Tony > Recent Status Updates

Neverending.

It's all well to imitate Cicero's letters for "the very important matters they contain," but one must not lose oneself in too close an involvement with their style. This literary young man must realize that books are opened only in order, finally, that they be shut.

Of a teacher she had - It was said that he had two apartments: one to hold books; the other, next door, to hold books and a bed.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union were officially anti-imperialist; each accused the other of being imperialistic. That capitalist countries inevitably turn imperialist was Communist dogma since the time of Lenin. That Communism is an ideology committed to expansion and even world conquest was a rationale frequently advanced in American foreign policy debates.

And analytically, writers did not distinguish between a major industrial power that felt emasculated by a punitive peace treaty (Germany) and a developmentally backward nation that believed it was encircled by imperialist enemies (Russia)--just as one does not distinguish medically between a king and a peasant when they both have the flu. Totalitarianism was a disease that threatened all.

I often wondered how their angry God became so popular. Humanity is very strange and I don't pretend to understand anything, however why worship something that only sends you plagues and massacres? and why was Eve blamed for everything?

"Never be without a book in your hand." - JFK, just back from the Pacific War, to his 12 year-old brother Teddy.

Another time, when she (Rose Kennedy) read to the older children the Easter story of Christ's entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey, shortly before the Crucifixion and Resurrection, Jack piped up: "Mother, we now what happened to Jesus Christ, but what happened to the donkey?"

'Madame, why do you have to carry all these heavy loads while your men always go home on horseback almost empty-handed?'

She turned to me. 'What woman,' she said, 'would like a tired husband at night?'

You cry out in pain if someone steps on your corn, but if they shoot you through the heart, all you feel is a dull blow. Then you die.

myths are not like truths; they are the triumph of credulity over evidence. The form of a myth is indeed externally conditioned by facts; there is a minimum of evidence with which it must comply, if it is to live; but once lip-service has been paid to that undeniable minimum, the human mind is free to indulge its infinite capacity for self-deception.

Politics do matter; politicians can affect the destiny of nations.

Information turns florid in the hand-to-hand. The more orderly the formation of people, the more bent and deviant is the knowledge passing through, or so it seems. It's not the priestly or political body, lain in state, that cultivates conspiracy--it's the queue. The queue is the agar of conspiracy.

Claims of loyalty and connectedness to other species can, and do, resolutely divide us--and no more so than where an animal revered or cherished in one culture is categorized as edible in another.

If deaths from mushroom poisoning are any metric of national fungal enthusiasm, compare the one or two deaths a year in the United States with the two hundred deaths in Russia and Ukraine in the year 2000.

Within complex adaptive systems, small changes can bring about large effects that can only be observed in the system as a whole. Rarely can a neat arrow be plotted between cause and effect. Stimuli--which may be unremarkable gestures in themselves--swirl into often surprising responses. Financial crashes are a good example of this type of dynamic nonlinear process. So are sneezes, and orgasms.

Within complex adaptive systems, small changes can bring about large effects that can only be observed in the system as a whole. Rarely can a neat arrow be plotted between cause and effect. Stimuli--which may be unremarkable gestures in themselves--swirl into often surprising responses. Financial crashes are a good example of this type of dynamic nonlinear process. So are sneezes, and orgasms.

The variety of banana that accounts for ninety-nine per cent of global banana shipments, the Cavendish, is being decimated by a fungal disease and faces extinction the coming decades.

When one has had power in his grasp, and has failed to hold it, and has remained alive--what does one become? -- Perhaps we shall see.

"News will come from Rome--but it will be rumor confounded with fact, fact confounded with self-interest, until self-interest and faction become the source of all we should know."

We lived in a world where rain might fall thirty percent, or seventy percent, of the time. Truth was probably no different. There could be thirty percent or seventy percent truth. Crows had it a lot easier. For them, it was either raining or not raining, one or the other. Percentages never crossed their minds.

One of a teacher's important duties is to get children to be genuinely impressed.

The barman was neither Mexican nor American; he was a barman.

Jesús had not returned.
'He sold his mother's cow,' said Don Otavio, 'so he will go to the North of North America, to Texas, to make his fortune. He has had a general disgust.'
'What about his wife?'
'She can marry Juan.'
'Divorce?'
'No, no. She and Jesús were never married enough. The Church does not like the Indios to get really married. There would be so much adultery. It would be a very great sin.'

Poverty has been defined as the lack of means. What means? Means of existence. What kind of existence? Desirable. To whom? Desired by whom, from what vantage point, for whom? A child? A man? All men? Now? Next year? In five years? Later? In a town? In the country? In a country? In the world? In which world?

The answers must lie between two shrugs.

Was he really wanted in Mexico? He was told that a plebiscite had been held on that question, and an overwhelming majority returned in his favour. A plebiscite among Indians, most of them illiterate, in a country, then occupied by a foreign army, which to this day has not known anything resembling a free, universal and secret ballot . . . Now, it seems thin. Maximilian accepted.

(She goes to a bookstore):

I bought a Manual of Conversation. In the section headed Useful Words and Phrases, I find on page one:

'Are you interested in death, Count?'
'Yes, very much, Your Excellency.'

I drew the cork with my French Zigzag. The neatest sound on earth.

Her writing is hitting me immediately, in a good way. Expect more updates.

The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.

To Pythagoras, numbers were more than tools for counting and computing. He studied their properties and relational patterns, seeking to extract from them some larger revelation about the nature of reality, the way a poet uses words not merely to denote and describe the world but to evoke and wrest meaning via symbolic logic.