The NRA is Coming for Your Children.
Trenz Pruca
TODAY FROM AMERICA:
A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES WHILE JUNE IS BUSTING OUT ALL AROUND HIM.
“Understanding is a drug for the masses.”
Montego, Greg. Ziegfeld Zaggar, Quantum Detective & the Dirty Rotten, Sarcastic Multiverse (The Quantum Detective Book 1).
It is Sunday the fifth of June 2022. It rained this morning. You can tell it was raining, the sky was overcast and the ground was damp. In California rain is more like a heavy mist — no heavy raindrops pocking the water on the ground — no huge clouds boiling in the sky — no thunder and lightning — just the slight smell of moisture and a darkening of the damp ground.
Hayden and his friend Jake flew off to Thailand for their great adventure this morning. After breakfast, I asked Naida what we should do today. She answered, “It’s Sunday a day of rest.” “But don’t we do that every day now?” I responded. She smiled. I thought about it a while and agreed so I went back upstairs and put myself to bed and slept for a few hours.
There is something about getting very old that I had never really expected. Oh, the period of life threatening diseases of the aging, the cancer, the heart disease and what have you, the doctors, hospitals and fear are all expected and there for one to ignore, complain about, or laugh about. Also the inevitable and expected loss of memory and for some the drift into dementia. At first we laugh about it, but then, when it begins to cast its dread shadow on our lives, we lose whatever gallows humor it provided. I have always wondered about dementia. My grandmother began to drift into its grasp in her early seventies. But, rather than pain or confusion, she found everything amusing. There was little that did not make her either smile or giggle. Let’s face it, in life one has the option to either giggle or run away in terror. Anyway, for a lot of us, back when we were in our 40s or thereabouts, there was the sudden recognition that we were mortal prompting a questioning of what we were doing with our lives. What has surprised me most as I reached this current stage in my life, is the very real possibility of being gone tomorrow with little option for great plans. Even preparation of travel plans seem to be beyond my ability. So be it.
“I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything’s fine.”Jeanne Louise Calment —(Jeanne Louise Calment was born in Arles , France , on February 21, 1875, the longest confirmed human lifespan on record: 122 years and 164 days. When the Eiffel Tower was built, she was 14 year old. It was at this time that she met Vincent van Gogh. “He was dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable,” she recalled in an interview given in 1988.)
On Monday afternoon, in somewhat of a better mood, I went off to the pool. The temperature hovered at about the 90Fs. I hid in the shadow of one of the walls that surround the pool area for a while and watched the children playing in the water. Then I swam a bit, took in a little sun to dry off and after spending about two hours there, I returned home.
Tuesday, June 7, primary day in California, the temperature reached into the mid 90s. I slept late. By the time I had eaten breakfast and dressed, it was early afternoon. The day seemed to be moving on without me. I told myself it was time I caught up. So, at about 2pm I set off to Safeway for some shopping. I listened to Cloud Cuckoo Land while driving there and back. I am on my last disc. After a quick lunch and another brief nap, I went to the pool. There I swam a bit and lazed about for two hours or so. I returned to the house feeling much more positive than when I left, proving once again a little exercise (not too much) and a nap (also not too much) can brighten your whole day.
The next morning after breakfast, as we sat on the couch in the study, I reading Christopher Moore’s Island of the Sequined Love Nun and Naida browsing through the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens’ autobiography, she began reading aloud Steffens’ description of a time, during Teddy Roosevelt’s stint as the reformist New York City police commissioner, his close friend, Jacob Riis ,asked him whether in the course of his crusade to clean up police corruption in New York City, TR also had designs on the presidency. He, TR,“…seemed about to strike or throttle Riis, who cowered away amazed.”
“Don’t you dare ask me that,’ T.R. yelled at Riis, ‘Don’t you put such ideas in to my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—, you—‘Riis’s shocked face or T.R.’s recollection that he had few friends ad devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, put his arm around his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained.’Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be president. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve, he can’t do his work, he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of and I can do them if I think of them alone. But, if I begin thinking about what it may lead to—.’He stopped, looked at our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly, ‘I must be wanting to be president. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so I’ll beat myself. See!’Again he looked at us as though we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk.‘Go on away now,’ he said,’And don’t you ever mention the — don’t you ever mention that to me again.’”Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens Vol 1, Harcourt Brace and Company, Second Printing, (pg. 258-9) 1921.
