Sunday's Kat Kwote

Master Cat, who still kept in advance of the party, came up to some reapers, and said to them, "You, good people, who are reaping, if you do not say that all this corn belongs to my Lord the Marquis of Carabas, you shall all be cut into pieces as small as minced meat."

~ Charles Perrault from "Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots"~

Neil Armstrong

I guess we'd all like to be remembered not for one great firework, but for the ledger of our daily work.

~ Neil Armstrong ~

Photo courtesy NASA.

Poetry Friday

The subjects choose me. Whatever tickles my fancy or bangs my funny bone I approach with vim and vigor, or vice versa.

~ Douglas Florian ~

Mystery

Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun.

~ Charles Caleb Colton ~





Graphic courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Even More True Today!

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. ~ Mark Twain ~

Never Forget!

When a society or a civilization perishes, one condition can always be found. They forgot where they came from.

~ Carl Sandburg ~





Photo courtesy National Park Service.

Interesting Technique

Please understand the reason why Chinese vegetables taste so good. It is simple. The Chinese do not cook them, they just threaten them!

~ Jeff Smith ~

Photo by sanfamedia.com.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

A cat's eyes are windows enabling us to see into another world.

~ Irish proverb ~

Two Quotes Today

We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.

~ Neil Newhouse ~

And this, keeping in mind Mr. Newhouse's audience:

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

~ John Stuart Mill ~

Poetry Friday

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

~ John Ashbery ~


Poster courtesy Library of Congress.

Good Question!

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

~ Will Rogers ~


 

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Whoopie! It's the Law in Maine!

The whoopie pie, a baked good made of 2 cakes with a creamy frosting between them, is the official state treat.

~ Title 1, §225: State treat ~






Photo by joyosity.

Housework

My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?

~ Erma Bombeck ~




Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

What?

Many a bum show has been saved by the flag.

~ George M. Cohan ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

~ Margaret Mead ~

Photo by Ed from Ohio.

And Coupled With Fear--We're Doomed

Hate, sad to say, at least in America these days, is a far greater motivator than love and feelin' groovy.

~ Michael Moore ~

Poetry Friday

Never keep a poem waiting, it might be a really good one and if you don’t get it down it’s lost.

~ Ruth Stone ~



Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Mother Nature Is Very Crafty

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

~ Richard P. Feynman ~





Photo by quinn.anya.

Data

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

~ Alvin Toffler ~

Primary Day in NH

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt ~

Let Loose!

There is something so rewarding about dancing. It's almost spiritual--you let loose, you feel free, you get endorphins from the exercise.

~ Julianne Hough ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

~ Will Cuppy ~

Photo by jonasflanken.

Can You Guess Who Said This?

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt ~

Poetry Friday

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: the echoes are the bottom.

~ Wallace Stevens ~

Photo by Cascadian Farm.

Cookbooks

What makes cookbooks interesting is to find out about the people and the culture that invented the food.

~ Vincent Schiavelli ~

On Signing the Social Security Act of 1935

We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt ~

Design for the original card courtesy Social Security Administration.

It's a Gift To Be Simple

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

~ Charles Mingus ~





Photo by mtphrames.

Have a Relaxing Labor Day!

Park scene, Labor Day, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1939), photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

~ Ovid ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Most cats are interesting, and they are easy to love, which is more than anyone can say for most people.

~ Michael Robbins ~

Photo by staticgirl.

Hell Will Have To Freeze Over First

Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard.

~ Sally Kohn ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

the kitten dances
round and round...
falling leaves

~ Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue ~






Photo by Eric Parker.

Poetry Friday

My "must-have" was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me. The children of old New England were always surrounded, it is true, with stubborn matter of fact,-—the hand to hand struggle for existence. But that was no hindrance. Poetry must have prose to root itself in; the homelier its earth-spot, the lovelier, by contrast, its heaven-breathing flowers.

~ Lucy Larcom ~

Grover's Taxi

"I want to go to the library."

~ Mr. Johnson, a.k.a. Fat Blue, voice by Jerry Nelson ~

Give Up Smoking?

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

~ Mark Twain ~





Drawing by Everett Shinn courtesy Library of Congress.

Doodle!

Even if you can't draw, do a little doodle or rip an illustration from a magazine--these visuals will help bring your idea to life.

~ John Emmerling ~

Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Room Deodorizer?

