Eric's Favorite Quotes
Like many people, I have a tear-off day calendar in my office. My calendar consists of philosophical quotes and stories. Some are hits, some are misses. I save the home runs to read through later.
As part of wrapping the year (and cleaning out what is to be my old office, soon), I decided to transcribe all those quotes before I accidentally recycle them, and then post the ones I like in small batches.
A person’s favorite quotes no doubt give you one bit of insight into that person.
Since my absolute favorite philosopher ever is Epictetus, we’ll kick it off the first batch with a quote from him that does an excellent job in summarizing his stoic outlook:
Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does.
– Epictetus
My life is my message.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi
You see the hut, yet you ask, “Where shall I go for shelter?”
– West African Proverb
As a man is, so he sees.
– William Blake
There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.
– Fritz Holling
Talk does not cook rice.
– Chinese Proverb
A Different Sort of Tree House…
Via Raymond Chen’s blog, a picture of a house on Redmond Ridge that had ten trees fall on it from our recent windstorm: The Seattle Times: Half the power restored, 533,000 customers still powerless.
Wow!
As I mentioned before, we were very fortunate here at our Tree House nestled into the hills of Hollywood Hill only to have small fir branches bouncing off of our roof. I’m running out of excuses to haul-off the other tree limbs & such scattered about on our property, so that is bubbling up to the top of my to-do list.
We were also fortunate for the power: it went off the Thursday night of the windstorm and came back on close to the very end of Monday, giving us just about exactly 96 hours without power. I had just learned to get the pellet-stove to a very efficient state. Folks up the hill from us went without power for at least a couple of days longer.
Dy-no-mite! Flying owls with dynamite, specifically…
I agree, the art is wonderful. It’s like a modern day woodcut style with excellent colors and balance. Forget the text…
Freedom In Peril: Guarding the 2nd Amendment in the 21st Century, is a spectacularly beautiful graphic novel. Here, for example, is one of the biggest threats to the white suburban hunter: dirty hippies and their evil sidekicks: the dynamite-carrying owl, sinister pig, angry Wall Street bull, dire wolf, terror chicken and Land Lobster
Source: NRA’s Secret Graphic Novel Revealed! – Wonkette
An update from Boing Boing, including a link to the entire PDF to download and… enjoy?
Update: I can’t say with certainty that this is in fact from the NRA — I’ve emailed them to ask. But Wonkette kindly shared a copy of the original PDF with us just now, and here it is: PDF LINK. I’ve been updating this post off and on throughout the day with discussion on whether it is or isn’t a hoax. Now that I’ve seen the whole PDF, it certainly looks real. Comments from folks who believe(d) it’s a hoax follow, at the end of the post.
Welcome to SeatGuru! Your Guide to Airplane Seats and In-flight Amenities
If you travel (me: not too often), this is a nice guide to consult before booking your plane ticket and choosing your seat: Welcome to SeatGuru! Your Guide to Airplane Seats and In-flight Amenities.
Choose the airline and the class of plane and then hover over the color-coded seats to see any pros or cons (e.g., does not recline) to the various seats.
(courtesy Boing Boing.)
Snow, Ice, Windstorm… Next Up: Brimstone and Locusts?
Well that was a doozy. Everyone around the Seattle and Redmond area has a story about the big windstorm (does it have an official name yet?). We’re still without power and it’s looking like it won’t be until Friday or Saturday before we can enjoy flicking the light switch and actually getting illumination. That will be seven or eight days on the occasional bit of generator power, an unfortunate record for me.
We call our house The Tree House because we’re blessed to have found just a nice little house nestled up the hill into the woods in the Hollywood Hill neighborhood. That’s all cool for just about every day of the year, except when the windstorm comes to town and plows into your hill.
Things I’ve learned:
- Doug Firs don’t drop branches. They drop limbs. Huge limbs that I’m hardly able to drag, let alone pick up and throw into the forest.
- Sleepy eyes seeing a large neighboring Red Cedar sway back and forth and then do a belly flop into the ground can make your eyes snap open so fast it hurts.
- Torrential rain is not native to the Northwest.
- The sky is so full of stars… without the light pollution of Seattle and the Eastside, I practically fall over at night gazing at all the brilliant stars in the sky.
- If there’s a severe weather alert, make sure that you’re all gassed up (when I think of this, I hear Mr. T growling it at me, meaning that there’s a “fool!” slapped on to the end).
We were very fortunate. Limbs dropped, trees fell down, trees snapped, but nothing hit The Tree House severely.
I hope as a result of this the region figures out how to avoid the power problems we set ourselves up for. Trees right next to powerlines, let along powerlines running through tree branches: bad idea. Cut cut cut!
I think we need to put some reflective stylings on our stoplights / stoplight posts, too. Last night I was delivering Elisa to a warm, powered place and I was driving on a local road (Avondale). If caution cones and stop sign placards had not been set out, there were at least one or two stoplights I would have blown through vs. treating it like a four-way stop, it was so dark and my headlights did nothing to call-out the stoplights. Combine that dumbness on my part with someone else at 90 degrees that is just as clueless and that’s not a happy result.