As for the Island of the Sequined Love Nun, it is a novel about an island in the South Pacific, a goofy pilot, the sale of human body parts, cargo cults, cannibals, sharks, talking bats, and a surgical nurse/exotic dancer/goddess dressed only in a red scarf and red high heel pumps and if you ever see sequins on her body you are probably suffering from a migraine.
Later, after a brief nap, I drove into the Golden Hills to pick up some medicine. Hayden was in Thailand therefore I had no-one to have lunch with so I immediately drove back. During the drive, I listened to the final disk of Cloud Cuckoo Land. Although I had difficulty reading the novel, the audio version revealed its greatness. I guess the several story lines taking place during the Siege of Constantinople in the 15 Century, the twentieth Century, and sometime in the future set against the old Hellenistic play, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes were adventures in pluck, survival and the importance of a simple grounded life. I, however, saw only sadness and depression. No matter where the protagonists began, no matter how hard they tried, how far they traveled, or how much they accomplished, they all ended up living most of their lives in a small rural village in relative isolation. Diogenes book after all was a story about the futility of aspiration.
Following lunch and another brief nap, at about 5:30, I took off for the pool, It again was full of people so I lounged in the Hot Tub which was vacant. It is not that I am wary of children and other people. In fact, I immensely enjoy watching them. It is just that I prefer not joining them in their activities and feel uncomfortable attempting to enter even the most basic conversations with them. Introversion may be part of the reason, but embarrassment in knowing that I would inevitably spend most of the conversation talking about myself is another part. So, I sat there and enjoyed myself just watching.
“One t’ing life’s taught me: where there’s no capacity for joy, there’s no capacity for goodness,”Galbraith, Robert. Troubled Blood: 5 (A Cormoran Strike Novel) (p. 275). Little, Brown and Company.
The next day, I slept most of the day then watched the January 6 congressional hearings in the evening. Liz Cheney, as I am sure most of those who watched recognized, gave a magnificent prosecutorial opening statement. It is a shame that most of those who should have been watching probably weren’t.
Friday, another day I woke up after noon. I had awakened some time about 2AM last night and went downstairs and read Christopher Moore’s novel, Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove until the skies began to lighten and I returned to bed and slept away the morning. Christopher Moore (Not my friend Christopher G. Moore who writes mysteries based in Southeast Asia) is one of my favorite comic novelists. This novel is about a dragon/lizard, the last of his kind, who, deep in the ocean somewhere off the California coast, suddenly awakens from his several million year hibernation and comes ashore near a little town on the coast just south of Big Sur and begins eating people (most of whom deserved it) while also releasing a psychological scent driving the citizens of the town into a riot of heightened libido frenzy. There were also a number of interesting sub-plots including B-movie stars, drugs, repenitant psychoanalysts, evil sheriffs, christian evangelists and even a corrupt pharmacist with an obsession about having sex with marine mammals. Try it you will like it. No not sex with marine mammals (unless that is your thing of course) but try the book. Hmm, not sex with the book. Try reading it.
It was another day with a temperature in the 100s. As I looked out the window into the back yard the sun was shining brightly and I wondered if I should venture out today, or remain a disheveled blob of a human sitting among the detritus of the air-conditioned studio pounding on my computer keyboard. It requires some serious thought, perhaps even a nap…
Well, I avoided a nap and set off for the pool at about 3PM. The temperature was about 104 degrees F. It was like walking in a sauna. There were very few people at the pool. I swam for about 1/2 hour or so. When I was not in the water I kept to the shade. The sun was too high in the sky for any sunbathing. It is best during hot days when it is low on the horizon. After about an hour and a half, I left the pool, went on a short walk through the Enchanted Forest, returned home, and had a late lunch. It was about 5:30 PM.
Saturday. It is a bit cooler today, in the upper 90F. Nevertheless, as we walked to the the Saturday Morning Coffee, the air felt even more enervating than when it had been in the mid 100s the last few days.
We returned home. I was feeling queasy and a bit depressed. Perhaps it was the heat perhaps the ennui of the aged. After a bit, I ate lunch while Naida played a rollicking version of Malagueña on the piano. I felt much better. After her Malagueña recital she noticed a very large hornet had gotten into the house. She hunted it down and killed it with a song book of French folk songs. Following that bit of derring-do, she looked at the murder weapon and remarked that she had never seen that book before, even though in had been residing among a large group to song books strewn about the floor near the piano. She then returned to her concert and played some of the songs from the newly discovered songbook, interspersing her piano performances (including singing some of the lyrics) with stories about her mother’s musical accomplishments. She finished up playing and singing some pop-tunes from the 20s and thereabout (Including My Funny Valentine and My Heart Belongs to Daddy.). She then showed me one of the several song books authored by her mother entitled Sing- Along with Erin (Erin being her mom’s name) containing song lyrics from Aba Daba Honeymoon through Embraceable You and on to The Loveliest Night of the Year. We then sang together the entire song book. It was glorious fun.
