March 2011
February 2011
The Wind
Cat Stevens
Cat Stevens - The Wind
Down a notch.
- Dr: What's goin on.
- Me: My mother is dying--
- Dr: So sorry.
- Me: I'm handling arrangements
- Me: and hyperventilating a lot.
- Dr: Of course.
- Me: Exercise is helping that
- Me: and my bathroom is now spotless.
- Dr: You can come do mine.
- Me: Yes, I'm real useful around the house.
- Dr: I think we've established that.
- Dr: How is that going by the way?
- Me: He turns one this week!
- Dr: Mazel-tov!
- Me: So anyway I'm riding my bike some
- Me: but I'm up to like 80 pushups a day.
- Dr: This is when normal people pop a fucking Xanax.
- Me: This is the reason for my visit.
- Me: That and the cool magazines.
I'm guessing I should probably drink more.
What "Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives" Tells us about America
We are not as angry as the media portray us. We are not as divided as our elected representatives and their aides would have us believe.
This show tells us that Americans want to try new things, experience new people and can get along just fine with people who look nothing like them.
The great melting pot is alive and well in diners, drive-ins and dives all across America. Our detached and distanced representatives, be they Republicans, Democrats or “other” should spend some time in Guy Fieri’s America. They will find a people who are looking for nothing more than a good meal with family, friends and neighbors. And they don’t particularly care who those neighbors might be.
Episode after episode you have Texans in a Lebanese joint in Dallas, Floridians in a Korean BBQ dive in Tampa and Philadelphians going mad for an Indian joint that’s been around for years.
And despite all the different people featured on this show (and each episode is very much like the last) the refrain from the crowd is always the same, “good food, good people, something new, something fresh, part of the neighborhood.”
We are letting 0.0001% of the people in America destroy the few precious things we have left by allowing them to control the conversation. It’s time for this to stop.
Amen.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
—Voltaire
Satisfied Mind
Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley - Satisfied Mind
The Stutterer →
slate.com
It’s hard to describe the feeling of stuttering to anyone who has always spoken smoothly. It is not a nervous impulse. It is not, despite appearances, a spastic feeling. Stuttering starts in the voice box and the upper lungs with something like a pressure clench, the sensation of some valves closing against a flow, a trap tripping its release at the wrong moment. (John Updike described it11 as the feeling of “a kind of windowpane suddenly inserted in front of my face while I was talking, or of an obdurate barrier thrust into my throat.”) The clench occurs suddenly, irreversibly—in the final instant before beginning a sentence, in the middle of a phrase—making the experience of being a stutterer somewhat like the chronic knowledge that your clothes may explode off your body any moment.
NYT Health: Stuttering →
nytimes.com
Every so often I can thank Hollywood for directing our attention to some universal human developmental difficulty, and for the subsequent “expert” buzz, which can actually generate useful, clinical information.
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote the freedom to err.”
—Gandhi
