wasting most of our life with them. The gruesome part of sitting (and it is gruesome, believe me) is to begin to see what is really going on in our mind. It is a shocker for all of us. We see that we are violent, prejudiced, and selfish. We are all those things because a conditioned life based on false thinking leads to these states. Human beings are basically good, kind, and compassionate, but it takes hard digging to uncover that buried jewel.


And finally . . .

"As some people say" is one of the more perniciously lazy phrases in the English language.
--PZ Myers

No comments:

Post a Comment