So, anyway. The generator is going but one pellet stove is not enough to heat the house. Down comforters: best invention ever. No internet: phooey.
The Prologue: Wisconsin man bags deer with 7 legs… tasty.
This is how the horror story begins: Wisconsin man bags deer with 7 legs.
With the foreshadowing: “And by the way, I did eat it,” Lisko said. “It was tasty.“
Echo on “…tasty.“
Cut to intro credits.
After you get introduced to Lisko’s family (helping you to judge whether he’s a sympathetic character or about to deserve what happens to him), Lisko starts noticing strange bumps on his appendages. Growths. Down there, too. Then maybe his wife starts to notice her own changes soon after that.
Then you realize Lisko, being a generous soul with more venison than he can eat, has shared out his latest kill, perhaps not even letting people know where that sausage came from.
Hermaphrodite crab people: arise! Propagate! Troublesome reporters? “…tasty.” Forget those two-leg limited pants. Time for muu-muus.
And have your sad story retold one-day on the Sci-Fi channel with Dean Cain as the hero.
It made me laugh: Cute Overload: 'Sup…
It surprised me. It made me laugh: Cute Overload: ‘Sup…
Synchronicity – Blood Money by Akomplice
One day after I added Tcritic to my BlogLines list, they go and blog about the very T-shirt design I was looking for when I found their blog: Blood Money by Akomplice at Tcritic – Daily T-Shirt Blog. Well, actually, it’s a variation of the original design that was in Entertainment Weekly well over a month ago now.
I’m none too found of the text that comes on the back of the T-shirt, but I love the provocative nature of the front.
NSFW?
You Know, They Shoot Back in Graham
Of course certain things in life are dumb. Some things are even dumber when added with locality: Random drive-by shootings have Graham residents on edge.
Folks are pretty well armed in Graham. They will hunt you down and shoot back and then most likely make smoked jerky out of your sorry butt. My weekends in Graham were pretty well punctuated with far-off gun shots of high caliber weapons. Looks like someone tired of shootin’ up watermelon and cans and decided to go after cars.
Dumb.
Living in the deep country is great, but you are way more exposed to the dimmer bulbs wandering through life. And those dim bulbs are most likely armed.
How to Shutdown Redmond, WA: 1/2 Inch of Wet Snow
Holy crap. That’s the only way to describe what was going through my mind after walking into the warmth of home tonight. My usual twenty-minute drive home from Microsoft was one-hundred-and-twenty minutes. All because of one-half an inch of snow.
Most people from a snowy part of the country can’t understand how the Northwest shuts down with just an inch of snow. Well, Redmond streets were for the most part shutdown tonight in the middle of rush-hour. How does it happen? It’s a one-two punch, from what I saw tonight.
First: the fancy sports cars. You know, the rear-wheel drive ones? The owners get about a half-a-block out of their parking lot before those rear-wheels start spinning on the compacted wet snow (aka, ice) and drift to the curb. End game. Now everyone behind them has to merge over. Enough sports cars staggered through the roads pretty much shutdown one of the lanes.
Second: the compact cars with front-wheel drive. We do not live in a flat place. Mixing an incline, a hill, or a bridge with a light front-wheel drive car and someone who doesn’t drive in snow that much leads to flashing hazard lights and an abandoned car. And more creative driving to get around the flashing-hazard light obstacle.
So here’s a new rule for all sports car drivers: you have to splurge and buy an old, used Subaru. If there’s a hint of snow forecasted, that’s what you drive to work. And what the hell… wear a flannel plaid shirt, too, that day.
My Subaru Outback was stellar tonight. It didn’t get any challenges until the end of my drive home.
By the time I made it to my street off of highway 202, I was hoping that people weren’t using the side-road to my house as a place to pull over and give up. I turned and I stopped: there was a car blocking my path. d’oh. Fortunately, it ended up being my neighbor. Unfortunately, her car couldn’t get traction up the hill. Her husband and I tried to push it for a bit, but gave up and saw a nice place to park it near the mailboxes.
I offered to drive them up the hill to their house. Up we went up with the Subaru on the fresh wet snow, which was now easily two (two!) whole inches. No problem – it probably helped to have two passengers. I dropped them off and headed up our long driveway. Now, the Subaru had to do some serious work here. It did slip some and I had to get a bit creative with the clutch. Around the corner I went into the garage, the ABS light on my dash proudly lit.
It’s beautiful outside. One nice thing about wet snow is that it clings to every branch in the trees, embracing them with a fuzzy white fur of snow. I look forward to taking some photos in the morning.
As for getting down the hill in the morning… that’s going to be a different challenge.
News from the Seattle-PI: Snow continues to grip region, snarling Seattle traffic .