After the lunch time concert, I felt much better as I made my way upstairs for my nap. As I lay there on our bed looking up at the ceiling, I thought for a short timer this time of my life was not too bad. Then the dog started barking and I fell asleep while reevaluating my recent euphoria.
Throughout my life I wanted to grow up. I wasn’t very good at it and the best I could manage was to grow old. No one I know liked that at all, least of all me.
B. MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:
Almost 65 years ago in 1957-58, I was a student at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington DC. It was a long time ago, a time difference equal to that from the last decade of the 19th century to those same years, in other words ancient history. And just like the victorian world of the 1890s was alien, old fashioned, ridiculous and horrid to us in the 1950s, so perhaps is the 1950s to many of us today. It was the so called golden age of capitalism and television. It was the time of house visits by doctors, segregation, panty-girdles, the organization man, the good housewife, the McCarthy hearings and the “Red Scare,” polio, happy day’s and so on.
Anyway, I had talked* my way into Georgetown University’s prestigious School of Foreign Service intending to become a diplomat and dreaming of a career negotiating intricate international trade deals and the end to wars. I was later to learn most Foreign Service Officers spent an abysmally long time in the passport office and rarely got into the big deal business of diplomacy. So, I eventually abandoned my goal and replaced it with a life of aimless wandering and periodic debauchery.
(*I never applied to Georgetown or any other schools of higher learning I have attended, preferring to talk my way in on registration day.)
Anyway, there I was a poor first generation Italian boy from streets matriculating at the school of the Catholic Aristocracy. The Georgetown Catholic Aristocracy at the time consisted of those families who headed medium sized businesses, had penetrated the higher levels of local and state governments and the federal bureaucracy, or were related to members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. By working three jobs during high school, I had saved only enough money to pay for my first year’s tuition and about six months rent on an off campus apartment that I lived in with two friends from my old neighborhood. They both had enough funds to pay their way, one because his father was a successful bookie who had secreted more than enough money behind a loose brick in his fireplace and the other’s father was an engineer and his uncles high level CIA operatives in DC. I did not have money left for food so I had to either steal it (which I did) or along with my roommates run crooked card games to raise some extra funds off of the more well-off and often gambling addicted students.
Like most schools Georgetown had two types of students — those who attended classes, studied in the evenings, and had relatively clear ambitions and those who were the ne’er-do-wells and trouble makers. I gravitated more to the latter.
I never liked school and schooling. It interfered with my reading. During my grammar school years, I would take every opportunity available to feign illness so that could stay home and read. I would read anything I could get the hands on, books, backs of cereal boxes and even the twenty four volume encyclopedia we had in our house that my parents had been suckered into buying by a door to door salesman who persuaded them to spend more than they could afford for something that he promised would make their beloved son successful in school and eventually President of the United States. Despite reading those volumes, I became neither. Actually, I recall, I only read twenty one or twenty-two of them. Perhaps that is the reason I failed to be either a successful student or President of the United States.
In school, when I went there, I would quietly sit by the small bookcase located in each classroom and read the books contained in them and ignore whatever else was going ronin the room around me. Although I was generally a quiet well behaved lad, whenever a teacher would insist I stop reading and pay attention to what she or he was trying to teach, my response inevitably qualified me for a trip to the Principal’s office, after school detention, or a demand my mother attend a conference with either the teacher or the Principal and at times both. My fifth grade teacher once told me I had broken the school record for punishment. Later, in high school, I would not stay home but would cut classes and sit in the school library reading. I had set my goal to reading every book in the library beginning with A and continuing through Z. I had gotten somewhere in the Ss by the time I graduated. As a result of my grammar and high school reading regime, I became very knowledgable about everything as long as it did not begin with anything after the letter T.
In college, although I generally continued my historical approach to education, I discovered one or two professors, usually in History, who captured my attention. Their interpretations often changed everything I had thought I knew.
