The Concept Of Prayer

Tucson Weather Today

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"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
--Mark Twain


The Folly Of Prayer

Is prayer ever answered? Of course not. In fact, religious and philosophical objections to the very study of prayer's efficacy exist. Many interpret Deuteronomy 6:16 "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test"to mean that prayer cannot, or should not, be examined.

The fact is, God never answers any prayers. The entire idea that "God answers prayers" is an illusion created by human imagination.

source:

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
--Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

(Mark Twain)

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I have been paying attention to some of the words being bandied about by some of the interviewed GOP candidates and it seems to me that their high-flown rhetoric contains many 50-cent words, of which the actual meaning they quite evidently do not correctly comprehend.

One of those words is:

existential [eggz-is-TEN-shul]
adjective
1. of or relating to existence.
2. concerned with existence, especially human existence as viewed in the theories of existentialism.
3. (of a proposition) affirming or implying the existence of a thing.

Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject -- not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.

Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher, though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual -- not society or religion -- is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically").

Existentialism


"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." 
--Mark Twain

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Did You Know . . .?

Macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs.

Ingestion of macadamia nuts by dogs has been associated with a nonfatal syndrome characterized by vomiting, ataxia, weakness, hyperthermia, and depression. Dogs are the only species in which signs have been reported.

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WORD FOR TODAY

apparatchik [ah-pah-RAH-chik]
noun
1. a member of a Communist apparat
2. an official or bureaucrat in any organization


"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
--Mark Twain

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This Is Who I Am

Fact Into Fiction And Back Again

     

Tucson Weather Today

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Well, I tinkered a bit with my first draft but did not enact any major revision, just added a few embellishments that were suggested by a friend. There is no doubt that I will continue to redo it some more in the hope of improving it. But I am going to post it here in the blog, in the form it now stands.

THINGS THE MISANTHROPE REMEMBERS
By Gene Chambers

You say you want me to tell you how it was back when I was growing up in the middle of the twentieth century? Well, okay. Now let me see...

I remember the time I went down to the Iroquois river and happened to see KiKi Rizensun, the old Indian who was the last Potawatomi in the area , or so it was said. Old KiKi was swinging West along the beaten path on the South bank, at the edge of the cornfield on the Kyrkendahl property. Close on to the Babcock limestone quarry, it was.

I was just a kid, only about twelve years old, I believe. But that was near the start of the 1950s and raggedy brats like me in little farming towns like Rensselaer did a lot of runnin' wild, as it was called back then, and nobody ever thought a thing was wrong with that. My dog Dusty was with me and that's all a kid needed back in them times.

What I was thinking about just before old KiKi came loping along the path was this: When I die, when I leave this physical stage of existence, it will be to enter into a new and wondrous wider realm, not of biological consciousness as we recognize it but a state of being unknowable and completely unimaginable to the limited powers of the human mind.

Now, I know you probably think a young snot-nose like me could not think such deep thoughts, probably because I wouldn't know enough of the two-dollar words it takes to do such contemplating. But you'd be just as wrong as  you could be. There's lots and lots of us youngsters who're smarter than most adults think we are. And smarter than those same adults, too, come to think about it.

I stopped in front of that old Injun and he stopped too. KiKi didn't ever wear a feather in the dirty bandanna wrapped around his head, but I always saw one there anyway. I didn't pay any attention to the rips in the arms of his shirt or the patches sewed onto the knees of his old faded denim pants. Most of my stuff was torn and patched up, too.

"Hey there, KiKi," I hollered, because I knew he was kind of hard of hearing.

He just stood there and didn't say a thing. Just stood there and looked at me. He didn't ever talk much. I knew him because he sometimes attended the little storefront church on Washington Street where my mom made me and my brother Joe go to on Sundays. It was The Gospel Tabernacle and only poor folks went there. The rich people from town and from the countryside all went to the Presbyterian, or the Methodist, or the big Catholic Church on McKinley Street.

"Did you find anything good down by the Cattle Crossing?' I asked. The Cattle Crossing was the name of the wide shallow spot where the grazing cows crossed the river and where us kids all went to swim in the summertime. Some of the rowdies called it B-A-B, which stands for Bare Ass Beach.

KiKi still didn't say anything but kept on standing there on the path and staring down at me. He was real skinny and sometimes stood kind of stooped over, but he was pretty tall.

