Big Bird And Oscar The Grouch

I always thought, How fortunate for me that I got to play the two best Muppets?  Playing Big Bird is one of the most joyous things of my life. ...  I don't get to play him -- I get to live his life.

-- Caroll Spinney, who leaves "Sesame Street" this week after nearly 50 years of playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, New York Times, 17 October 2018

First Legal Gram

I came out tonight to be the first person in Canada to purchase the first legal gram of recreational cannabis, to help see the end of prohibition in Canada finally.

-- Canadian Ian Power, who with Nikki Rose completed the first legal marijuana sale in Canada, shortly after midnight in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's easternmost province, Reuters.com, 17 October 2018

Tribal Affiliation

Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation.

-- The Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, Chuck Hoskin Jr., in a statement Monday in response to a DNA test showing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American, Washington Post, 16 October 2018

Are You Surprised?

When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?

-- Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi (13 October 1958 - ?), missing Saudi journalist and author.  He is currently missing amid allegations that he was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on 2 October 2018.  "Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive.  Now it’s unbearable." in The Washington Post (18 September 2017)

Disasters

This is what disasters look like.

-- Former FEMA Chief W. Craig Fugate, on the damage in Florida from Hurricane Michael, New York Times, 12 October 2018

Distance

If you can repair your future child's myopia with preemptive genetic tinkering, you might also want to increase her I.Q. by a few dozen points. Will it lead to a world as utopian as Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average? Of course not. It will just add genetic manipulation of embryos and child cloning to the means by which affluent, fussy people try to distance themselves from bad luck, disappointment, menial work, death, and poor people.

-- David Quammen (1948-), award-winning science, nature and travel writer, "Clone Your Troubles Away: Dreaming at the Frontiers of Animal Husbandry", Harper's Magazine (February 2005)

Thanks, Mark

I don't have a clever quote tonight, just the fading reverberations of a "China Grove" encore as the Doobie Brothers wrapped their set at State Farm Center in Champaign, IL tonight.

Cheers.