An 8-Course Serving of Quotes!

My preferred seasonings on things patriotic- chew thoroughly:

George Bernard Shaw:
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

Mark Twain:
The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Barbara Ehrenreich:
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Goethe:
Patriotism ruins history.

Howard Thurman:
During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.

Pablo Casals:
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

H. L. Mencken:
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

Your Daily Quote

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers 1879-1935

"COUGAR" slang now inducted into the Canadian Oxford Dictionary

When my brother and my buddies back in Canada used to hang out, we came up with a term for older women on the prowl. Since young women were- ahem... pussy or kittens, it naturally followed that older women, a little more predatorial or on the prowl, would be cougars.
Yeah, they could have been panthers or tigers, but cougar seemed more fitting, what with the "C" alliteration to cat and, of course, that "cu... word."
Lo and behold, either the term spread like wildfire, or we were unknowingly involved in a hundredth- monkey syndrome of universal thought, 'cause the word Cougar has just been added to the Canadian edition of the Oxford dictionary.
Check out the link- there's a few other tasty and uniquely Canuck additions.

Quote of the Day (ahead of his time?)

"Why blame conspiracy when human stupidity explains so much?"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)



You know, I think I may start throwing these up whenever I see fit.
Might end up being quote of the week or even quote of the afternoon, depending
on my attention span at the time.

"You got something in my hair that night,
the stars were bright,
San Fernando.......pppfffffft"

Breaking News! Not for the Faint-Hearted

Soul-mates Finally Explained

"Soul-mates...."

A term used widely, with glassy-eyes- means nothing.
Here's why.


Originally the term soul-mates was used to define the mystical reunion of people in this lifetime who had once been in love (or in bed) in a previous lifetime. This longed for reuniting presupposes a belief in reincarnation. So far so good.

However, to further romanticize the issue and remove it's possibility from the grasp of you and most of your neighbors, the exalted soul-mate, the "twin-flame", was introduced. Now this twin-flame, if you were lucky or evolved enough, was purported to be an actual split off your own soul. Your own bad self.
So, to meet a twin-flame soul-mate was to join with your highest self and realize unity in it's absolute fullest. This was deemed rare and elusive, unless you ordered by midnight tonight.

Well, the new-age books started cranking out reincarnation and soul-mate books but didn't want to leave anybody out on account of the twin-flame velvet rope effect. This carrot on the stick held by the self-improvement group got lowered progressively enough so that we could all gobble a bit and chew on it.

I mean, first it got watered down to where you should maybe forget the twin-flame thing and just find a soul-mate while you got good enough at evolving, or maybe transcending evolution altogether. And they had to add in that we could have several soul-mates, because if yours died, wouldn't you be pissed? Nah- just get another!

Next it became, "you know, if it's too hard to divorce this oaf you've never shared a past-life experience with, you can just work at deepening your soul connection, therefore transforming yourselves into soul-mates." Doesn't that sound a little reminiscent of plain and simple loving someone? At this point, the term soul-mates means nothing.
So, now when I hear or read of someone holding out for a soul-mate relationship, I'm thinking- is that it? Anything else?!

But if we admit this watered-down version is really one defined by the book mill, in order to cater to everyone, and not by the true, romantic reincarnationist out there, we can get to my point.

First we lay the foundation, since we've already embraced reincarnation (nice rhyme). And, we are up on our metaphysical principles enough to remember, and feel- that time is an illusion. Time to us, now as mystics of course, is both infinite and infinitesimal, and basically meaningless since we made the whole thing up.

The effect this has on a series of lifetimes (assuming they are serial and not parallel) is to blend them together into, really, one big long lifetime- with a few seams in there. Little hiccups in the flow where you were perhaps the opposite sex, sacrifice to the gods, or selling rubber crutches- whatever. Past life, present life, future life, who cares, right? Because we've now agreed they're all the same.

Now at the end of our distorted logic, it's not hard to figure out that when I'm finally reunited with my long lost soul-mate, I'm effectively running into an ex-girlfriend.

Are you ecstatic? Tell me again the exciting romantic part! What about getting some strange!!!?

So, when your next date gets that wistful look and confides her deep longing for a soul-mate relationship, tell her you don't want to hear about her ex-boyfriends- the past is the past, man.

A.D.D.- Parallel Definition offered

Say, folks-

Do you ever wonder what it might be like to step out of a Mercedes G-Wagon and glide past the valet into the local Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, larger than life?

What it would be like peering through sunglasses (worn indoors), gabbing loudly on your cellular soother, everyone's adoring eyes falling upon you because you've been mistaken for some actor on a reality show?

Me neither.
I got enough attention when I was a kid.

I wasn't deficient in attention. Therefore, no Attention Deficit Disorder.