Monday, September 30, 2019

Pathological Power: Narcissists and Psychopaths


Pathological power: the danger of governments led by narcissists and psychopaths

September 19, 2019 7.24am EDT

Shane Snow

Donald Trump and The Definition of Insanity
58,000 mental health professionals say Donald Trump is too unstable to be president. Here’s a deep dive into the diagnosis and what could happen because of it.
Article

Tzimmes

I just added the carrots onions prunes and more wine. The brisket has been baking for two hours. So this is the final hour.
Listening to this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFifpg7PIoM&list=RDFFifpg7PIoM&start_radio=1&t=18


Itzhak Perlman plays "As der Rebbe Elimelech is gevoyrn asoi freylach"
(A Jewish Violin ALBUM)
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra

Bessarabian Medley (Klezmer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9F6IIWdPw0
Alicia Svigals, Iliya Magalnyk and Marilyn Lerner @ The Stone, New York, April 27, 2007. Recorded by Misha.

Basarabye

Itzhak Perlman with "Brave Old World" klezmer-band plays classic doyna (Romanian-Jewish style melody) composition "Basarabye" by Moyshe Pinchevski and Bella Gottesman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx-2sX0zT8

Edgy Outdoor Campaign

View

Guys & Dolls & Bagels: Isle of Klezbos at Joe's Pub

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBZB21uKoQ8

Metrolpolitan Klezmer!!

1:11 / 5:10
Metropolitan Klezmer: Nokh a Gleyzl Vayn & Freylekhs Dance Medley at The Emelin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-VbxjM9qO4

Metropolitan Klezmer: Uskudar Taxim & Terk in Amerike at Brooklyn Center
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1WNnlxlbMw

The House

The house smells so good. I added a cup of burgundy and a cup of bullion to the dutch oven. The brisket is held up by a trivet. I will bake first and then take out the liquid to skim the fat and add the veggies and bake some more with the defatted liquid.

Grandma Ethel's Brisket with Tzimmes

Recipe


L'Shana Tova

"Rosh" is the Hebrew word for "head", "ha" is the definite article ("the"), and "shanah" means year. Thus "Rosh HaShanah" means 'head of the year', referring to the Jewish day of new year.

"At Rosh Hashanah dishes like apples and honey and other sweet vegetable dishes are traditionally eaten with the hope for a good New Year."
- Joan Nathan, in 'Jewish Cooking in America

Magic

So here's my day so far.... smashed a water bottle accidentally leaking a quart of water on the floor. I mopped it with the big blue dog towel. The floor needed mopping anyway so all was not wasted. A lady ran a stop sign denting a man's company truck. She took off! I helped him call police and stayed with him until they arrived. I picked up trash and found an unopened water bottle and Romeo found a new softball and I found a photo-postcard of one of my favorite authors, Gustave Flaubert.

Aladdin

I opened the fridge and my 32 oz water bottle fell and cracked open. Water everywhere! I grabbed the blue dog towel and mopped the floor. I needed to mop the floor anyway, I told myself. I love this water bottle. I used it daily and I found it in a parking lot at the college pool a few years ago. Drinking 32 ounces of water each time I swim in the too hot pool saves me from headaches. Oh well.

W.S. Merwin

On writing, Merwin insists on regular practice. He said: “I’ve found that the best thing for me is to insist that some part of the day — and for me, it’s the morning until about two in the afternoon — be dedicated to writing. I go into my room and shut the door, and that’s that. You have to make exceptions, of course, but you just stick to it, and then it becomes a habit, and I think it’s a valuable one. If you’re waiting for lightning to strike a stump, you’re going to sit there for the rest of your life.”

“I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”

He died in March 2019 at the age of 91.

Truman Capote

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”

-Truman Capote

Sunday, September 29, 2019

Stop the Car!

Stop the car, turn around" I said. "Check out that lamp! Someone is throwing it away."
My husband turned around and we got out and examined the upright lamp. It was on the sidewalk. We took the stained glass top off and placed it in the back. We tilted the tall heavy stand and base in between the front seats. Now we're home and we've set it up and plugged it in. It's beautiful. I bet someone was moving today and couldn't fit it in their car.

A Way In: 5780 Live in Harmony and Peace


As we stand on the edge of this New Year, readying ourselves to cross over to what will be,
May strength and inspiration rise up within and around us.
May the skies inspire a vast perspective that opens us to new possibilities.
May the fires of devotion turn us toward each other with love.
May the waters remind us that all things change and we are part of the continued unfolding.
And may the earth shine its beauty encouraging our gratitude and dignity.
Each of us is here for our short time. May we live what we love, offering our gifts and blessings for the well being of all.
May this year show us the way to live in harmony and peace with each other and all the earth. And may we help each other believe that this is indeed possible.

Shana Tova

- Rabbi Yael Levy

Artchitects and Gardeners

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Réflexions sous-marines

Réflexions sous-marines
Ceci est ma première tentative de sonar. J'écris parce que je suis souvent seul et que j'aime la compagnie des mots. Les mots sont de petites étincelles de son avec signification, chacune avec un héritage ancestral qui lui est propre. J’écris parce que c’est comme ça que je sens mon chemin dans le noir. Les mots sont mon chemin de miettes de pain qui peuvent me conduire hors de la forêt ou plus profondément.

J'aimerais rester un dauphin chatouilleux bien dans ma vieillesse, nager dans les nappes de soleil sous-marines de la piscine de mon YMCA. J'adore voir les anciennes dames nager méthodiquement, se glissant dans l'eau turquoise. Juste être près d'eux équivaut à être nourri à la soupe au poulet par cinq grands-mères. Ces dames nagent tous les jours. Certains ont une peau translucide avec des veines bleues et vertes, des ecchymoses, des cicatrices et des os fragiles. Ils ont tous les joues roses et les rires copieux. Elles sont belles. C'est l'église de la communauté chlorée des mamas aquatiques sous-marines.

La vie n’est pas ce qui commence après avoir banni les souffleuses à feuilles et éliminé le courrier indésirable. La vie comprend tout ce qui se passe, y compris la peur et les mille-pattes. La vie est maintenant. Je me dis; nager, écrire, peindre, jouer du cor, cultiver le courage malgré la peur, célébrer l'absurdité, l'imagination et s'amuser. Rire et apprendre. Découvrez qui vous êtes. Pour quoi d'autre sommes-nous ici?

Parfois, je me lève à 4 heures du matin et je mélange un lot de levain pour me rendre compte que les postiers et les milkmens commencent déjà leur journée et que mes amis musiciens se mettent à dormir, et je suis bouleversé du point de vue de ceux qui vivent de l'autre. côté de la planète.
Publié par La sirène urbaine le dimanche 22 octobre 2006



Underwater Musings
This is my first attempt at sonar. I write because I am often lonely and I love the company of words. Words are little sparks of sound with meaning, each with an ancestral heritage of its own. I write because it’s how I feel my way through the dark. Words are my path of bread crumbs which may lead me out of the forest or in deeper.

I would like to remain a ticklish dolphin well into my old age, swimming in the underwater sun patches at my local YMCA pool. I love to see the ancient ladies methodically swimming laps, flowing through the turquoise tinted water. Just to be near them is equal to being fed chicken soup by five grandmothers. These ladies swim daily. Some have translucent skin with blue and green veins, bruises, scars, and brittle bones. They all have rosy cheeks and hearty laughs. They are beautiful. This is the chlorinated community church of the underwater aqua mamas.

Life is not the thing that begins after you ban leaf blowers and clear away junk mail. Life includes all the things that come along including fear and centipedes. Life is now. I tell myself; swim, write, paint, play your horn, cultivate courage in spite of fear, celebrate absurdity, imagination, and have fun. Laugh and learn. Find out who you are. What else are we here for?

Sometimes I wake at 4 am, and I mix up a batch of sourdough and realize the mailmen and milkmen are already beginning their day and my musician friends are just getting to sleep, and I am upside down from the perspective of those living on the other side of the planet.
Posted by The Urban Mermaid on Sunday, October 22, 2006

Tastes Better in French!