Dusty was being a dog, running around us in circles and nosing into us each time one of them circles brought him in close enough. He came a bit too close to KiKi once and got a swift kick for his trouble.

"Hey!" I yelled, "don't kick my dog."

"Not kick dog."

"You did too. I saw you."

He dropped to squat on his heels, still gazing at my face.

"You think you see KiKi kick dog?"

I nodded, and he said:

"A vision one time comes to KiKi . . . The red man does not see like the white man sees. The white man sees only what he believes is there. The vision of the red man is... as when one stands alone in a field in the moonless dark of midnight during a thunderstorm, unable to see anything for the blackness all around and all at once a blaze of lightning illuminates before his eyes the total landscape, one view that then seems so detailed, and this sight is that of the entire Earth presented there before him, time prolonged and kept forever in his mind, in that instant."

It seems strange to me now since I'm pretty sure KiKi didn't know that many English words, not those exact words anyhow. But that was his meaning, it seems to me.

Nevertheless, that's how I want to remember it.

Later that very day, Dusty got hit by a car speeding East along on Highway 421. The car didn't even stop, but Dusty crawled up under some bushes that were growing all  around the house there on the corner of 421 and Melville Street. I crawled in after him but he was laying there breathing real big breaths and whimpering. I tried to hug him but he whimpered louder and I thought I must be hurting him. So I let go of him and just sat there with him. Dusty was not only my dog, he was my friend.

After a while Dusty got real quiet. He stopped breathing and I knew that Dusty was dead.

I ran all the way home and got my Dad and we took his body home and we buried him in a deep hole we dug on the edge of the vegetable garden.

A few days after that, when I was spending the night at Grandma's house, I was still trying to understand about death, and I asked Grandma about it, and about Mary Belle (my little sister who'd also been killed after being hit by a car) and about the time after the war when Uncle Glen (her son) came home from German and then got killed when he was hit by a train up at Michigan City. Grandma began to cry real quiet like, and again she started telling me about how we would be seeing Mary Belle and Uncle Glen again one day in Heaven. And I asked her, "Dusty too?"

I don't remember exactly what she said about that but she probably just said, "Yes, Dusty too."

Uh-huh, that's what she told me. Grown ups always tried to say whatever they thought a guy wanted to hear.

Later that evening I was telling them about the Science Fiction story I had read where men went to the moon and did lots of adventurous things. Grandpa laughed and told me that nobody could ever go to the moon, because the moon wasn't really there, it was just a reflection from the sun, and when I asked him what the sun was reflecting off of he said it was reflecting off of the sky.


Several years later, around July 20, 1969, I asked Grandma (Grandpa was gone by then) if she remembered his telling me that.

She said she did.


(Copyright 2013 Gene Chambers)

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HISTORICAL CLIP

On this day, February 18 in 1885, Mark Twain published his famous -- and famously controversial -- novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens) first introduced Huck Finn as the best friend of Tom Sawyer, hero of his tremendously successful novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Though Twain saw Huck's story as a kind of sequel to his earlier book, the new novel was far more serious, focusing on the institution of slavery and other aspects of life in the antebellum South.

Antebellum refers to the period before a war, especially the American Civil War. The Antebellum South is typically defined by historians as the period of time between the War of 1812 and the American Civil War.

Aside from its controversial nature and its continuing popularity with young readers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been hailed by many serious literary critics as a masterpiece. No less a judge than Ernest Hemingway famously declared that the book marked the beginning of American literature: "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

From: HISTORY

Note:
The Writer's Almanac has an interesting article regarding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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WORD FOR TODAY

apotheosis [a-pahth-ee-OH-suhs]
noun
-  the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god.
-  the ideal example; epitome; quintessence.
--Dictionary.com

1.  the elevation of a person to the rank of a god; deification
2.  glorification of a person or thing.
3.  a glorified ideal.
4.  the best or greatest time or event: ex: the apotheosis of De Niro's career.
--World English Dictionary

Apotheosis (also called divinization and deification) is the glorification of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre.

In theology, the term apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. In art, the term refers to the treatment of any subject (a figure, group, locale, motif, convention or melody) in a particularly grand or exalted manner.
--Wikipedia

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY


Vanna White

Born Feb 18, 1957
Age:  55 years old

Vanna White (born Vanna Marie Rosich) is an American television personality and film actress best known as the hostess of Wheel of Fortune since 1982.