Anyway, of the ne’er do wells and trouble makers that made up those other students whose lifestyles I gravitated to at college there was a sub-group of pure thugs who also possessed a patina of political savvy. The most prominent of which was the Buchanan family,. (To be continued)
DAILY FACTOIDS:
A. Most Caucasians (white people) are Brown.
Caucasian is an anthropological term for people with a certain physical type – high narrow noses, no epicanthic fold, comparatively hairy etc. White ethnic Europeans are Caucasians, but so are North Africans,, along the Mediterranean coast, most groups in the Middle East, Indians, Pakistanis, Romanies, Bangladeshis, Rohingya and partially the Burmans. Most Caucasians, therefore, are brown.
(My ancestors come from a large island in the center of the Mediterranean. They and most of those from the other islands that dot that sea as well as the mainland areas adjacent to them are more khaki colored [a dull dusky brown with a touch of yellow] than brown or white. I guess you can call us the Khaki Colored People or the KCP.)
(By the way, brown is a combination of red and green, or yellow and purple, or blue and orange.When you think about it we brown and khaki colored people are really quite colorful underneath it all.)
B. 1590. Death of Maddalena Casulana, Italian composer, lutenist, and singer. She was the first female composer in the history of western music to have her music printed and published.
In the dedication to her first book of madrigals, to Isabella de’ Medici, she shows her feeling about being a female composer at a time when such a thing was rare. She wrote:
“[I] want to show the world, as much as I can in this profession of music, the vain error of men that they alone possess the gifts of intellect and artistry, and that such gifts are never given to women.”
PEPE’S POTPOURRI:
A. David Anderson on Top: Well, Where Are They?
David Anderson is Naida’s cousin, Although I have never met him, I know him through Naida’s stories and his posts on Facebook. Although he may not feel it, I consider him to have been one of those to have won this game of life. Life, you see, is a full-time sport. Like in the NFL you win some and you lose some. What really maters at the end of it all is the memories, the money and if your really lucky you came out of it all healthy enough to enjoy the first two. He received a Phd in mathematics and lived with his wife and two daughters in Alaska where he worked for the State Department of Fish and Wildlife, often spending weeks alone or with his family in the wilderness at times north or the Arctic circle. He later travelled to France where he worked as an entertainer singing and playing the guitar in the Cafes of Paris to earn enough money to put himself through the Sorbonne where he earned a Phd. In French literature.
Here’s a little ramble about Enrico Fermi and the Fermi Paradox. Enrico was a brilliant 20th Century particle physicist for whom fermions (matter particles like quarks and electrons) are named. FYI the remaining particles are called bosons, and are responsible for forces in quantum field theory. Examples include photons, gluons, and gravitons.Okay, so around 1950 Fermi, Teller, and one or two additional heavy hitters in theoretical physics, were having lunch together at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and the conversation came round to extraterrestrial life. Given the enormity of space and time, it seemed reasonable that we earthlings would not be alone in the cosmos. “What a waste of space that would be,” remarked Fermi, and so on and so forth.But in fact, neither then nor now has a shred of reliable evidence of any other civilization turned up in our past light cone (meaning all of space-time from which another civilization or its artifacts could in theory be detected by us, given the finite speed of light and the expansion of space).So this is the Fermi Paradox: Given the apparently high probability of our not being alone in the cosmos, where is everybody? “Where is everybody” became the signature phrase for the paradox. And Fermi expressed it that way.In the years since then, several things have occurred, of which I’ll mention two. First, Carl Sagan founded SETI, the search for extraterrestrialintelligence. My opinion is that SETI is too narrow.Does “intelligence” mean what we humans pride ourselves in? If so, heaven help us! Additionally, the search for alien signals has been conducted in the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwaves to gamma rays (i.e. photons of varying energy or frequency). But perhaps aliens are broadcasting with gravity waves (by modulating the curvature of space-time) or with what is known as quantum entanglement etc., etc., etc.SETI has now been largely abandoned, but its offspring, astrobiology, has matured into a respectable science. I will end with one line of astrobiological investigation that I find fascinating:To date, all life on our planet appears to be genotypically related. That is, arising from a single source. If we could find an exception to that apparent reality, then the doors of the search would open widely, or at least motivation would greatly increase.Currently, the search for a second “genesis” is focusing on earth’s most extreme environments, including everything from the upper atmosphere to deep ocean sediments and at all extremes of temperature.So the question remains, “Where is everybody?”PS. Speculation arises that a technological bottleneck exists at which point civilizations discover nuclear fusion and blow themselves up. This grim prospect does nothing to leverage a solution to the paradox.
B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:
A fanatic ignores what he does not want to know and excuses what cannot be excused in order to find someone to share his resentments.