Cuisson mélasse granola
Mon mari aime mon granola. Sylvia appelle ça des miettes de biscuits. De toute façon c'est bon et bon pour vous!

Le secret de mon meilleur granola
http://theinsomniacskitchen.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-secret-to-my-best-granola.html
Je dois faire quelque chose un million de fois avant de concevoir la méthode la plus simple et la plus savoureuse.

Le secret de mon meilleur granola ne consiste pas à le griller mais à le sécher au four. De cette façon, la saveur de la vanille et de la mélasse ne sont pas éclipsées. Cuire au four préchauffé à 250 degrés pendant 35 minutes et laisser reposer pendant une heure ou toute la nuit pour absorber la chaleur résiduelle.

Recette:
Une tasse d'huile de maïs, de mélasse de grand-mère, une cuillerée à thé de véritable extrait de vanille, une cuillerée à thé de sel casher (la moitié de cette quantité si vous utilisez du sel à grains fins). Peut-être que je devrais juste l'admettre, deux cuillerées à thé de sel casher.

Instructions:
Faites chauffer l'huile, la mélasse, le sel et la vanille dans une grande casserole à spaghettis et remuez jusqu'à ce que le mélange bouillonne, puis éteignez le feu. Ajoutez ensuite un grand récipient cylindrique d'avoine roulée à l'ancienne (42 oz ou 2 lb 10 oz) et remuez comme un fou. C'est comme lancer une salade d'avoine avec de la mélasse et de la vinaigrette à l'huile. Lorsque l'avoine est uniformément enrobée, versez-la sur deux plaques à pâtisserie ou dans deux grandes poêles à frire en fonte et laissez cuire au four pendant 35 à 45 minutes à 250 ° F. fermé. Laissez simplement le granola sécher par lui-même. C'est la découverte secrète importante. Revenez quelques heures plus tard ou le lendemain, une fois séché et refroidi. Décomposez-le et rangez le granola dans un récipient hermétique.

Ceci est mon voyage préféré et collation. Je porte souvent un peu avec moi au cas où j'aurais un petit creux quand je ferais une longue promenade. Parfois, j'ajoute des raisins secs.
Publié par The Urban Mermaid le samedi 28 septembre 2019

La grotte chauve-souris

La grotte chauve-souris
Après ma nage matinale, j'étais sous tension pour la journée. Mais à 12h30, il pleuvait et j'avais besoin d'une sieste. Je suis allé à la grotte chauve-souris, notre chambre avec un rideau noir. Roméo a couché avec moi. J'ai bien dormi.

The Bat Cave
After my early bird swim I was energized for the day. But by 12:30PM it was raining and I needed a nap. I went to the bat cave, our bedroom with a black curtain. Romeo slept with me. I slept well.

read my blog in French

read my blog in French
Vendredi 20 septembre 2019
Envoi
Hier, j'ai reçu une visite impromptue du centre de la police, des pompiers et du 911 de notre ville. C'était incroyable, comme un centre de contrôle du trafic aérien. Le poste de pilotage était faiblement éclairé et une grille d’écrans et d’écrans brillait au-dessus de chaque station. Les compétences nécessaires pour naviguer dans cette situation stressante étaient impressionnantes. La grille d'images montrait les vues des répartiteurs sur le parc principal de la ville, les blocs de cellules en bas et la zone entourant le siège. Ils avaient un rideau noir qu’ils pouvaient fermer quand ils étaient distraits par une activité dans le hall ou se faisaient harceler par ces types effrayants du "Premier amendement".

Les dispatchers sont rigoureusement formés. Ils doivent tout apprendre dans le gigantesque manuel de codes et procédures de sécurité publique de 3 pouces d'épaisseur. Ils doivent naviguer en recevant et en transmettant un flux d'informations pendant qu'ils écoutent des appelants en colère, effrayés et en détresse. Ils doivent savoir exactement où se trouvent chaque officier et chaque unité de sécurité publique. "Le plus important est la sécurité", m'a dit un répartiteur. "J'aime mes gars et je dois les garder en sécurité."

"Quand tu aimes ce que tu fais", dit un autre, "les huit heures s'écoulent".

"Je dois savoir où sont mes cinq gars, même en cas de panne de courant. Nous devons connaître le nom de toutes les rues de la ville et leur emplacement, et pouvoir offrir des conseils de navigation aux gars quand ils le seront. Nous poursuivons un suspect. Nous utilisons Google Maps et élargissons la vue à vol d'oiseau. Tout cela alors que les appels arrivent. Cela devient vraiment intense ici. Certaines personnes s'entraînent et ne peuvent pas gérer le stress. Vous l'emportez avec vous à la maison. J'ai eu un appel de suicide récemment et l'appelant n'a pas réussi. C'était difficile. Mais quand on aime le travail ... Je suis ici depuis deux ans et elle est là depuis un an. "

J'ai adoré l'environnement sombre, l'intensité, la collaboration dans l'espace et avec un langage spécial. Les dispatchers sont là! Ce sont des dieux invisibles qui dirigent les officiers par des voies sûres. Je ne savais pas à quel point ils étaient impliqués.

Friday, September 20, 2019
Dispatch
Yesterday I received an impromptu tour of our city's Police, Fire, and 911 dispatch center. It was amazing, like an air-traffic control center. The cockpit was dimly lit and a grid of screens and monitors glowed above each station. The skills required to navigate all of this under stress were awe-inspiring. The grid of imagery showed the dispatchers views of the main city park, the cell blocks downstairs, and the area surrounding the headquarters. They had a black curtain they could close when they are distracted by activity in the lobby or getting harassed by those creepy "First Amendment" guys.

The dispatchers are rigorously trained. They have to learn everything in the gigantic 3-inch-thick manual of public safety codes and procedures. They have to navigate both receiving and transmitting a stream of information as they are listening to angry, frightened, and distressed callers. They have to know exactly where each officer and public safety unit is at all times. "Most important is safety," one dispatcher told me. "I love my guys and I need to keep them safe."

"When you love what you do," another chimed in, "the eight hours flies by."

"I have to know where my five guys are are even if there is a power outage. We have to know the names of all of the streets in the city and where they are and be able to offer navigation tips to the guys when they are pursuing a suspect. We use Google maps and enlarge the birds-eye view. All of this as calls are coming through. It gets really intense in here. Some people train and can't handle the stress. You do take it home with you. I had a suicide call recently and the caller didn't make it. That was hard. But when you love the work . . . I've been here 2 years and she's been here a year."

I loved the darkened environment, the intensity, the collaboration through space and with a special language. The dispatchers are there! They are invisible gods directing the officers through safe avenues. I had no idea how deeply involved they were.

Suspicious Cars

We can tell the cars that are up to trouble. They park in the hot spot so they have the advantage of two alleys. When I see them I go out and start picking up trash. I get the plate and phone it in.

Voitures suspectes
Nous pouvons dire aux voitures qui sont en difficulté. Ils se garent dans le point chaud, ils ont donc l'avantage de deux allées. Quand je les vois, je sors et commence à ramasser les ordures. Je récupère la plaque et la téléphone.


Heroes

“A society manufactures the heroes it requires.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Wasn't Surprised

“She wasn’t surprised when his character revealed itself—if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Rosh Hashanah 2019

Rosh Hashanah 2019 will begin in the evening of Sunday, September 29
and ends in the evening of Tuesday, October 1

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/rosh-hashanah-101/
https://damndelicious.net/2015/04/10/homemade-tater-tots/

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/rosh-hashanah-symbolic-foods/

Baking Molasses Granola

My husband loves my granola. Sylvia calls it cookie crumbs. Either way it's good and good for you!

The Secret to My Best Granola
http://theinsomniacskitchen.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-secret-to-my-best-granola.html
I have to make something a million times before I devise the simplest and best-tasting method.

The secret to my best granola is not toasting it but drying it out in the oven. This way the flavor of the vanilla and molasses are not overshadowed. Bake in a preheated oven 250 degrees for 35 minutes and let sit for an hour or overnight to absorb residual heat.

Recipe:
One cup of corn oil, one cup of Grandma's Molasses, teaspoon of real vanilla extract, one heaping teaspoon of kosher salt (half this amount if using fine grain salt). Maybe I should just admit it, two  level teaspoons of kosher salt.