John Travolta

Born Feb 18, 1954
Age:   58 years old

John Joseph Travolta is an American actor, dancer, and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta's acting career declined through the 1980s. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.

Molly Ringwald

Born Feb 18, 1968
Age:  44 years old

Molly Kathleen Ringwald is an American actress, singer, dancer, and author. Having appeared in the John Hughes films Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986), Ringwald is part of the 80's "Brat Pack" and is frequently named the greatest teen star of all time. She currently plays Anne Juergens in the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

Cybill Shepherd

Born Feb 18, 1950
Age:  62 years old

Cybill Lynne Shepherd is an American actress, singer and former model. Her better known roles include starring as Jacy in The Last Picture Show (1971), as Betsy in Taxi Driver (1976), as Maddie Hayes in Moonlighting (1985–1989), as Cybill Sheridan in Cybill (1995–1998), as Phyllis Kroll in The L Word (2007–2009) and as Madeleine Spencer in Psych (2008–2010).

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No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
--Stephen King

And...

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
--E. L. Doctorow

Last Day Of The Month

 

Tucson Weather Today
 

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text goes here . . .

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WORD FOR TODAY

criterion
noun
a standard by which something can be judged or decided
plural criteria

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

 

Kaley Cuoco

 

Birthday: November 30, 1985
Age: 26 years old

Kaley Christine Cuoco is an American film and television actress. She first came to attention for her role as Bridget Hennessy on the Emmy Award-winning sitcom 8 Simple Rules (2002–2005). She later starred as Billie Jenkins on the final season of the supernatural drama series Charmed (2005–2006). She has gained international acclaim and recognition for her current role as Penny on the Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning comedy series The Big Bang Theory (2007–present), which became the highest rated comedy on US television among adults 18–49 for the 2009–10 season.

By the way, Kaley is a vegetarian.

Mark Twain

 

Birthday: November 30, 1835
Death Date: April 21, 1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well received. Twain had found his calling.

Dick Clark

 

Birthday: November 30, 1929
Death Date: Apr 18, 2012

Richard Augustus Wagstaff "Dick" Clark, Jr. was an American radio personality and television personality, as well as a cultural icon who remains best known for hosting American television's longest-running variety show, American Bandstand, from 1957 to 1987. He also hosted the game show Pyramid and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, which transmitted Times Square's New Year's Eve celebrations worldwide.

As host of American Bandstand, with his strong communication skills, Clark was a "primary force in legitimizing rock and roll," not only to teenagers, but also to America's adult population. The show gave many new music artists their first exposure to national audiences, including Ike and Tina Turner, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, Talking Heads and Simon & Garfunkel. His shows were among the first where blacks and whites performed on the same stage and the live audience seating was desegregated. Singer Paul Anka claimed that Bandstand was responsible for creating a "youth culture." Due to his youthful appearance, Clark was often referred to as "America's oldest teenager".

Shirley Chisholm

 

Birthday: November 30, 1924
Death Date: Jan 1, 2005

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was an American politician, educator, and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

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"The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning."
--Lewis Thomas

Reading Instead Of Writing... Again

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Tucson Weather Today

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Yesterday, being a long and overcast day filled with scattered and chilly rain showers and periodic sudden cessations of wi-fi service, I took up my old dog-eared hard bound copy of The Best Essays Of The Century edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan and curled up in my recliner under a 40 watt lamp and lost myself in my lifelong favorite pastime... absorbing the thoughts and revelations of other minds.

The first essay was Corn-pone Opinions by Mark Twain which was a stimulating start to an entire day devoted to deep reflection on the many circumlocutions and derivations as well as adroit deviations the biological brain is capable of formulating within myriad minds in its timeless search for the shadowed and shrouded basic meaning behind the existence of human life.

Who better than Mark Twain could cut through the omnipresence of human pretense and point out the Darwinesque bare bones skeleton of self-interest and its underlying instinctual decree for perpetuation of the species that lives merely millimeters beneath the unconsciously fraudulent surface?

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Sometimes I allow myself to laugh (and sometimes I do not) when I read some of the eloquent and prophetic pronouncements from earlier times, such as:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre -- the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

--H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun,
July 26, 1920

H.L. Mencken

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I find myself wondering what both of the above mentioned gentlemen would have to say about the following modern-day innovation:

Or this one . . .

