ODDS & ENDS: Traveling, Ithaca, Dependency, Learning from Others, Getting Stated, Moving Along, Dreams, Colons, Simon Says, Rule of High School

Traveling
"I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train." - Tom Waits

"'Sherpa' means 'Easterner' in Tibetan; and the Sherpas who settled in Khambu about 450 years ago are a peace-loving Buddhist people from the Eastern shore of the plateau. They are also compulsive travelers; and in Sherpa-country every track is marked with cairns and prayer-flags, reminding you that Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot." - Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?

Ithaca
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road’s a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You won’t find them on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty and a fine
emotion touches your spirit.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you won’t encounter them,
unless you carry them within your soul.

Pray that the road is long.
May there be many a summer morning, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to discover new things and to learn from scholars.

Always keep (your home in) Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to finally arrive at the island when you are old,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, filled with so much experience,
you will finally understand what an Ithaca means.
- Constantine Cavafy

"Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is not aware." - Martin Buber

"Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the Cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, one feels once more Happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood. A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope – the three Sister Graces of our moral being.” - Sir Richard Burton

"My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance - and I wanted to go for the same reason." - John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

"Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had." - James Hilton, Lost Horizon

"Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On'" - Tom Waits

On Dependency
"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge." - Fritz Perls

On Learning from Others
"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry." - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

On Getting Started
"It's like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you've set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you're watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up." - Kurt
Vonnegut

On Moving Along
"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” - Anne Lamott

Sean Connery, A Narration of Ithaca


Randy Pausch, Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams


From Point Loma Nazarene University
An Evening with George Plimpton


From MiamiHerald.com
A Journey into My Colon . . . and Yours by Dave Barry

From the Daily Mail
A Letter to My Younger Self by Simon Cowell

From Seth Godin's Blog
The Rule of High School

ODDS & ENDS: Gifts, Country Music, Language

On Gifts
"Johnny Cash sang like he meant business. He didn't get fancy and he didn't send his voice on missions it could not complete, but there was an urgency in his best songs that pounded them home. When he sang something, it stayed sung." - Roger Ebert

On Country Music
"Country music is three chords and the truth." - Harlan Howard

"Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy." - Dierks Bentley

"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music." - Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize lecture, December, 1993

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means put down." - Bob Newhart

"Country songs have always told the best stories and no one - really, no one - has ever done it better than Nashville. All my life I've admired guitarists like Chet Atkins and Roy Clark who touched me through their sound, but it was those Nashville songwriters who got to me through their words." - B.B. King, blues guitarist and singer-songwriter

On Language
"Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." - Noam Chomsky

"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - Wade Davis, speaking at The Long Now Foundation

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." – Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

"And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute." – John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love

"Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought." - Karl Kraus

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." - Nietzsche

Johnny Cash, The Man in Black


From Academy of Achievement
Music's Man In Black: An Interview with Johnny Cash

From FORA.tv
A.C. Grayling & Don Watson, It's All Gone to the Dogs - Video

From FORA.tv
Roy Blount Jr., The Sounds, Roots, and History of Words - Video

From YouTube
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Video

ODDS & ENDS: Beliefs, History Lessons, Gettysburg Address, Conflict, Overcoming Disappointment

Beliefs and Credos
"I am a singer and a songwriter, but I am also a father - four times over. I am a friend to dogs. I am a sworn enemy of the saccharine, and a believer in grace over karma. I talk too much when I'm drunk and sometimes even when I'm not." - Bono, lead singer, U2

"There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?" - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses." - Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history,
That dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
- Robert Fulghum, The Storyteller's Creed

"What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do." - James Carville

“Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing. Nevertheless, they give up their life to that little or nothing. Our life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it and then it is gone. But to surrender what you are…and live without belief…that’s more terrible than dying…more terrible than dying young.” - Maxwell Anderson, Joan of Lorraine

History Lessons
"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles A. Beard, All the Lessons of History in Four Sentences

"Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips." - Victor Frankl

"History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it." - John Buchan

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On The Gettysburg Address
"Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?" - Robert Coles

"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." - Chicago Times, commenting on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address the next day

Robert Coles: Children Consider Human Conflict



From FORA.tv
Rabbi Harold Kushner, Overcoming Life's Disappointments (Video)


From Scott London
A Way of Seeing: The Work of Robert Coles (Essay)

From Google Books
The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles

ODDS & ENDS: Criminal Minds Quotes, BTK Killer Speaks, Green River Killer

Criminal Minds - Season 3

"Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone." - George Washington

"He who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still." - Lao Tzu

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; nothing more difficult than understanding him." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed." - G.K. Chesterton

"Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?" - Erasmus

"An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects." - Martin Luther

"Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters." - Francis Goya

"Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none." - William Shakespeare

"No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies." - Daisy Bates

"For we pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won." - Lucy Maud Montgomery

"...within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be." - Dr. R. Joseph

"There is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings." - Arthur Rubinstein

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering." - Ben Okri

"A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ." - John Steinbeck

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses." - George Bernard Shaw

"If we knew each other's secrets, what comforts we should find." - John Churton Collins

"No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another." - Anatole France

A&E Documentary Special - The BTK Killer Speaks - Part 1

A&E Documentary Special - The BTK Killer Speaks - Part 2
A&E Documentary Special - The BTK Killer Speaks - Part 3
A&E Documentary Special - The BTK Killer Speaks - Part 4
A&E Documentary Special - The BTK Killer Speaks - Part 5


A&E Cold Case Files Number 100 - Obsession: Dave Reichert and the Green River Killer - Part 1


Cold Case Files Number 100 - Obsession: Dave Reichert and the Green River Killer - Part 2
Cold Case Files Number 100 - Obsession: Dave Reichert and the Green River Killer - Part 3
Cold Case Files Number 100 - Obsession: Dave Reichert and the Green River Killer - Part 4
Cold Case Files Number 100 - Obsession: Dave Reichert and the Green River Killer - Part 5

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

FOCUS: Tips for Working and Living Fruitfully

"Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice." - Yoda

"Daniel-san, must talk. Man walk on road. Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk down middle, sooner or later, get squished just like grape. Same here. You do karate ‘yes,’ or do karate ‘no.’ You do karate ‘guess so,’ you get squished. Understand?" - Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

"It does not do you good to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can be learned in no other way." - Mark Twain

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go." - Tennessee Williams

"Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone." - Miller Williams.

"He who promotes his own honor at the expense of his neighbor's has no portion in the World to Come." - Rabbi Yehudah ben- Chanina, Jewish World Review, 5/28/09

"For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." - 1 Corinthians 13:12

"Remember the scene in Cat Ballou where a very drunk Lee Marvin goes from unconscious to ranting to triumphant to roaring to weeping defeat and then finally passes out? One of the men watching him says, with real awe, 'I never seen a man get through a day so fast.' Don't let this be you." - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

"If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones." - John Steinbeck


Matt Weinstein, What Bernie Madoff Couldn't Steal From Me


Jacob Needleman, What Is God?


From FORA TV
On Life, Cheerfulness and Aging by Garrison Keillor (Audio)

From MiamiHerald.com
A Journey into My Colon . . . and Yours by Dave Barry

From Psychology Today Online
Recipe for Maintaining Inspiration: Conversations, Random People, and Big Ideas by David Rock