ODDS & ENDS: Faces, Spaces, Places, Measuring What Matters, Hiding Our Best Self, Bright-Sided, Tuesdays with Morrie

On Faces
"I only know that when I make eye contact with one (black widow spiders), I feel a deep physical shudder of revulsion, and of fear, and of fascination; and I am reminded that the human style of face is only one accidental pattern among many, some of the others being quite drastically different. I remember that we aren’t alone. I remember that we are the norm of goodness and comeliness only to ourselves. I wonder about how ugly I look to the spider." - David Quammen, Flight of the Iguana

"I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts." - John Steinbeck

On Spaces
“Periods of recovery are likewise intrinsic to creativity and to intimate connection. Sounds become music in the spaces between notes, just as words are created by the spaces between letters. It is in the spaces between that love, friendship, depth and dimension are nurtured.” - Jim Loehr

On Places
"You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bowl, but on a candlestick; and it gives light to all that are in the house." – Jesus, Matthew 5

"A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die." - Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

"The megacities, like cancer, have appeared with their great extremes of poverty and wealth, their isolation from what was called the natural world with its rivers, forests, silent dawns and nights. The new populations will live in hives of concrete on a diet of film, television and the Internet. We are what we eat. We are also what we see and hear. And we are in the midst of our one and only life." – James Salter, Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now What?

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." - Orson Wells, The Third Man

"The thought was banal, and yet somehow, as happened every now and then, it took him by surprise and profoundly disappointed him. It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday – but when? – he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there – somewhere – waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment of the Graben." - Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

On Measuring What Matters
"Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: 'What does his voice sound like?' 'What games does he like best?' 'Does he collect butterflies?' They ask: 'How old is he?' 'How many brothers does he have?' 'How much does he weigh?' 'How much does his father make?' Only then do they think they know him. If you tell grown-ups, 'I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof,' they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them 'I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs.' Then they exclaim, 'What a pretty house!' That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

On Hiding Our Best Self
"That which you or I think is most unique about ourselves we hide. In ordinary discourse, in the normal state, we share our common self, our superficial self. Yet what is most unique about us is what has the greatest potential for bonding us. When we share our uniqueness, we discover the commonality in greatness that defines everyone on the planet." - Robert E. Quinn

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there." - Henry Miller, Sexus

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided


Mitch Albom at Black & Blue Bash 2007



From Jewish World Review
What the Chicago Olympic Failure Must Teach Jewry by Joseph Aaron

From Forbes.com
The Most Painfully Annoying Business Jargon by Christopher Steiner

From Cluetrain.Com
The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger (Entire text)

ODDS & ENDS: Driving-Thinking, Caveman Empathy, Night, Farting Around, Duty-Honor-Country, Our Way of Life, Faith-Reason, Cartooning

On Driving and Thinking
"If one has driven a car over many years, as I have, nearly all reactions have become automatic. One does not think about what to do. Nearly all the driving technique is buried in a machine-like unconscious. This being so, a large area of the conscious mind is left free for thinking. And what do people think of when they drive? I can only suspect that the lonely man peoples his driving dreams with friends, that the loveless man surrounds himself with lovely, loving women, and that children climb through the dreams of the childless driver. And how about the area of regrets? If I had only done so-and-so, or not done such-and-such – my God, this damn thing might not have happened. Finding this potential in my own mind, I can suspect it in others, but I will never know, for no one ever tells." - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

On Caveman Empathy
"I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them." - Ray Bradbury

On Night
"It is night now, no longer evening but fully night, as in 'black as,' if not precisely, 'dead of.' Evening usually has the afternoon hanging on its coattails, has actual flecks of daylight clinging like lint to its lapels, but night is solitary, aloof, uncompromised, extreme. The safe margins of the day, still faintly visible during eventide, have been erased by night’s dense gum, obscured by its wash of squid squirtings, pajama sauce, and the blue honey manufactured by moths. Is the night a mask, or is day merely night’s prim disguise? Most of us are born in the night, and by night most will die. Night, when tangos play on the nurse’s radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers 'Free at Last' in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir." - Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas.

On Farting Around
"Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore." - Kurt Vonnegut, on PBS, 2005

On Duty, Honor, and Country
"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps. I bid you farewell." - General Douglas MacArthur, in remarks to the cadets at West Point, 1962,

On Our Current Way of Life
"We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us." - Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid

Sam Harris, The Clash Between Faith and Reason


Robert Mankoff, Cartoon Editor New York Magazine

ODDS & ENDS: Criminal Minds Quotes, Why Can't We Be Good?, Jeffrey Dahmer, Pit Bulls and Profiling

Criminal Minds - Season 2
"The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body. After all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind." - Francois de la Roche Foucauld

"It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but it is never gone." - Rose Kennedy

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - Dietrich Boenhoffer

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. The most massive characters are seared with scars." - Khalil Gibran

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde

"The ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate." - Erich Fromm

"Crime butchers innocents to secure a prize. And innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime." - Maximilien Robespierre

"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate." - Elbert Hubbard

"Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Some of the best lessons are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom of the future." - Dale Turner

"Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. This is the way the world ends." - T.S. Eliot

"Evil brings men together." - Aristotle

"There is not a righteous man on Earth who does what is right and never sins." - Ecclesiastes 7:20

"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate." - Socrates

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." - Thomas Paine

"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." - Robert Kennedy

"The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul." - John Calvin

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed." - Herman Melville

"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles." - Charles Chaplin

Jacob Needleman, Why Can't We Be Good


Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2-Part 1


Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 2 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 3 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 4 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 5 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 6 (Video)

From The New Yorker
Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Profiling by Malcolm Gladwell