Directions:
Heat the oil, molasses, salt, and vanilla, in a large spaghetti pot and stir until bubbly then turn off the heat. Then add one (42 oz, or 2 lb 10 oz) large cylindrical container of old fashioned rolled oats and stir like mad. It's like tossing a salad of oats with molasses and oil dressing. When the oats are evenly coated pour them onto two baking trays or into two large cast iron frying pans and bake for 35-45 minutes at 250 F. Then after it has baked for 35-45 minutes turn the oven off and keep the oven door closed. Just let the granola dry out by itself. This is the important secret discovery. Come back a few hours later or the next day when it has dried and cooled and break it up and store the granola in an airtight container.

This is my favorite travel and snack food. I often carry a little bit with me just in case I get peckish when I am out on a long walk. Sometimes I add raisins.

Boys and Girls Club

The Boys and Girls Club is moving to our Street!

Every time I pick up trash...

Every time I pick up trash, and I mean bags and bags like I just did, I FIND something amazing!! Perhaps it's Woonsocket's way of saying thank you! Today I found overalls! Something I've been wanting!!! And they appear to be my size!!

Teacher

Finding a good book is like finding a good teacher. If they use the language well I can read about any topic, even the history of trash disposal in America.

I LOVE BRENDA UELAND!

You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end—much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.
BRENDA UELAND

Inner Life

“Why do something unless it corresponds to the shape and language of one’s inner life?”
—Frank Bidart

Uta Hagen

He felt like she had to come up with all this grounding reality because otherwise she would just fly off into the wings because she was so innately theatrical character actor and teacher.

M20: When you talk to Huggins students one mantra keeps coming up.

M30: Mark Nelson who also teaches at HP Studios says on the first day of class with Hagen he was a nervous wreck and she crouched down next to me and whispering to nobody else in the class could hear was private and she said if I have two minutes and I want to relax so that I can act. I ask myself where am I. Where have I just come from and what do I want to do.

M20: And if I know the answers to those three questions I realize there have been lots of influential acting teachers over the years Constantine Stanislavski. Lee Strasberg. Stella Adler and they all have their disciples but for many Huda Huggins tool box is one they come to again and again. And for those who were lucky enough to learn about it from Hagen herself well the lessons never go away. Mercedes Rule now teaches in the same room where she studied with Uta Hagen.

F12: It was the most magical place to me. It saved my life. At that time and I think she focused me in a way that was absolutely necessary and key to my moving on in her belief in me gave me belief in myself.

F3: Whether she was teaching or acting for Uta Hagen it was all about how to be a human being on stage and never stop learning about that and not look like an actor but look like a human being onstage and still have total communication with that audience. That’s the real craft and that’s the bottom. Jeff London produced our story.

transcript

Prevent Psychic Poisoning

I have kept my radio off for 4 years to avoid the NARCISSIST in chief.

Thoreau

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Sad that It's Over

The best thing you can say about an ending is that it made you happy you read it, but sad that it's over. It really is that simple.
CHUCK WENDIG

Arundhati Roy

To me there is nothing higher than #fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of #stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Detail

Every little detail you can smuggle with you into your fiction makes your world more real to your reader.
NEIL GAIMAN

Adoption

I found a spoon and a bowl abandoned in the parking lot. I kept my eye on it for two months and finally rescued them and washed them."A food network spoon" my husband said reading the fine embossed metal. 'This is my new favorite bowl," I said. I can fill it with vegetables!

fact-checking

Publishers assume that writers do their own fact-checking, but that’s a little bit like having an internal-investigation department that’s run by the people being investigated.
SUSAN ORLEAN

Visual Air

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Library Book Drop Dance

I feel so guilty when I cannot finish my stack library books before they're due. I'll walk my dog early and put them in the book drop before the library is open. When I have finished a book that I love I arrive midday and tie up my dog and walk in and tell the librarians "this was such a good book, you must read it!"

Something

First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can’t see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
T.C. BOYLE

Jhumpa Lahiri

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Colson Whitehead


There are no rules. If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? No. There are no rules except the ones you learned during your Show and Tell days. Have fun. If they don’t want to be friends with you, they’re not worth being friends with. Most of all, just be yourself.

COLSON WHITEHEAD

Vitality

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist, but the ability to start over.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Democracy vs Tyranny

Writing is a process that’s entirely totalitarian. A writer is a tyrant, a dictator. He has complete power over every comma, every sentence, every character. When I’m writing, I’m the boss — I’m in charge. When the book is published, the political nature of it changes completely. People can read my books in whatever way they want to. I don’t want any control over the process of reading, it’s democratic: and furthermore, between the reader and the book there opens up a space of complete freedom, which is also private. In a democracy, we have a private voting booth. It’s secret. So the difference between reading and writing is the difference between democracy and tyranny.

PHILIP PULLMAN

Kate Douglas Wiggin

“...no talent is wholly wasted unless its owner chooses to hide it in a napkin.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

“It was a friendship born of propinquity and circumstance, not of true affinity.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

“Nancy was more impulsive than industrious, more generous than wise, more plucky than prudent; she had none too much perseverance and no patience at all.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mother Carey's Chickens

“It is very funny, but you do not always have to see people to love them. Just think about it, and tell me if it isn't so.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Birds' Christmas Carol

“To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Birds' Christmas Carol

“There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

It’s the birthday of Kate Douglas Wiggin (books by this author), born in Philadelphia, (1856), who wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) and many other novels. She also started the first free kindergarten on the West Coast, in San Francisco. She spent much of her own life working as a teacher, and she once said, “Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever fresh and radiant possibility.”

Friday, September 27, 2019

Baking Leftovers

I am baking the leftover mutligrain pasta with cottage cheese and tomato sauce and grated carrots.

Hide vs Mend

“Men take more pains to hide than to mend themselves.”
― George Savile Halifax (Marquis Of)

Master of Patience


A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.

George Savile

Lifeguards on the PHONE!

No Phones Please! | Guard For Life

https://guardforlife.com › 2019/06 › no-phones-please
Jun 19, 2019 - Don't let distractions get in the way of being an awesome lifeguard! Cell phones and other outside distractions can make it difficult for guards to ...
Lifeguard Commandments: No Texting While Lifeguarding ...

https://cultureofsafety.thesilverlining.com › leave-distractions-at-home
Empower Patrons and Other Lifeguards Empower the entire lifeguard crew, and the pool's patrons, to speak up when they suspect a lifeguard is distracted while on duty. After all… lifeguarding, and water safety, are a community effort.
Lifeguards Started Confiscating Parents' Phones On The ...

https://www.apost.com › blog › lifeguards-started-confiscating-parents-pho...
The lifeguards walk up to the mom and confiscate her phone and then point at the children playing the water, she nods her head in agreement. They proceed to ...
Lifeguard Texting Spells Trouble| Aquatics International ...

https://www.aquaticsintl.com › lifeguards › lifeguard-texting-spells-trouble...
What's your policy on lifeguard cell phone use? Last summer, media outlets across the nation called attention to a potentially deadly practice: lifeguards texting ...
'Lifeguard was on her cell phone while girl drowned'| Aquatics ...

https://www.aquaticsintl.com › lifeguards › lifeguard-allegedly-on-phone-...
Authorities say a six-year-old girl drowned just a few yards away from the lifeguard who was distracted with a cell phone.
'Put Down the Smartphone' — World's Largest Lifeguard ...

https://foreverymom.com › family-parenting › safety › lifeguard-associatio...
Jul 3, 2019 - The world's largest lifeguard organization is urging parents to put down their phones this week, claiming there's a direct link between child ...

Sourdough Rye, Swiss Style

My improv multigrain sourdough rye came out so good I will make it again next week. I used whole wheat medium grind flour, wholemeal rye flour, coarse cornmeal, pinhead oats, salt rye starter, water. I mixed it all up and let it sit in a big pickle bucket for 24 hours in the fridge and shaped them into mini loaves and baked them at 450 for 35 minutes. I often bake starting from a cold oven in which case I set the timer for an hour.

