Emphasis on the Word "Capable"

While looking for something else, I found this tactful and accurate statement on the website for Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West: "Cats are capable of learning and responding to their names, particularly if they have an affectionate relationship with the person who calls them." 

Meaning, they can do it if they feel like it.

No kidding.

Humor with Substance

"The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I’m left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can’t quite remember."

George Carlin said that. It was quoted in a presentation I saw the other night, and not only is it funny, it is a very subtle remark when you stop laughing and think about it.

That's so typical of George Carlin. I think of him as a serious philosopher, masking the big questions behind raucous, sometimes scatological humor.

The most important of these examples, perhaps, was his famous "Seven Words That You Can Never Say on TV" (no, I am not going to link to it). I read that case in First Amendment class and I was really impressed.

Not so much with the cleverness of the court determining that the FCC could make rules limiting the broadcast of "indecency" to the hours between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., because most kids would be asleep then -- wow, those were the days, huh? -- but because I absorbed the impression that Carlin was really riffing on the power of words: the fact that there were 7 out of the 400,000 words in English that were just plain unsayable in polite company or over the airwaves.

To me, this is a whole different issue than what's going on now with Cher, Nicole Richie and Meryl Streep (no, I am not going to link to them, either!), which strikes me as merely a trip to the crossroads of live t.v. and limited vocabulary. Not a whole lotta philosophy happening there.

Carlin was something different, and I'll always feel admiration and affection for a man who loves words and takes them seriously.

And have you heard him on Baseball v. Football? Words again, and funny. Thoughtful, too.

For the New Year

I think that we're all waiting to be transformed into something else

but in fact the luckiest of us are the people who realize this is it.

~Allan Gurganus

Wishing you all the good things you hope for in the New Year.

For the Old Year

In the end these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you learn to let go?

~Buddha

Between the Holidays

Let us make merry while we may, and think upon joy,
for one may seize sorrow whenever one likes.

~Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Perspective

From Getting a Life: Strategies for Joyful & Effective Living, by Copthorne Macdonald:

Yes, the donut has a hole, but it is still mostly donut.

An Alternate View of Literature

From The View from Pompey's Head, by Hamilton Basso:

He said it was hard enough for him to keep up with the things he had to keep up with, without wasting his time reading novels, and besides, he'd rather go out for a good brisk canter any day.