Onions and bacon cooking up just makes your kitchen smell so good. In fact, one day I'm going to come up with a room deodorizer that smells like bacon and onions. It's a fabulous smell.

~ Paula Deen ~

Photo by jypsygen.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

I want to be a lion. Everybody wants to pass as cats.

~ Counting Crows "Mr. Jones" ~

Here Lies...

Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.

~ Leah Price ~





Photo by Cat Sidh.

Poetry Friday

The grass resolves to grow again,
receiving the rain to that end,
but my disordered soul thirsts
after something it cannot name.

~ Jane Kenyon from "August Rain, After Haying" ~

Photo by MarkyBon.

Define "Cute"

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

~ Abbie Hoffman ~

Beware Those With Weak Heads!

Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.

~ Jane Austen ~

The Case for Knowledge

When people in a democracy are not educated in the art of living--to strengthen their conscience, compassion, and ability to question and think critically--they can be easily manipulated by fear and propaganda. A democracy is only as wise as its citizens, and a democracy of ignorant citizens can be as dangerous as a dictatorship.

~ Paul K. Chappell ~

Art

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

~ Edgar Degas ~







Degas' "Dans un Café" courtesy Musée d'Orsay.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

And Perdita makes me smile every day. She runs to greet me when I come home, and she flops at my feet in the morning to be petted. She loves boxes and balled-up pages of the Nation. She is afraid of vacuum cleaners and tornado sirens. She lies on her back in squares of sunshine with her paws in the air and looks perfectly ridiculous and content.

~ Michael Robbins ~

Take What You Need

~ Unknown artist, photo by Jana Kobold,
posted on StreetArt in Germany, 8/11/12 ~

Poetry Friday

All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

~ John Drinkwater ~

Not Just a Boxer!

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

~ Mike Tyson ~





Photo by octal.

Summer's Winding Down

'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.

~ Thomas More ~



Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

An Important Distinction

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes ~

If You Create, You Are a God!

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

~ Rita Dove ~


Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

                               a spitting image
                               of her mother...
                               kitten

~ Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue ~


Photo by indy catholic.

Bring On the Merry!

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

~ J. R. R. Tolkien ~

Illustration by Randolph Caldecott.

Poetry Friday

Poem, do not raise your voice.
Be a whisper that says "There!"

~ Wendell Berry ~





Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

NH's Own--Franklin Pierce

Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion.

~ Franklin Pierce ~






Currier & Ives lithograph courtesy Library of Congress.

Better Yet, Stop and Eat!

If you ever have to support a flagging conversation, introduce the topic of eating.

~ Leigh Hunt ~

Utopia

Human beings will be happier--not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

~ Kurt Vonnegut ~

Perhaps It's Lost in Cyberspace?

Uncle Martin: Tim, did you see this article? Your government is about to spend two billion dollars on a space program that can't possibly work.

Tim: Uncle Martin, here I've got my friendly bank statement. Right here. And over here I've got my enemy checkbook. And between the two, a penny is lost. And the bank wants me to find it! Yes, Abe Lincoln, lost in a miasma of mathematics and figures. And you speak to me about two billion dollars? Please Uncle Martin, can we keep it quiet?

Uncle Martin: [Going back to newspaper] Hmp.

~ From My Favorite Martian ~ ~





My Favorite Martian photo courtesy tv.com.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

In 1963 the French government had numerous cats undergoing intensive training for possible space flight, with fairly arduous tasks involving a compression chamber and a centrifuge. But they don't seem to have suffered too much; ten of the would-be astronauts were 'decommissioned' for eating too much!

~ Patrick Roberts at Purr-n-Fur ~

Honesty In Politics

Is there a limit to how dishonest you can be, in politics? Or is this what is now known as running the nation like a business, where little irritations like honesty or legitimacy can go straight to hell, if there's profit in sending them there?

~ Hunter for the Daily Kos ~

Poetry Friday

Concrete poetry

Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic.

~ from Poetry Foundation's "Glossary Terms" ~

Time

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

~ Rabindranath Tagore ~

Photo by Injas World.

Cake for All!

All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.

~ George Harrison ~

Tim Green aka atoach.

So True...

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

~ Ernest Hemingway ~

Photo of Hemingway taken in 1904, courtesy JFK Presidential Library and Museum.

A Shame She Had to Miss the 2012 Issues

I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps--space stamps and Olympics stamps.

~ Sally Ride ~



See other Olympics postage stamps at Philatelynews.com. --KK