Dreaming

I woke up thinking about the lithograph my mother hung on the invisible wall in the laundry alcove. My step-father bought it at an auction when he was newly divorced and suddenly single. My mother hated it and hung it where nobody would see it. It was a Picasso!

Narcissist in Chief


"Pretty soon my mother won't be president anymore!" I said to my husband this morning and we both laughed.

Irvine Welsh

"Mates are a waste of fucking time. They are always ready to drag you down tae their level of social, sexual and intellectual mediocrity."
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

"Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them."
— Irvine Welsh

"I'm not running away, I'm moving on."

Soul

“You can't lie to your soul.”
― Irvine Welsh

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Vahit Tuna, artist in Turkey

ttps://mymodernmet.com/vahit-tuna-femicide-art-installation/

Rosario Castellanos Figueroa

Rosario Castellanos
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosario Castellanos Figueroa (Spanish pronunciation: [roˈsaɾjo kasteˈʝanos]; 25 May 1925 – 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. She was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced Mexican feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today.

Born in Mexico City, she was raised in Comitán near her family's ranch in the southern state of Chiapas. She was an introverted young girl, who took notice of the plight of the indigenous Maya who worked for her family. According to her own account, she felt estranged from her family after a soothsayer predicted that one of her mother's two children would die shortly, and her mother screamed out, "Not the boy!"

The family's fortunes changed suddenly when President Lázaro Cárdenas enacted a land reform and peasant emancipation policy that stripped the family of much of its land holdings. At fifteen, Castellanos and her parents moved to Mexico City. One year later, her parents were dead and she was left to fend for herself.

Although she remained introverted, she joined a group of Mexican and Central American intellectuals, read extensively, and began to write. She studied philosophy and literature at UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico), where she would later teach, and joined the National Indigenous Institute, writing scripts for puppet shows that were staged in impoverished regions to promote literacy. The Institute had been founded by President Cárdenas, who had taken away her family's land. She also wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Excélsior.

She married Ricardo Guerra Tejada, a professor of philosophy, in 1958. The birth in 1961 of their son Gabriel Guerra Castellanos (now a political scientist) was an important moment in Castellanos’ life; prior to his birth, she suffered from depression after several miscarriages.[1] However, she and Guerra divorced after thirteen years of marriage, Guerra having been unfaithful to Castellanos. Her own personal life was marked by her difficult marriage and continuous depression, but she dedicated a large part of her work and energy to defending women's rights, for which she is remembered as a symbol of Latin American feminism.[2][3]

In addition to her literary work, Castellanos held several government posts. In recognition for her contribution to Mexican literature, Castellanos was appointed ambassador to Israel in 1971.

On 7 August 1974, Castellanos died in Tel Aviv from an unfortunate electrical accident. Some have speculated that the accident was in fact suicide. Mexican writer Martha Cerda, for example, wrote to journalist Lucina Kathmann, "I believe she committed suicide, though she already felt she was dead for some time.".[4] There is no evidence to support such a claim, however.

Rosario Castellanos

“I no longer wait, I live.”
— Rosario Castellanos

“We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.”
― Rosario Castellanos, A Rosario Castellanos Reader: An Anthology of Her Poetry, Short Fiction, Essays and Drama

“The sound is gone. There's nothing left but the insomniac throbbing of crickets. Crickets in the garden, the courtyard, the back courtyard. Close, domestic, identifiable. And those out in the country. Between all of them they raise, little by little, a wall that will keep out the thing that lies waiting for the tiniest crack of silence to steal through. The thing that is feared by all those who are sleepless, those who walk through the night, those who are lonely, children. That thing. The voice of the dead. ”
― Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations

“The sound is gone. There's nothing left but the insomniac throbbing of crickets. Crickets in the garden, the courtyard, the back courtyard. Close, domestic, identifiable. And those out in the country. Between all of them they raise, little by little, a wall that will keep out the thing that lies waiting for the tiniest crack of silence to steal through. The thing that is feared by all those who are sleepless, those who walk through the night, those who are lonely, children. That thing. The voice of the dead. ”
― Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations

Short+Fast

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

RAY BRADBURY

Edel Rodriguez AMAZING Artist

https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/edel-rodriguez/

Thursday Morning Quotes

“We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

“Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness

“You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough.”
― Naval Ravikant

“Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”
― Naval Ravikant

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

A Great Man, A Great Mother

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human?

“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Naval Ravikant: Any Meeting...

“A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.”
― Naval Ravikant

“Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”
― Naval Ravikant

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
― Naval Ravikant

“You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough.”
― Naval Ravikant

“Any meeting with eight people sitting around at a conference table, nothing is getting done in that meeting. You are literally just dying one hour at a time.”
― Naval Ravikant

Legacies

“Cooking is one of the legacies we can leave to the future, and I would like to be remembered for my baking. We all know we’re not immortal, but after I’m gone, I would like my son and daughter to be able to say, ‘Our mother made real yeast bread for breakfast.’”
-Marion Cunningham

Finnish Pancakes

Here

Marion Cunningham Lemon Pancakes

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/8797-marion-cunninghams-lemon-pancakes

Butter...

“And if you can’t get butter infused with the tears of Dutch milkmaids, store-bought is fine.”
Ina Garten

Screaming Invitation

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”
Jamie Tworkowski

Seize the moment!

Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.
Erma Bombeck


Thomas Wolfe

“There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.”
― Thomas Wolfe
https://moretimeatthetable.com/favorite-quotes/

More Time at the Table

Among virtually every culture on Earth, anything worth doing is best done over dinner. Bring out a nicely braised roast, a hot loaf of bread, and a slice of lemon pie, and rifts can be healed, pacts sealed, loves revealed. Even the condemned do not want to leave the world without one last supper. –Natalie Angier —New York Times, November, 2000.
https://moretimeatthetable.com/favorite-quotes/

Coffee drive Saturday will benefit men’s shelter

Hello Men’s Shelter Supporters,

I wanted to let you know that the 6th annual WNRI Coffee Drive is taking place this Saturday morning from 8:00 till about noon. Special thanks to Tommy Brien and Roger Bouchard for their generosity to host, organize and promote this extremely valuable fundraiser! Over the past 5 years WNRI listeners have donated:

500 pounds of coffee
300 pounds of sugar
100 pounds of non-dairy creamer and
62 pillows

Dozens of socks and gloves
And an amazing $5,000.00 in cash!

These donations provide the resources needed to help the homeless and working poor in our community.
Please remember that you are always welcome to come by and tour our shelter space.
We open our doors to the residents on November 1st .

Thanks for being such a blessing!
Pastor Steve Bacon
Harvest Community Church
Woonsocket, RI 02895
765-1777

Mono+Poly


Dietary fats: How to make healthy choices


Get the skinny on dietary fats, including the healthy types to eat and the ones to avoid.

Your body needs some fat to function normally. But it's wise to choose the healthier types of dietary fat and then enjoy them — in moderation.

Fats: The good and the bad
Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats are the best choices. Look for products with little or no saturated fats, and avoid trans fats: Both increase blood-cholesterol levels and can increase your risk of heart disease. And keep in mind that all fats — the good stuff as well as the bad — are high in calories, so measuring and moderation are key.

The good:

Monounsaturated fats are found in olive, canola and peanut oils, as well as in avocados and most nuts.
Polyunsaturated fats are found in other plant-based oils, such as safflower, corn, sunflower, soybean, sesame and cottonseed oils. Omega-3 fats are polyunsaturated fats that help your cells function.


The bad:

Saturated fats are found in animal-based foods, such as meats, poultry, lard, egg yolks and whole-fat dairy products, including butter and cheese. They're also in cocoa butter and coconut, palm and other tropical oils, which are used in many coffee lighteners, snack crackers, baked goods and other processed foods.
Trans fats — also called hydrogenated vegetable oils — are found in hardened vegetable fats, such as stick margarine and vegetable shortening. Lots of foods contain these unhealthy ingredients as well, including crackers, cookies, cakes, pies and other baked goods, as well as many candies, snack foods and french fries.