Can't help it . . . that's the way my mind works

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No president who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.
--James K. Polk

Delicious Meals And Distracting Books

Tucson Weather Today

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I tried some of those packaged prepared dinners from Hormel and Marie Calander, not the frozen kind but the ones that had been dried or somehow preserved and need no refrigeration. It surprised me when I found out that they tasted almost as good to me as home cooked dinners made from scratch.

Almost . . .

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Free, online, is Letters From The Earth by Mark Twain. Of course I had read the letters years ago, but it was good to re-read them.

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Everyman, a book written by Philip Roth is a book of only 200 pages about an old man of 71 (my age at the moment) and when I read what was presented in the "Look Inside" section of Amazon.com I was impressed. I hate paying full retail price for books, even though I know that doing so helps sustain the author, but I believe I'll grit my teeth and pay full price this time.

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Well . . . I'm going to cut this short today and go outside for a long walk in this beautiful Arizona sunshine.

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"Old age isn't a battle, old age is a massacre."
--Philip Roth

Coming soon . . . Some Better Stuff

Tucson Weather Today

I woke up rather early this morning. The clock indicated the time as being 4:25. As soon as I had swung my feet over the side of the bed and turned on my bedside lamp, Eva came trotting in, her tail moving at a rapid rate and her head swinging to and fro in time with her tail. She's a good little puppy. Well... she's not a puppy anymore, and she's not so little either. But she's certainly a good canine companion.

. . .

In the 'comments' after a Language Log discussion regarding a passage in the newly published autobiography of Mark Twain on spelling, I read the following:

I share both Twain's gift for spelling and his disdain of it. It is trivially easy for me to spell words correctly because I find that if they are spelled any other way they "look wrong." I can't explain it better than that, but it's definitely a visual experience for me. If I am unable to say verbally how to spell something, all I need do is write down both the spellings that seem reasonable when I am thinking of the letters as sounds, creating images to compare. One of them will "look wrong," and if the other does not, then I have my correct spelling.

Now that's exactly how I have always determined the correct spelling of a troublesome word. When I 'see' the two words together in print, I can almost always recognize the one that is spelled correctly.

Never thought about that before.

By the way, I sometimes read the entire 'comments' section after a particularly intriguing Language Log posting -- they are often more interesting and more enlightening than the original post itself.

Language Log was where I first read about the "schwa" --
Imagine that: a seventy-one year old man who had never heard of that word.

schwa: the sound "uh." For example, the vowel sound heard at the beginning of the word alone;
A short indeterminate vowel, like that at the end of "sofa". By far the commonest vowel sound in English.

Isn't that interesting?

. . .

Another new word:
execrable
(EKS uh kruh buhl)
utterly detestable; abominable; abhorrent.
deplorable: of very poor quality or condition

I'm pretty sure this is a word I will avoid using. Of course it's a perfectly good word, but I just don't like the sound of it.


And yet another word I just learned today is apophasis, but I am not sure that I will be able to remember it.

apophasis
(uh POPH uh suhs)
mentioning something by saying it will not be mentioned
The phrases "not to mention her atrocious behavior" is an apophasis.

. . .

Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate says that Julian Assange The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.

This WikiLeaks thing is one of those seemingly significant events currently 'making history' of which I have no clear cut opinion. In my mind I am torn between a usually definite stance of 'all information should be available to everyone' and the belief that 'in time of war, full disclosure can be harmful.'

. . .

I have again reworked my novel's first revision of Chapter 1, heeding the sound advice from other writers. I deleted most of the reportedly excessive adjectives and adverbs. I removed some of the reportedly flowery references, "carven caves, etc." The result is disappointing. While I can see the obvious compositional improvement (more publishable) the new version seems flat and 'dull as dishwater.'

Perhaps instead of a revision, Chapter 1 needs a complete rewrite.

I'll have to give that some thought.

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"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."
--Noam Chomsky

Whatever . . .

Whenever my attention to the task at hand--whether severely or ever so slightly--wavers and wanders then wanes, I turn for diversion to my Kindle PC and read a chapter or two from the novel 'Lord Jim.' Not to learn from its pages how to write literature. No, not to discern from the author's words the process of composing text for a modern novel that will be both understood and appreciated by today's readers. No. Joseph Conrad employed far too many adjectives and adverbs, and too many over-used figures of speech, too many abstruse similes and metaphors. (Or so I've been told)

As, (italics mine) for example, in:

She held on straight for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle--viscous, stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over the plain, luminous and smooth, unrolled a ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.