C. Today’s Poem: The Love Song of Shu-Sin (written c.2000 BCE)
The history of the discovery of the Love Song of Shu-Sin may be worth a poem all in itself. The article in the World History Encyclopedia (https://www.worldhistory.org/article/750/the-worlds-oldest-love-poem/) gives a brief and easily understandable history of its discovery and its significance. Below is the English translation of the poem in 1951 CE by the famous Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer. The poem was not just a love poem, however, but a part of the sacred rite, performed each year, known as the “sacred marriage” in which the king would symbolically marry the goddess Inanna, mate with her, and ensure fertility and prosperity for the coming year. As Kramer described it:
“Once a year, according to Sumerian belief, it was the sacred duty of the ruler to marry a priestess and votary of Inanna, the goddess of love and procreation, in order to ensure fertility to the soil and fecundity to the womb. The time-honored ceremony was celebrated on New Year’s day and was preceded by feasts and banquets accompanied by music, song, and dance. The poem inscribed on the little Istanbul clay tablet was in all probability recited by the chosen bride of King Shu-Sin in the course of one of these New Year celebrations. (245-246)”
The Love Song of Shu-Sin
Bridegroom, dear to my heart,Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,Lion, dear to my heart,Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.Bridegroom, let me caress you,My precious caress is more savory than honey,In the bedchamber, honey-filled,Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,Lion, let me caress you,My precious caress is more savory than honey.Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me,Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies,My father, he will give you gifts.Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.You, because you love me,Give me pray of your caresses,My lord god, my lord protector,My Shu-Sin, who gladdens Enlil’s heart,Give my pray of your caresses.Your place goodly as honey, pray lay your hand on it,Bring your hand over like a gishban-garment,Cup your hand over it like a gishban-sikin-garmentIt is a balbale-song of Inanna.The Love Song of Shu-Sin is from Samuel Noah Kramer’s work History Begins at Sumer, p.p. 246-247
History Behind the Poem
Shu-Sin reigned as king in the city of Ur from 1972-1964 BCE according to what is known in scholarly circles as the `short chronology’ but, according to the `long chronology’ used by some scholars, reigned 2037-2029 BCE. The poem, therefore, is dated according to either 1965 BCE or 2030 BCE but is most often assigned a general date of composition at around 2000 BCE. Shu-Sin was the younger son of Shulgi of Ur (reigned 2029-1982 BCE) who was the last great king of the Ur III Period (2047-1750 BCE).According to the historian Stephen Bertman, besides this poem, “Shu-Sin was also the male lead in a series of erotic poems in Akkadian written in dialogue form similar to the later biblical Song of Songs” (105). Long before the biblical narratives were set down, then, the Mesopotamians were writing the `first drafts’ of some of the most influential works in world history.The archaeological work done in Mesopotamia in the 19th century CE completely changed the way history, and the world, could be understood. Once upon a time, the ancient past stopped with the Bible and the version of history presented in the biblical narratives. Following the discovery of Mesopotamia’s ancient past, history was enlarged, deepened, and humanity’s story became much more complex and interesting. The literature of ancient Mesopotamia provided the first forms of world literature, the first expressions of human emotion and experience and, among them, the experience of romantic love and passion through the world’s oldest love poem.
D. Tuckahoe Joe’s Blog of the Week:
One of my favorite blogs reviews history on a logarithmic scale beginning with the Big Bang (creation of the universe on January first and ending on the 31st of December. A logarithmic scale in this case means:
“that each day of the year covers a shorter period in the history of the universe than the preceding day (5.46% shorter). January 1 begins with the Big Bang and covers a full 754 million years. January 2 covers the next 712 million years, and so on. Succeeding days cover shorter and shorter succeeding intervals in the history of the universe. At this rate, a given calendar date covers only a tenth as much time as a date 41 days earlier.”“On this logarithmic scale, Earth is formed on January 20, trilobites arise toward the end of February, and dinosaurs meet their doom on April 6. The middle of the year finds Homo erectus giving way to early versions of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. October begins with King David and ends with Columbus. By December 7, we reach the year of the Beatles’ first LP (1963). December 31 covers just one year, 2017; calendar time and history-of-the-universe time finally coincide at midnight.”
I thought it would be interesting to check in and see how things had progressed from the “Bo\ig Bang.” To June of this logarithmic year. It is now 1.95 – 1.84 million years ago and proto-humans had just left their jungle arbors and began to hesitantly explore Africa’s grasslands. I had always believed that early hominin exploration of the grasslands was perhaps the major step on their road to modern humanity. I thought it led to standing up straight to see predators and prey over the grass and running to either escape predators or kill prey. This post, however, points out the crucial role of the unique vegetation of the grasslands in hominin evolution.
