spring cleaning

whew! this place is dusty! :o)

yep, still me

Still me--just a very very bright and handsome version of me...almost didn't recognize myself.

Hello youuuu. ;?)

am i still me?

hmm...

and i thought Obama was a compelling speaker

If you haven't caught Fareed Zacharia's new show on CNN yet, I highly recommend.

It is cleverly titled GPS for Global Public Square. Fabulous speaker and thinker, And while merely one voice and one perspective on global current events, a refreshing one with some insight.

Enjoy.

11 billion

From Talking Points Memo:

Americans cut backon driving in March, compared to the previous March, more than in any single month since such record-keeping began in 1942. It was a 4.3 percent drop in miles driven, a reduction of:

11 billion miles.

("Day-amn!" say the staff at jer,uh...ME!)

[TPM continues]...I was doing a little more reading on this and came across this...from Time, circa 1947:

The average U.S. citizen completely ignores the regularity with which the automobile kills him, maims him, embroils him with the law and provides mobile shelter for rakes intent on seducing his daughters. He takes it into his garage as fondly as an Arab leading a prize mare into his tent. He woos it with Simoniz, Prestone, Ethyl and rich lubricants--and goes broke trading it in on something flashier an hour after he has made the last payment on the old one.

By last week, this peculiar state of mind had not only sucked thousands of American oil wells dry, stripped the rubber groves of Malaya, produced the world's most inhuman industry and its most recalcitrant labor union, but had filled U.S. streets with so many automobiles that it was almost impossible to drive one. In some big cities, vast traffic jams never really got untangled from dawn to midnight; the bray of horns, the stink of exhaust fumes, and the crunch of crumpling metal eddied up from them as insistently as the vaporous roar of Niagara.

the good doktor

DOKTOR FAUSTUS

We were long since a great power, we were quite used to it, and it did not make us as happy as we had expected. The feeling that it had not made us more attractive, that our relation to the world had rather worsened than improved, lay, unconfessed, deep in our hearts. ... War then, and if needs must, war against everybody, to convince everybody and to win. We were bursting with the consciousness that this was [our] century, that history was holding her hand out over us, that after Spain, France, England, it was our turn to put our stamp on the world and be its leader; that [this] century was ours.

--Thomas Mann

ego deficit

Man on th ra-di-o today said willpower is a measurable thing. The self-regulating activity of the ego or some such.

That point where you cave in and eat a whole bucket of ice cream is the point of ego deficit. Your reserves of willpower have been depleted, so you give up on Lent, or New Year's resolutions, or your diet.

Different things replenish or empty your tank, and there seems to be a finite pool such that if one thing takes away, there's that much less for all the other things.

Cool. And I always thought I went through these weird cycles where I'd slide into depression and fall back into old habits with no get-to-itiveness. Hmm, maybe not bad at all, just the body saying 'I need a break' I've run out of steam for the moment...