Sunday's Kat Kwote

For while in every other part
      His portly person sleeps,
That bushy tail, with steady wave,
      A ceaseless vigil keeps.


~ R. Worthington, "Don't You Like My Cat?" from Baby Chatterbox ~



Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

We Don't Need a Salesman!

The whole purpose of a campaign is to tell the American people who you are and what you want to do as president, not to hide your policies behind a smoke-screen of counterfeit empathy and deceptive advertising and hope they won’t notice them until you’re elected.

That’s not leadership, it’s salesmanship.

~ Steve Almond ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Zombies

Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.

~ George A. Romero ~



Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Happy Halloween!

Witch and ghost make merry on this last of dear October’s days.

~ Anonymous ~
Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Language

Language was important, sexy, fun, alive, extremely personal, it was like food, you wouldn't just pop anything into your mouth, why would you let anything pop out that hadn't been considered and prepared for someone to enjoy?

~ Jeanne Darst from Fiction Ruined My Family ~

Hurricanes

One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms.

~ Adam Frank ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Myself and Pangur, cat and sage
Go each about our business;
I harass my beloved page,
He his mouse.

~ Eavan Boland, "From the Irish of Pangur Ban" ~

Welcome, Julian!

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

~ Louisa May Alcott ~

Poetry Friday

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

~ John Barton ~

Interesting Thought

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

~ Anita Brookner ~

It Didn't Stop Her From Becoming a Writer

I dropped chemistry. I practically blew up the lab in college.

~ Patricia Cornwell ~

Old New Hampshire

Old New Hampshire, Old New Hampshire
Old New Hampshire Grand and Great
We will sing of Old New Hampshire,
Of the dear old Granite State.

~ Refrain from NH Offical State Song, "Old New Hampshire" ~

Postcard courtesy Boston Public Library.

To Be a Writer You Have to Read!

I started to read books when I was a child. This triggered my strong interest in literature after reading more and more books. I felt I had many words to express, I thought the strongest and most unconstrained way was through literature, so I started to write. Of course, I also had a desire to prove myself, and a wish to change my destiny.

~ Mo Yan ~
Photo © J. Kolfhaus, courtesy NobelPrize.org.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

A Thousand years or so before Christ the Egyptians associated the cat with music, utilizing the graceful head and figure of the beloved animal in the decoration of the sistra.

~ Carl Van Vechten ~

This Makes a Lot of Sense

The nation exists to make lives better for all its people--making sure that corporations treat their workers as assets to be developed rather than as costs to be cut. Companies have been slow to create jobs not because of insufficient profits but because of inadequate customers. The vast American middle class are the real job creators, but they don’t have enough money in their pockets because too many companies have broken the basic bargain linking wages to productivity.

~ Robert Reich ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

~ Lucille Clifton ~


Photo © Dorothy Alexander.

And It Keeps You Warm, Too!

We hold the values of freedom and human rights very high and I think that those are all a part of a very strong quilt that binds us together.

~ Robert Menendez ~


Photo by circulating.

This Is Applicable to So Much!

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

~ Ernest Hemingway ~

Work Out!

There's no reason to stereotype yourself. Doing math is like going to the gym--it's a workout for your brain and it makes you smarter.

~ Danica McKellar ~

The Good Stuff

I'm not after fame and success and fortune and power. It's mostly that I want to have a good job and have good friends; that's the good stuff in life.

~ Drew Barrymore ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Cats can be cruel and stingy and aloof (although most cats are far less aloof than has generally been supposed). And all of them are half insane.

~ Michael Robbins ~
Photo by jennratonmort.

Defining the Terms

A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt ~

Poetry Friday

The secret of all art, also of poetry, is, thus, distance. Thanks to distance the past preserved in our memory is purified and embellished.

~ Czeslaw Milosz ~

Me, Too!

The more I live, the more I think that humor is the saving sense.

~ Jacob August Riis ~




Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A Great Matter

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling.

~ Leo Tolstoy ~





"Portrait of a Young Married Couple" by Jacob Jordaens courtesy Museum of Fine Arts.

An Old Fashioned Birthday Wish

Card courtesy New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click on the image for a larger view.

Columbus Day

Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood.

~ Christopher Columbus ~
Map courtesy New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

...it is much easier to train a cat to perform tasks that have some ancestral meaning for their niche in the environment than those which are abstract or meaningless from their point of view. Cats, in other words, are much smarter than they let on.

~ Stephen Budiansky ~


Photo by carolyn.will.

Common Sense and Courage

Most of man's problems upon this planet, in the long history of the race, have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage.

~ Frances Perkins ~

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Poetry Friday

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

~ William Faulkner ~

Play

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

~ Plato ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

True Love

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~

What An Achievement!

The fastest time to enter a zipped suitcase is 5.43 seconds achieved by Leslie Tipton (USA) on 14 September 2009 in New York, USA on the LIVE! with Regis & Kelly show.

~ Courtesy Socialphy ~

A Most Extreme Form of Censorship

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

~ Ray Bradbury ~


Photo by Samuel M. Livingston.

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.