Grassroots:1.95 – 1.84 million years agoA perspective on Australopithecus and early Homo, from researchers at my school, the University of Utah.Tropical grasses and sedges commonly use the C4 pathway for photosynthesis, which evolved from the C3 pathway used by most plants, in response to lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We can trace an isotopic signature in the teeth of animals that eat C4 plants (and animals that eat those animals). From about 3.5 Mya we see evidence of hominins eating more C4 foods: either grasses (maybe including underground parts) or animals that ate grasses. Paranthropus boisei seems to be a particular champion with the C4s. Chimpanzees, even when they live in open woodlands, mostly stick to eating fruits and leaves. By contrast, exploiting grassroots and sedges to varying degrees may be an important component of australopithecine adaptation to the savannah.This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Australopithecus, grass on June 8, 2022.
E. Giants of History: Terry Pratchett — Discworld in the Beginning.
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part… There was … the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.Pratchett, Terry. The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld . HarperCollins.
F. Tito Tazio’s Tales: From the Old Sailor, Deep-Sea Diver, Pirate, Adventurer, Smuggler, and on and on.
5 am. Cold. ….too much. Shit. Too hot too cold. Too muchrain. .no money ………friends. dead …fuck demeaningbycycle. ….^ STEEALING. MY SHIT .==.cat.eating. Me. Out of house. And home*Otherwise…..ok
TODAY’S QUOTES:
1. Quotes and Rules of Life from Jeanne Louise Calment
( She was born in Arles , France , on February 21, 1875 and lived the longest confirmed human lifespan on record: 122 years and 164 days.):
“I’m in love with wine.”“All babies are beautiful.”“I think I will die of laughter.”“I’ve been forgotten by our Good Lord.”“I’ve only got one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.”“I never wear mascara; I laugh until I cry too often.”“If you can’t change something, don’t worry about it.”“Always keep your smile. That’s how I explain my long life.”“I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything’s fine.”“I have a huge desire to live and a big appetite, especially for sweets.”“I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they’re starting to rust and buckle a bit.”“I took pleasure when I could. I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I’m very lucky.”“Being young is a state of mind, it doesn’t depend on one’s body, I’m actually still a young girl; it’s just that I haven’t looked so good for the past 70 years.”
2. Jim Powell’s translation of Fragment 114, Sappho’s universal lament:
“Virginity, virginity, where have you gone and left me?”“Never again will I come to you, never again.”
Gone but not forgotten.
TODAY’S CHART: The Shame and Sorrow of the United States of America.
SHOOTING INCIDENTS AT K-12 SCHOOLS 1970-PRESENT
Victims per Year
Year Killed Wounded Minor Injuries
1970 8 24 0
1971 7 18 1
1972 4 22 0
1973 5 24 0
1974 12 18 5
1975 5 13 3
1976 3 17 0
1977 4 15 0
1978 8 20 0
1979 4 27 0
1980 7 22 0
1981 5 13 0
1982 5 11 0
1983 9 19 0
1984 6 38 4
1985 5 27 0
1986 8 84 2
1987 6 21 2
1988 12 54 0
1989 10 44 0
1990 5 15 0
1991 13 29 0
1992 18 50 7
1993 35 13 4
1994 19 20 0
1995 12 20 1
1996 18 7 2
1997 19 32 0
1998 17 53 0
1999 18 45 0
2000 11 8 0
2001 7 27 0
2002 4 15 2
2003 9 18 0
2004 7 26 0
2005 20 41 0
2006 18 44 0
2007 5 45 4
2008 11 18 0
2009 4 28 0
2010 5 13 0
2011 3 20 0
2012 3 47 0
2013 10 24 0
2014 16 33 0
2015 5 35 0
2016 5 51 1
2017 9 62 0
2018 51 107 6
2019 24 95 11
2020 27 49 1
2021 42 151 17
2022 49 108 21
According to The School Shooting Database Project, since 1970 there have been at least, 2064 Shootings, 683 Fatalities, and 1934 Injuries in K-12 schools in the US,
The School Shooting Database Project is conducted as part of the Advanced Thinking in Homeland Security (HSx) program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS).
Remember this catalogue of carnage leaves out the many more mass shootings that occurred in colleges, on streets, in shopping centers, on governmental properties and the like. It also omits those who were permanently traumatized by these shootings, a number I expect will be probably at least 10 times larger than those who were struck directly by bullets.
TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:
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