George Washington

Near the end of June of 1778, the French have sent ships to America, and General Clinton of the Brits decided that he needed to change positions and bail out of Philadelphia. Washington wants to attack them as they move out. However, his general on point, Charles Lee, wants to nix the plan, but is finally cajoled into leading the attack. Lee makes a mockery of the effort at Monmouth Court House, obviously holding back, and the attack becomes a debacle for the patriots, and the troops are fleeing in panic.

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When Washington got wind of the chaotic flight of his troops, he galloped up to Lee, glowered at him, and demanded, “What is the meaning of this, sir? I desire to know the meaning of this disorder and confusion!”

Lee took umbrage at the peremptory tone. “The American troops would not stand the British bayonets,” he replied.

To which Washington retorted, “You damned poltroon, you never tried them!” Washington did not ordinarily use profanities, but, faced with Lee’s insubordination that morning, he swore, “till the leaves shook on the trees,” said one general.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

A great sleep

A great sleep, thank god! Aside from a couple of bathroom runs, we are talking about a fairly solid eight hours. I needed it badly. Dreamless but good.

Pessoa

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why.

And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity.

I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

-- “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa

white-screenings

Going through some old journal entries, and seeing one about white-screenings of the computer, I am happy to realize that that has not been a problem with the laptop - absolutely no white-screenings. It's a complete mystery why it was a problem for my previous two desk-top computers. It is nice to be free of that little headache with the re-bootings and having to log back into my accounts. I cannot imagine having that kind of patience today.

a nap

I don't think a nap is going to happen. I'm going to give up. No biggie. I had a fantastic night's sleep. I still could have used a nice fifteen-minute nap, but okay.

The cats

The cats are so frisky out there. Like kittens. I'm glad I let them out for the afternoon. It drizzled this morning, and it is overcast and cold, but it is dry now and the temperature is 50 degrees. I'm thinking about leaving them out tonight. The temperatures are expected to get down to the lower-mid forties; it's borderline but manageable, I think. I don't know.

The Third World Meets the Information Age

The Third World makes some interesting choices in the information age.

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The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. And they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.

[But it shouldn't be that difficult to understand for those of us who are entirely addicted to the World Wide Web.]

If you don’t have plumbing, and have never had plumbing, and nobody around you has ever had plumbing, then you’ve presumably long since worked out an efficient way to relieve yourself.

That’s what you do, and what your people have always done. Maybe it’s less private than an outhouse – but in that case you’re used to not having privacy. Maybe it involves walking further than you would to a bathroom – but maybe it seems normal not to defecate in your home. So somebody comes along and offers to build you an outhouse – would you pay good money for a luxury that solves a problem you don’t have? Or would you prefer to pay the money for something that opens up a huge range of new social and economic possibilities – like a cell phone?

-- Sully's Dish

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Francine Prose

Do you consider yourself a fiction or a nonfiction person?

I consider myself a sentence person.

-- Francine Prose, NYT Interview

I have found someone else I need to read. Lord, I need another fifty years of reading life...

Pop

Pop returns late from his rounds, and I enjoyed having the house to myself. It turns out that he and Lorie went to see the new Tom Cruise movie about that Jack Reecher character.

Seeing two women at a time in his seventies. It is all the more striking because he just stayed home and watched TV after Mother's death throughout his sixties. I still wonder what happened.

Swing It, Baby

[H]igh heels exaggerate the differences in the ways men and women walk, making the wearer appear more feminine. This stimulates "sexual arousal in males," as well as increased attentiveness on the part of women who are scoping out potential competitors for male attention. This can happen on either a conscious or an unconscious level, but this evidence suggests the dynamic is real, and transcends fashion fads.

-- Tom Jacobs

Color me mystified. I thought women just liked to make walking more of a challenge.

David Duchovny's "Californication"

I see an ONTD post on a new season of David Duchovny's "Californication". I cannot belive that show is still going on. I remember when it first came out and I loved the first few shows, but was not surprised when the show quickly became politically correct and feminized.

How long ago was that?

It feels like it might have been before we got on the Internet, but I sometimes forget that we have been on the Internet for a long time now, over a decade.

Reading the article, I see that it was six years ago. It feels even longer. My sense of time keeps getting worse with the years.

(ONTD)

Daily Fun

Funny Wildlife

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