It seems that the temper of the times determines the perceived quality of a published work.

Is a writer, aiming for publication, ever free to write whatever and however he or she wants to write? I think not.

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad

A used hardcover copy for a penny.

. . .

Uh oh! -- I forgot; I was going to heed a famous author's advice to improve the quality of my blog by making each day's entry a miniature story, with beginning, middle, and end. Oh well, as with a weight loss diet, I can always start doing so tomorrow.

. . .

I read over at The Writer's Almanac that Andrew Bell illustrated 160 plates for the first edition of the Britannica, including illustrations of female pelvises and fetuses for the "Midwifery" entry, which shocked King George III so much that he demanded they be ripped out of every copy of the encyclopedia.

Now, I'd say that's a pretty good illustration of why an actively ruling Monarchy is not the most desirable as a form of government. In fact, life's experience shows the folly of allowing any form of government to grow unchecked. They all grow larger and larger, and grow more and more powerful, feeding mercilessly off the people, until the finally just get too big for their britches. And have to be taken down a notch or two.

And on and on groans and grumbles the crusty old curmudgeon.

. . .

The more I speak and hear spoken aloud the guttural word 'blog' the more I dislike it. Perhaps I should stop using the word and refer to it instead as my web journal... or something like that.

. . .

I finally got around to officially effecting the change of address for my Amateur Radio license from Jacksonville to Tucson. I'm not sure how soon the change will be made in the FCC database though. I'll keep checking until I see the correct address.

. . .

Even Mark Twain put to good use the practice of salting his writing with multiple grains of adjectives and adverbs, even the -ly ones. For instance, in his autobiography he wrote: "John Robards was eternally and indestructibly amiable. I may even say devilishly amiable; fiendishly amiable; exasperatingly amiable."

That's what can be accomplished by incorporating -ly adverbs into a statement the author sees as being enhanced by using those particular parts of speech.

So there . . .

. . .

New Word

pleonasm
redundancy;
The use of more words than necessary to express an idea

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Last Month Of 2010

Since NaNoWriMo is now over, I have started work on the first revision of my novel. Strangely enough, the scene with which I opened the original story is the one I chose to use in the revision. But I did do some rewriting of the scene, and I appended to it two of the other scenes I'd used in the original, again with much rewriting. Who knows, this novel might work. It might actually become a publishable book.

If I don't wimp out.

. . .

I left myself a note on my desktop's *NOTES* page that reads: Recently I read somewhere, can't remember where:

Writer and physicist Alan Lightman, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1948. He reportedly said that as a kid, "I was always troubled and awed by the big questions. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the meaning of life? How did the universe begin?"

Well, don't we all ask those same questions at one time or another throughout our lives?

But it seems to me that the questions are meaningless. They have no answers beyond what we perceive within our individual minds (brain processes) by way of the interaction of chemical actions and their reactions. Asking such questions and expecting to eventually receive answers presumes that the human race is somehow special among Earth's multitudes of biological life forms. Because we think that our ability to think is something special in the universe. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity indeed.

Just because a person believes a thing does not make it so. Subjective beliefs are not objective facts. When Occam's Razor shaves away the Earth's minuscule stubble that is biological life, what remains is objective reality.

And I simply cannot understand why every reasoning man or woman capable of conceptual discernment is (apparently) unable to perceive that singular truth.

These are ideas I hope to incorporate in a novel.

Someday.

. . .

Another of the notes I found on that page is -- Quiz Question: Who wrote under the pen names Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom, Rambler, and W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab"

Hint: another of his pen names was Mark Twain.

Yes, it was Samuel Langhorn Clemens. Mark Twain hated the writings of Jane Austen. He once said that every time he read Pride and Prejudice, he wanted to dig up Austen and "beat her over the skull with her own shin bone."

From Mark Twain's new autobiography: For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.

If I had identified the source of the above notes I would mention them here. But I did not do so.

. . .

The Writer's Almanac for December 1, 2010 has some good stuff. You can take my word for it or you can read it yourself. It contains, for example, a short piece about Julia A. Moore, famous for writing really bad poetry:

She's sometimes referred to as a "poetaster, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester." This distinction usually entails things like the use of awkward meter, painfully sappy sentimentality, words that rhyme in an unpleasant way, or poor taste in subject matter.

There is also an insightful little piece about Woody Allen.

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"I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness."
--Rex Stout