REMEMBER: FRUIT JUICE IS SIMPLY filtered water. (I like mine run through a tangerine tree, or pear, or cherry.)
Pithyism #357
ONESELF IS AN INSUFFICIENT TOOL with which to measure the Universe.
Sigh, Kitty, Sigh
IF ONLY WE COULD TEACH the cat the meaning of “wait five minutes” …
Schrodinger’s Bat
IF THERE ARE UNIVERSES NEXT door to ours, I would swap the one with sentient reptiles for one that’s just different enough — one containing, say, all-new Star Trek episodes with just a wee bit o’ difference. How much would you pay for an original, still-in-the-wrapper Spock nose?
Harlan’s Secret
“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.”
— Author and critic HARLAN ELLISON, my first inspiration and sometime/longtime influence, as quoted on http://www.advicetowriters.com, a website worth visiting
5 Thoughts: Alternative Pleasantries
1. REGRET IS LIKE THE PROVERBIAL potato chip, which is why I am reluctant to taste even one. Living a reasonably full life keeps any real regret firmly in its place; i.e., away. Yet while I regret nothing, there are some experiences which I would like to have but either cannot or will not swap for whatever I’d have to sacrifice to realize them. Think of them as wistful might-have-beens or alternative pleasantries:
2. Steve Jobs doing his annual MacWorld thing. I have friends who are Mac users, and I have friends who are Mac addicts who never miss a product rollout. Yet I have never so much as seen a video of Mr. Jobs’ yearly tech unveilment. Something there is about consensual dedication to intelligent (or any) tools; it would be nice to see the Fearless Leader revealing to the faithful their latest obsession.
3. One more Grateful Dead show. I was never a full-on Deadhead, but would see them whenever they played to their Bay Area homebase, and whenever I could, mostly between 1981 and 1990; the best show I attended was three days at Laguna Seca Raceway in 1988, with camping and girls and everything. It’s true that “there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” — it would be nice to know that the last one was the last one.
4. A few years ago, one of the cable stations ran a couple daily episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This allowed for the taping of the entire series; they were also running daily Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, but we didn’t know then how good (sometimes better) a series it was; or we could now curl up some evening at Quark’s (or, for the hardcore, Vic’s) without bugging Netflix.
5. I think I passed up a chance to see DEVO live in the late 1970s or early 1980s. But I saw them in the ’90s, which was in some cases more interesting due to all the middle-aged punks with their kids. So it all works out eventually.
Muse Ich
SOME SONGS JUST SOUND BEST on a transistor radio. (You know who you are.)