W00t!

Congratulations to my #2 daughter, Sheena, and her new husband Cody Schwartz on their wedding this past Saturday 19 May 2012.  They've been together for more than 7 years, have 2 kids together, and they decided to make it official.

Mystical

The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, ....  I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it.

-- Donovan (10 May 1946-), Scottish singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Grip Interview (1997)

Up All Night

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.

-- Casey Stengel (1890 - 1975), American baseball player and manager, BBC "The Myths of Sex Before Sport" (Jennifer Quinn), 12 August, 2004

Stupid Doesn't Mean

I don't know.  Just because we are stupid doesn't mean everybody else was.

-- JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, arguing against increased regulation as a response to his company's $2 billion loss, in a conference call, 10 May 2012

Someone Else Decide

When you've driven race cars, and when you've jumped out of airplanes, cars are on fire, when you've been upside down at two hundred miles per hour waiting for your head to hit the ground, when you've been in Africa with a wounded Cape buffalo six feet in front of you, chargin' ya, I'll let someone else decide what the most dangerous thing I've ever done is.

-- Carroll Shelby (11 January 1912 - 10 May 2012), American automotive designer, racing driver, and entrepreneur

Comfortable

I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.

-- Vice President Joseph R. Biden, on NBC's "Meet the Press", quoted in the New York Times, 7 May 2012

Too Old To Learn

Who is too old to learn is too old to teach -- Scottish Proverb

Vision

A great teacher never strives to explain her vision: she simply invites you to stand beside her and see for yourself. -- Reverend R. Inman

HBD To Me

The truth is a trap; you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

-- Soren Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 - 11 November 1855), Danish Christian philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialist thought and Absurdist traditions, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard (1954)


 19590505 has 2 representations as a sum of 2 squares:
19590505 = 572**2 + 4389**2 = 3091**2 + 3168**2

 May 5, 1959 was ...
The 125th day of the year (126th, this year)
2765 weeks and 3 days ago
19,358 days ago
53 years ago
... and, my birthday.

Seventeen And Crazy

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane. -- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

First Places Taken

It is more often from pride than from ignorance that we are so obstinately opposed to current opinions; we find the first places taken, and we do not want to be the last. -- Francois De La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), French author and moralist, Reflections; Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665)

Tenant Farmers

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy -- sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. -- Thomas Edison (1847-1931), American inventor and businessman, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931); as quoted in Uncommon Friends : Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel & Charles Lindbergh (1987) by James Newton, p. 31

Big Brother

If you believe in privacy and free markets, you should be deeply concerned about the proposed marriage of government intelligence gathering with private, profit-seeking companies. CISPA is Big Brother writ large, putting the resources of private industry to work for the nefarious purpose of spying on the American people. -- Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), "CISPA is the new SOPA", thehill.com, 23 April 2012

HBD, HSA

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. -- Anne Sexton (1928-1974), American poet and writer, "The Poet's Story," entry for 1 January 1972

More Harm Than Good

At this point, we don't trust America's TSA, Britain's Department for Transport, or airport security in general. We don't believe they're acting in the best interests of passengers. We suspect their actions are the result of politicians and government appointees making decisions based on their concerns about the security of their own careers if they don't act tough on terror, and capitulating to public demands that "something must be done." ... This loss of trust -- in both airport security and counterterrorism policies in general -- is the first harm. ... In 2004, the average extra waiting time due to TSA procedures was 19.5 minutes per person. That's a total economic loss -- in America -- of $10 billion per year, more than the TSA's entire budget. The increased automobile deaths due to people deciding to drive instead of fly is 500 per year. Both of these numbers are for America only, and by themselves demonstrate that post-9/11 airport security has done more harm than good. -- Security expert Bruce Schneier, "Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security, schneier.com, 29 March 2012

Soundtrack

Music is the soundtrack of your life.

-- Dick Clark (30 November 1929 - 18 April 2012), American radio and television personality, host of American Bandstand from 1957 to 1987

Crazy

The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality.

-- Thomas Piketty, one of two French economists whose work tracking income equality has informed debate in the United States over earnings and tax fairness, New York Times, 17 April 2012

Product

If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.

-- Unknown

Generic

Your pharmacists aren't telling you, hey, when we fill this with your generic, you are giving up all of your legal remedies.

-- Michael Johnson, a lawyer in a case concerning a lack of redress for patients harmed by generic, rather than brand-name, drugs, New York Times, 21 March 2012

Drone

I have revenge in my heart. I just want to grab a drone by the tail and smash it into the ground.

-- Noor Magul, a farmer in Pakistan who said three of his relatives were killed by a United States drone strike, New York Times, 19 March 2012