Tips for choosing foods with the best types of dietary fat

First, focus on reducing foods high in saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol. Then emphasize food choices that include plenty of monounsaturated fats (MUFAs) and polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs). But a word of caution — don't go overboard even on healthy fats. All fats, including the healthy ones, are high in calories. So consume MUFA-rich and PUFA-rich foods instead of other fatty foods, not in addition to them.

Here are some tips to help you make over the fat in your diet:

Use the Nutrition Facts label and ingredient list when selecting foods. Look for the amount of trans fat listed. By law a serving of food containing less than 0.5 grams of trans fat can be labeled as 0 grams. Therefore, it is important to also check the ingredient list rather than just the Nutrition Facts label for the terms trans fat and partially hydrogenated.
Prepare fish, such as salmon and mackerel, instead of meat at least twice a week to get a source of healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Limit sizes to 4 ounces of cooked seafood a serving, and bake or broil seafood instead of frying.
Use liquid vegetable oil instead of solid fats. For example, saute with olive oil instead of butter, and use canola oil when baking.
Use olive oil in salad dressings and marinades.
Use egg substitutes instead of whole eggs when possible to cut back on the cholesterol in yolks.
Select milk and dairy products that are low in fat.

Dream

I dreamed I was at the library activity room and Margaret the librarian was setting up shallow clay bowls and a glass Chemex for a huge coffee making coffee break. The shallow bowls had coffee grounds on a cheesecloth filter, and the Chemex was set up with paper filter. She was going around the room wetting the grounds.

Sasha Kildare

Article about negative thinking patterns.

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Aroma Romance

I'm baking twice baked smashed potatoes and the whole neighborhood is falling in love with me. Thank you Chef Michael Smith who taught this to me. http://chefmichaelsmith.com/recipe/oven-crisped-potatoes/ My nose is equal to my dog's nose. The scent is home family warmth even if you've never experienced it. Try baking them. Buy a bag of potatoes and olive oil and kosher salt and black pepper and make these.

Peter Schickele/ PDQ Bach

As typical of operas, everybody dies in the end, but due to the theater manager’s instance to prolong the work as well as produce a happy ending, everyone is miraculously resurrected at the end. Peter Schickele/ PDQ Bach-

Mary Bly/Eloisa James

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I started out as a writer was ‘you’re 50 percent a businesswoman and 50 percent a writer — and the businesswoman comes first.’ You’re not Tolstoy. There are very specific parameters to make [genre fiction] a success. I run this as a business with a lot of heart. It’s allowed me to have a long publishing career.

What’s your idea of perfect happiness?

You wake up in the morning and you have sabbatical from one of your two jobs and you don’t have any appointments. The whole day lies ahead of you. That is gorgeous, fabulous happiness right there. Time – time is the greatest happiness there is.

Mary Bly/Eloisa James

More

Bagel Chips or Leftover Bread Crackers

recipe

Heat your oven to 450° and use a bread knife to slice across the bagels (yes, this is the opposite way you'd normally cut) into 1/4"-thick coins and ovals. Toss the pieces in a large bowl with a few glugs of olive oil and a couple pinches of kosher salt.

Spread the slices across a rimmed baking sheet in a single layer so that none of the pieces overlap. Toast them in the oven for about 5 minutes, until chips start to brown. Flip them and toast the chips for another 5 minutes, until both sides are golden brown. Well, would you look at that. You made bagel chips.

Bread and Salt

Bread and salt Bread and salt is a welcome greeting ceremony in several Slavic and other European cultures and in Middle Eastern cultures.

Second Brain

Gut feeling.

Ellen Oliver DANCE

Film Still Life with Self Portraits (preview)
https://vimeo.com/278601567
Choreography and performance by Ellen Oliver 2018
Music by Tchaikovsky and Édith Piaf
Made possible through the 2018 aMaSSit choreography lab at the Dance Complex, Boston

Preview Pants Becoming Kites Ellen Oliver
https://vimeo.com/278600607
Choreography by Ellen Oliver in collaboration with Dayita Nereyeth
Performance by Ellen Oliver at AS220 Modern Movements Festival, Providence, RI
Music by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater

Impeachment Pie!

We have a bunch of bruised peaches. Must bake an impeachment pie!

We had a popcorn supper last night to celebrate the good news.

A Criminal

INTERVIEWER

If you hadn’t found the theater, what do you think you might have been?

MAMET

I think it’s very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1280/david-mamet-the-art-of-theater-no-11-david-mamet

Mamet

INTERVIEWER

So to you a character is . . .

MAMET

It’s action, as Aristotle said. That’s all that it is—exactly what the person does. It’s not what they “think,” because we don’t know what they think. It’s not what they say. It’s what they do, what they’re physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person’s character in life—not by what they say, but by what they do. Say someone came up to you and said, I’m glad to be your neighbor because I’m a very honest man. That’s my character. I’m honest, I like to do things, I’m forthright, I like to be clear about everything, I like to be concise. Well, you really don’t know anything about that guy’s character. Or the person is onstage, and the playwright has him or her make those same claims in several subtle or not-so-subtle ways, the audience will say, Oh yes, I understand their character now; now I understand that they are a character. But in fact you don’t understand anything. You just understand that they’re jabbering to try to convince you of something.

INTERVIEWER

So do you end up cutting a lot of material from your earlier drafts?

MAMET

Well, you know, Hemingway said it once: “To write the best story you can, take out all the good lines.”

INTERVIEWER

But do you then sometimes find that the audience has a hard time keeping up with you? It seems to me that in this climate one of the playwright’s problems is that the audience expects things to be explained.

MAMET

I never try to make it hard for the audience. I may not succeed, but . . . Vakhtangov, who was a disciple of Stanislavsky, was asked at one point why his films were so successful, and he said, Because I never for one moment forget about the audience. I try to adopt that as an absolute tenet. I mean, if I’m not writing for the audience, if I’m not writing to make it easier for them, then who the hell am I doing it for? And the way you make it easier is by following those tenets: cutting, building to a climax, leaving out exposition, and always progressing toward the single goal of the protagonist. They’re very stringent rules, but they are, in my estimation and experience, what makes it easier for the audience.

INTERVIEWER

What else? Are there other rules?

MAMET

Get into the scene late, get out of the scene early.

INTERVIEWER

Why? So that something’s already happened?

MAMET

Yes. That’s how Glengarry got started. I was listening to conversations in the next booth and I thought, My God, there’s nothing more fascinating than the people in the next booth. You start in the middle of the conversation and wonder, What the hell are they talking about? And you listen heavily. So I worked a bunch of these scenes with people using extremely arcane language—kind of the canting language of the real-estate crowd, which I understood, having been involved with them—and I thought, Well, if it fascinates me, it will probably fascinate them too. If not, they can put me in jail.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1280/david-mamet-the-art-of-theater-no-11-david-mamet

What makes dogs so special and successful? Love.

What makes dogs so special and successful? Love.

Subsequently, we and other people have tested goats and dolphins, and even bats. Bats raised by people follow human pointing gestures, and bats raised by other bats do not. What matters is your early experience in life. That’s what determines whether an animal will be sensitive to what people are doing.

Dog & Animal Laws

Home ›› Departments ›› Animal Control

Dog & Animal Laws

Dogs Running Loose
Leash your dog to go outside.

1st Offense: $50 Ticket
2nd Offense: $100 Ticket
3rd Offense: $150 Ticket

Dog Barking Law
Don't tie your dog outside between 10 pm & 7 am.
If your dog is barking for more than 15 minutes straight during the day, that is considered "Disturbing the Peace".

1st Offense: Warning
2nd Offense: Court: Judge can assess a fine between $100 - $200

Dog Population Law
Single family home: 3 dogs
Apartment: 1 dog

1st Offense: $50 Ticket
2nd Offense: $100 Ticket
3rd Offense: $150 Ticket

These fines are for each day that you have the extra dog. It also costs $45 to turn in a dog or a cat to the shelter. If you are caught trying to abandon the dog, there is a $250 fine.

Pooper Scooper Law
Pick up your dog's poop.

1st Offense: $25 Ticket
2nd Offense: $50 Ticket
3rd Offense: $100 Ticket

Dog Bite Law
A dog cannot bite any person, even the owner.
Dog bites can cause people to get sick.

1st Offense: Court

Dog License
Licenses are available at City Hall for $5.

Every dog must licensed by six months old.
A new license must be obtained every year by April.

Farm Animal Law
No farm animals are allowed in the city (rabbits, cows, goats, pigs, roosters, sheep, etc.) because they can pass diseases to people.

1st Offense: $50 Ticket
2nd Offense: $100 Ticket
3rd Offense: $150 Ticket

This information was compiled by the students in Woonsocket Middle School Rooms 214B & 112, with assistance from the Woonsocket Animal Shelter.

New Sounds in the 'Hood


New sounds:
Screaming babies, yelling adults, introducing the fighting ladies with new gigantic loud un-neutered barking pitbull to go with their 2 kids one of whom is older and has down syndrome. Sad all the way around. They are at war with the 2nd floor, who were friends and who found them the apartment. More screaming and some police appearances. 2nd floor has 2 screaming babies, 2 barking puppies but quiet adults thank God.

On other side of our yard, house painter ladder noise. Sounds of improvement.

Good news: my favorite Price Rite cashier moved in next door on house painters side. Aida, like the opera. She has dimples high up on her cheeks and a new baby. Her family has a party every Saturday night. I am happy for them. Tikki torches and motorized barbie cars and BBQ.

Chanel Miller

Miller tells PEOPLE, “While writing Know My Name, I was constantly drawing as a way of letting my mind breathe, reminding myself that life is playful and imaginative. We all deserve a chance to define ourselves, shape our identities, and tell our stories. The film crew that worked on this piece was almost all women. Feeling their support and creating together was immensely healing. We should all be creating space for survivors to speak their truths and express themselves freely. When society nourishes instead of blames, books are written, art is made, and the world is a little better for it.”

In the years since the assault, Miller says she worked on her book and rediscovered a sense of self-worth Turner took from her.

“I was slowly teaching myself self-compassion again,” she told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. “And yeah, realizing that I deserved to be treated much better.”

She added, “I thought I deserved time to cultivate myself and figure that out for myself before I could present myself to other people.”

Chandler

As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.[22] Chandler (1950), pp. viii–ix.

In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, he wrote, "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time."

J. B. Priestley

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.

-J.B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
J. B. PRIESTLEY

Chandler

Most writers think up a plot with an intriguing situation and then proceed to fit characters into it. With me a plot, if you could call it that, is an organic thing. It grows and often it overgrows. I am continually finding myself with scenes that I won’t discard and that don’t want to fit in. So that my plot problem invariably ends up as a desperate attempt to justify a lot of material that, for me at least, has come alive and insists on staying alive. It’s probably a silly way to write, but I seem to know no other way. The mere idea of being committed in advance to a certain pattern appalls me.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

Baking Sourdough Rye Breads

The rye bread has whole wheat, corn and oats in it. There's just enough chill for baking the kitchen warm. My pup is in the patch of sun.

The Highway Department was hanging the big Autumnfest sign on Social Street using the Fire Dept bucket this morning at 8AM.

I saved the good parts of the bruised peaches and made a smoothie with banana peaches orange juice ice and yogurt. Fruit rescue!

Jungie gave me a maple lozenge from Canada when I walked by with Romeo today.

Everyone is retiring and I am starting my life over again.

Poetry from Police Blotter


Poetry From A Police Blotter

2:59
After 17 years as a Glasgow, Scotland cop, he understands the ugliness of crime. But he says it's that job that taught him how to cope.


Transcript

January 8, 20118:00 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday

Dan Gorenstein

Police logs in the newspaper are often dull, usually just names, dates and a terse description of the crime committed. But as New Hampshire Public Radio's Dan Gorenstein reports, the Rochester Times police log is packed with poetry and puns.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Police logs in the newspaper are often kind of dull: names, dates and a terse description of the crime committed, usually about all you get. But the Rochester Times Police Log is packed with poetry and puns.

New Hampshire Public Radio's Dan Gorenstein reports.

DAN GORENSTEIN: Listen to this.

Mr. JOHN NOLAN (Editor, Rochester Times): At Halloween upon a street where youngsters go for Trick-or-Treat, a worried parent calls the cops. His kid has been handed Hall's cough drops. A curiosity has gripped us - Cherry, Mint or Eucalyptus? Dad makes the point it's medication not the stuff of celebration. Police check out this plot of terror and find it was a simple error.

GORENSTEIN: John Nolan writes the police log and edits the Rochester Times. He's delivered tales of odd and scary behavior for some 22 years now - some of it with his signature puns, some of it in rhyme. But Nolan used to write it like everyone else.

Mr. NOLAN: Kind of tedious and dreadful.

GORENSTEIN: So one night he decided to try a little experiment

Mr. NOLAN: (Unintelligible)wrote: A dog barks on 10 Rod Road. And I added: Deep in a forest a berry drops, because I had been reading some Japanese haikus so that was in mind.

GORENSTEIN: Managing editor Rod Doherty says he's a little surprised just how popular Nolan's police log is.

Mr. ROD DOHERTY (Executive Editor, Rochester Times): If it doesn't appear, I will start to hear from people: Where's the Rochester Police Log? Of course(ph) I started thinking, hey, we put all this on the news and the paper all the time, and you're calling up because the police log's not in there.

Mr. NOLAN: On Winter Street, a lady pushes a gentleman through a window to air a grievance.

GORENSTEIN: Some readers point out: These are serious issues, not jokes. That line about airing a grievance makes you smile, until you think about what happened. Was that sexual assault? Was it a break-in? To a certain extent Nolan agrees with the sentiment.

After 17 years as a Glasgow, Scotland cop, he understands the ugliness of crime. But he says it's that job that taught him how to cope.

Mr. NOLAN: You'd see the very worst of behavior. But it was always lightened a little bit or softened by sort of gallows humor. That's how people get by.

GORENSTEIN: Nolan doesn't just want people chuckle - he's using crime to tell a story about how people live together.

Mr. NOLAN: 5:47 p.m., with only a crescent moon teens have to fight under a street light. 1:27 a.m., The people in the raucous Granite Street apartment are at it again, banging on walls and yelling louder than ever. 8:12 p.m., spring has arrived - a bike is stolen from a Charles Street driveway.

GORENSTEIN: Nolan thinks one reader nailed it when he said the log is gritty, with the self-confidence to poke fun at its own goings-on.

For NPR News, I'm Dan Gorenstein in Concorde, New Hampshire.

Mr. NOLAN: In a different part of town, there is another cause to frown. Trick-or-treaters all are shocked, for after a man's door is knocked he answers it not how he should. He keeps appearing in the nude.

Vincent D'Onofrio

I haven't met anyone like him still. StanleyKubrick
a extraordinarily unique human being.
Kind. That's what I remember most. Smiled his mischievous smile at me many times.
Shared his intellect when you least expected it.
StanleyKubrick
said one thing about my coming career that i haven't ever shared. He said it was meant for me only.
Him taking the time to tell me this one thing, something meant for me only is something that has stuck.

Ever since if i feel inspired to do so I do the same for young artists. Something they can not see about themselves and what's to come. Something they can not see without the help from another.
A gift.
In that period of my life many gifts came my way. All to do with my future.

Vincent D'Onofrio (twitter)

That's Her Choice

“When you're with a man, no one tells you he's a creep; they don't like to; they think, well, that's her choice, perhaps ours isn't up to much either; how will we ever be sure, in this polite world? In other words, as we all know, one woman's creep is another's true love, and just as well.”
― Faye Weldon

Angel, All Innocence, And Other Stories

“So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.”
― Fay Weldon, Angel, All Innocence, And Other Stories

Faye Weldon

“Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life... in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked.”
― Faye Weldon

Fiction

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”
― Fay Weldon, Down Among the Women

The Memory

“It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

Fay Weldon

“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”
― Fay Weldon

Food Drink Sleep

“Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

Books

“Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!”
― Fay Weldon

Arrest Motion

“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

Human Heart

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
― William Faulkner

Experience, Observation, Imagination

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
― William Faulkner

Afraid

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.”
― William Faulkner

Late August

“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Ashamed

“Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest”
― William Faulkner

the writer's, duty is to write about these things.

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

Dreamers

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”
― William Faulkner

Story

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

Memory Believes

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

Time

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Doorknob Off!

Today is the birthday of the man who said, “Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.” That’s the novelist William Faulkner (books by this author), born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He liked to get up early, eat a breakfast of eggs and broiled steak and lots of coffee, and then take his tobacco and pipe and go to his study. He took off the doorknob and carried it inside with him, where he wrote his novels by hand on large sheets of paper, and then typed them out with two fingers on an old Underwood portable. He was prolific this way — in a four-year span, he published some of his best novels: Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932). In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Love

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
― William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Always Dream

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

The Past...

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

We Practice It

“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
― William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

William Faulkner

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Hemingway


Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Slowly

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
CONFUCIUS

Gabriel Fielding

The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
GABRIEL FIELDING

David Nessle

https://soundcloud.com/david-nessle

blog https://davidnessle.wordpress.com/

Harley Davidson 4:30 AM

We have a new alarm clock in the 'hood. A Harley Davidson parked on the street gets turned on at 4:30AM and wakes up the whole neighborhood. The owner lets it run a while before launching off to work.

Cottage cheese and peaches.

My breakfast today was exactly what I'd eat in 9th grade as an after school suburban snack. Cottage cheese and peaches.

Pooches and Pregnancies

Yesterday I ran into the young girl who used to be my neighbor.
When are you due?
Halloween. My child's father lives 2 hours away. He lives with his mother, he has a good job.
Is this baby number five? I asked.
Number four, she said.
We didn't know we were having a baby. Now we're back together.

My neighbors suddenly have a huge scary dog. This makes dog number four in the 3 family house. The yard stinks because nobody walks or leashes their dog. Yelling and barking is the norm. Each neighbor faults the other. This corner of the city is inundated with flies urine and dog-shit. We live next to a dog kennel.

I am amazed at the baby making and dog adoption that goes on as if it was as easy as buying a bag of potato chips.

failure to defend press freedom around the world.

Morning Mix
Egypt planned to arrest a New York Times reporter. The Trump administration reportedly wanted to let it happen.


FILE - This Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011 file photo shows the New York Times building in New York. Two people familiar with the matter said private research shows that the hacking group Fancy Bear sent phishing emails to roughly 50 employees at the Times in late 2014. The Times confirmed in a brief statement that its employees received the malicious messages but declined further comment. (Mark Lennihan, File)
By Teo Armus
September 24 at 7:09 AM

In late 2017, The New York Times received an urgent warning from a U.S. official. Egyptian authorities were looking to arrest Declan Walsh, the newspaper’s reporter in Cairo, according to its publisher. It’s not unusual for a large media organization to get tipped off about threats to its journalists overseas, particularly those reporting on authoritarian governments.

But what was striking is what the official said next: The Trump administration had tried to keep the warning about Walsh from ever reaching the Times. Officials “intended to sit on the information and let the arrest be carried out,” Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote in an opinion column on Monday.

This incident, described publicly by Sulzberger for the first time in a talk at Brown University earlier on Monday, adds a chilling new episode to the administration’s trend of attacking the press and diminishing the rights of journalists as they come under threat around the globe, the publisher wrote.

Where the United States was once seen as the top defender of press freedom, Sulzberger suggested that Trump has inspired the opposite around the globe, citing recent threats made in an address by the Cambodian prime minister, a social media blackout in Chad, and attempts to arrest foreign journalists in Egypt, whose autocratic president Trump once jokingly called his “favorite dictator.”

“These brutal crackdowns are being passively accepted and perhaps even tacitly encouraged by the president of the United States,” Sulzberger said.

President Trump has refused to acknowledge that the Saudi government ordered the assassination of The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, as international investigators have found. And the president’s frequent use of the phrase “fake news” has resulted in more than 50 foreign government leaders to adopt similar calls, the publisher charged.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walsh, The Times’ Cairo bureau chief, penned articles in early 2017 about the country’s crackdown on human rights groups, the expulsion of a prominent critic of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the largely ineffective efforts to hold the country’s former president Hosni Mubarak accountable. He also led a live web event from Cairo in March 2017 about the tight press restrictions placed on visual journalists in Egypt.

Later that year, the Times got a call from the U.S. official, who said Walsh had a target on his back. That’s when the call took a “surprising and distressing turn,” Sulzberger wrote on Monday.

The Trump administration wanted to sit on the warning and let Egyptian officials carry out the arrest, the official said. In fact, the official feared being punished for alerting the Times of what was about to play out.

So the newspaper instead turned to Walsh’s home country of Ireland for help. Almost immediately, officials from the Irish Embassy in Cairo escorted the journalist from his home to the airport, Sulzberger wrote.

The Irish Embassy in Cairo referred a request for comment to the Irish Foreign Ministry, which did not immediately return multiple calls and emails. Walsh also did not immediately respond to messages.

In his talk at Brown, Sulzberger used the incident to illustrate the repercussions of Trump’s failure to defend press freedom around the world.

“I’m sounding the alarm because his words are dangerous and having real-world consequences around the globe,” Sulzberger said.

Reporters without Borders, a nonprofit that fights for press freedom, has noted a sharp drop in the number of countries where it is safe for journalists to work. Only 8 percent of 180 countries evaluated by the organization in 2019 have a media climate considered “good” for journalists, amid a tightening grip from government and increased violence. The U.S. came in at 48th, and Egypt was 163rd.

Later in his speech, Sulzberger mentioned an incident last February, in which another one of the newspaper’s journalists was targeted by the Egyptian government. This time, their efforts were successful.

David D. Kirkpatrick, a Times international correspondent and former Cairo bureau chief, had written a book, “Into the Hands of the Soldiers,” that was critical of the Egyptian government. Upon landing in Cairo in February, Kirkpatrick was placed in custody for hours without food or water. He was then ordered on a flight back to London, where he’s based.

[In latest blow to press freedom, Egypt bars, then deports New York Times reporter]

Sam Werberg, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, later said the office was “concerned” about the incident and raised the matter with Egyptian officials.

Privately, however, the embassy’s reaction to the incident seemed to differ. After the Times’ leadership spoke out, Sulzberger heard from a senior official at the embassy.

“What did you expect would happen to him?” the official said, according to Sulzberger. “His reporting made the government look bad.”

Sulzberger’s column prompted one of Trump’s most outspoken critics in Congress to compare the president to an “authoritarian.”

“This is what authoritarians do,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)

Leap!

If you want to be a doctor, look before you leap. If you want to be in show business, leap before you look.
STEVEN SPIELBERG

Toby Litt

"To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus…”

To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer. Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence. To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus. Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, “Well done.” They want to say, “Wow.”

TOBY LITT

Vacuum Entire House

Vacuum entire house. Reorganize all closets and drawers. Paint exterior of house. Ask neighbors if they would like their house painted. Re-vacuum house. Write lead.
Susan Orlean

Write Scared

When I was a member of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, my editor, Gerry O’Neill, urged me to “write scared.” That is, push yourself beyond what you think is possible or safe, to the outer limits of your research and your ability, to the point where it feels exciting and a little scary. When it works, it’s exhilarating for you and for the reader.

MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

Dream

I dreamed I was pregnant with a huge belly and a live white rat was on my chest facing me like a hood ornament. He must be hungry, I thought.

Monday, September 23, 2019

The Keys for Getting Free

re-posted from Sunday, September 29, 2013

When my neighbors were moving their last box out I rushed over to the fence and gave their 12 year old daughter a hardcover copy of my first book: Avi's Punch with Judy, as a goodbye gift. I asked her if I could write in a dedication with a drawing of Sammy and Lily? "Are you ready for your new school," I asked.
"I hope I can make new friends - figure out who to trust, and they don't abandon me," she said. I feel like through this book I am giving her messages of hope hidden woven inside like a prayer rug in Sufi tales. These are the keys for getting free. Serena loves to read and we often talk about books when we are not talking about Lily Sammy and glucose monitors and the latest neighborhood drama. Serena's dad Mickey told me his ex wife abandoned Serena last year running away with a truck driver to travel the highways of Florida with him. Serena now lives full time with her father and step mother Lanie. They have fun. They just bought their own house in the suburbs and they have a pool and acres of land and Mickey drives a sit down lawn mower that came with the house. Serena told me she has celiac disease and is allergic to everything with wheat or milk and she has diabetes. She is slender petite and blonde with clear blue eyes. She lifted her shirt to show me she has scars on her stomach and thigh from having to wears a glucose monitor pump attached to her skin but under her clothes. She goes to a special summer camp for diabetic kids every year. Lanie came out to show me the special corn pasta they buy at a gourmet store. I wished I could bring over my pasta machine to show her how to make her own healthy corn noodles. I told her having to be careful about your food will make her a great cook and she will continue to have perfect skin when everyone else is getting zits. There's a plus side to everything. I said and we laughed.

I Walk my Dog Early

I walk my dog earlier now because the eee virus is out there carried by mosquitoes. The local kids have sports and outdoor games earlier too. Climate effects everyone. Think about ways you can help.

Don't buy liquid soap.
Don't buy anything in plastic small containers.
Use water from the faucet.
Eat mostly vegetarian.
Recycle.
Pick up trash on your streets.
Walk more drive less.
Use public transportation when possible.
VOTE!!!

Electric Pressure Cooker

Our butcher retired but two brothers bought the shop. They are doing a nice job of carrying on the tradition of the best place in town.

My friend gave me an electric pressure cooker and I plan to make this.

Instant Pot Pork Stew

Yield: 6
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
Additional Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 45 minutes

This easy spicy Instant Pot pork stew makes a hearty weeknight dinner.

Ingredients

1 T oil
1 1/2 pounds pork, cubed
1 cup water
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 Tablespoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1 can pinto beans or black beans, drained
1 can diced tomatoes, undrained
2 cups frozen corn, thawed

Instructions

Put the Instant Pot on Saute and add the oil. Brown the pork in the oil for 5 minutes.
Turn the Instant Pot off, and then use the water to deglaze it. Stir well and scrape the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to make sure there are no brown bits left on bottom.
Add the onion, garlic, cornmeal, cumin, chili powder, oregano, salt, and beans to the Instant Pot and mix well.
Dump the can of tomatoes on top but don't stir it into the other ingredients. (Not stirring it in reduces the chance you will get a burn error.)
Cover, bring to pressure on High pressure or the Stew/Meat setting and cook for 25 minutes.
Let the pressure release naturally for 10 minutes, then release the rest of the pressure and stir in the corn. Cover and let it sit for 5 minutes to heat the corn.

Michelle Goldberg


Opinion
Nancy Pelosi’s Failure to Launch

The House speaker’s hesitation on impeachment empowers a lawless president.


By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Sept. 23, 2019

Elizabeth Warren on Friday evening sent out a series of tweets that, in addition to calling out Donald Trump for his criminality, rebuked Congress for enabling him. “After the Mueller report, Congress had a duty to begin impeachment,” wrote Warren. “By failing to act, Congress is complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in U.S. elections. Do your constitutional duty and impeach the president.”

Warren was not impolitic enough to refer directly to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, but the implicit criticism was clear. It was also well deserved. Pelosi’s calculated timidity on impeachment is emboldening Trump, demoralizing progressives, and failing the country.

The House speaker is a master legislator, and by all accounts incomparable at corralling votes. But right now, Democrats need a brawler willing to use every tool at her disposal to stop America’s descent into autocracy, and Pelosi has so far refused to rise to the occasion. As Representative Jared Huffman tweeted, “We are verging on tragic fecklessness.”

Part of Pelosi’s rationale for not impeaching after the release of the Mueller report was that such a move didn’t have majority support in the country or bipartisan support in Congress. Her allies worried that were Trump to be impeached in the House but not convicted in the Senate, he could emerge stronger than ever. Many Democrats in swing districts wanted to steer clear.

These were reasonable concerns, but inaction signaled to Trump that he would face no consequences for obstructing justice or for seeking a foreign power’s help in undermining a political opponent.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

Now Trump has used the power of the presidency to do just that. We don’t yet know all the details in the whistle-blower report filed by a member of the intelligence community, which is now being kept, possibly illegally, from Congress. But there’s little question that the president tried to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden; both Trump and his ranting disgrace of a lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have admitted as much on television.

The idea was to try to force Ukraine to provide grist for a thoroughly debunked right-wing conspiracy theory that as vice president, Biden targeted a Ukrainian prosecutor on his son’s behalf. While Trump was strong-arming the reformist Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, his administration had frozen $250 million in security aid that the country desperately needed to defend itself against Russia, which invaded in 2014. It doesn’t matter if there was an explicit quid pro quo; Zelensky knew what Trump wanted from him. Trump deployed American foreign policy to extort a vulnerable nation to help his re-election campaign.

Trump’s latest defilement of his oath of office has pushed some previously reluctant Democrats, like the House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff, toward impeachment. Schiff reportedly coordinated his recent pro-impeachment comments with Pelosi, yet she remains resistant to moving in the same direction. One of Pelosi’s advisers told the CNBC reporter John Harwood that her impeachment calculus hasn’t changed, saying, “See any G.O.P. votes for it?” It was almost as if the adviser was trying to troll scared, desperate Democrats, rubbing their faces in the speaker’s baffling determination to give Trump’s party veto power over accountability.

The most Pelosi has done is to write that if the whistle-blower’s complaint is kept from Congress, the administration “will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.” Given the impunity Trump has enjoyed so far, this does not seem like a threat with teeth.

Ultimately, no one can know the political consequences of impeachment in advance. I find it hard to imagine how months of televised hearings into a widely hated president’s comprehensive corruption could help him, but I can’t see the future. Perhaps impeachment in the House without removal in the Senate would allow Trump to convince some voters he’s been exonerated, though so does the failure to impeach him at all.

Polls show that impeachment doesn’t have majority support, so there’s a political risk for Democrats in trying to lead public opinion rather than follow it. But surely there’s also a risk in appearing weak and irresolute. Already, frustration with Pelosi in the Democratic base is threatening to curdle into despair. “I see the grass-roots activists who helped build the wave last year really wondering what they built that wave for,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, told me.

In the end, our system offers no mechanism besides impeachment to check a president who operates like a mob boss. It’s true that Democrats will remove Trump only by beating him in 2020, but he is already cheating in that election, just as he did in 2016, and paying no price for it.

A formal impeachment process would, if nothing else, give new weight to Democratic claims when they go to court to enforce subpoenas or pry loose documents the administration is trying to hide. It would show that Democrats are serious when they say that Trump’s behavior is intolerable, and potentially allow them to seize control of the day-to-day narrative of this rancid presidency. Trump does not want to be impeached — a Monday Politico headline says, “Trump’s team is trying to stop impeachment before it starts.” It’s hard to imagine why any Democratic leader would assist them.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn

When the sage points to the moon

“Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
― Anthony de Mello

“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.”
― Anthony de Mello

“‎"I have no fear of losing u, for you aren't an object of my property, or anyone else's. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.”
― Anthony de Mello

“You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. ”
― Anthony de Mello

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.'

Said [author:Diogenes|3213618, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".”
― Anthony de Mello

“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.”
― Anthony de Mello

“When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.” “I know. An overwhelming passion for it.” “No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.”
― Anthony de Mello

“Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.”
― Anthony de Mello

“When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding... you can be yourself. Relaxed. You'll no longer be driving with your brakes on.”
― Anthony De Mello

“The tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.”
― Anthony de Mello

“When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Don't ask the world to change....you change first.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”
― Anthony de Mello

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“I have no fear of losing you, for you aren’t an object of my property, or anyone else’s. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.”
― Anthony de Mello

“Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
― Anthony de Mello

“The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”
― Anthony De Mello

“The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awakening: Conversations with the Masters

“As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“the greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Prayer Of The Frog, Vol. 1

“The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every
doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these
things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now
being taken as descriptions.

He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points
to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.”
― Anthony de Mello

“The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“The world is right because I feel good.
― Anthony de Mello