NO FEAR...GOT FEAR?...FEAR THIS...LOGO(S)

How do these various quotes strike you? --

"Great minds are occupied with ideas. Little minds are concerned with people." This is not the exact quote I believe there is an intermediate level which I believe might be a bit bourgeois.

"People who need people are the luckiest people in the world!"

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

"The only sin is worry." These last two are from secular observers.

Richard Dawkins and co. are presenting adverts on British buses: "There Is Probably No God; so Relax!"
(Dr. Dawkins has admitted there is a one in seven chance that he is wrong-- incredibly gracious of him woudn't you say?)

I recall a Twilight Zone episode in which an office worker who was a bit of a crab was portrayed as being everlastingly disgusted at the people around him. There were no cubicles in those days. He would moan, "People, people, people!" hour after hour and day after day, under his breath of course. One day he woke to find that everyone in the office and, by inference,in the entire world had become a carbon copy of himself. Do the math, make the moral...for those of you that do not know what a carbon copy is, no, it is not a carbonite replica of Hans Solo. Look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls!!!

Wreck amended reeding for those who have axe cess--
New Yorker our tickles or store eez "Storage Jars Go to War"

"Idols" by Tim Gautreau but first must read "Parker's Back" by Flannery O'Connor
"All That" by David Foster Wallace December 14 issue. The way that the author felt in his childhood is somehat comparable to what I feel at age 60. As I look back, I can honestly say that there is one feeling that has always eluded me, and that is boredom. Flummoxed, yes. Terrified? Often! But I really can't relate to being bored because everything fascinates me. A lot of people say that their teacher is boring. Frankly I can't say like Will Rogers that I never met a man I didn't like..but as far as I can remember--which must of necessity be selective -- I can say is that I cannot recall a person from whom I couldn't learn something--even the comatose have something to say to us!

"Midnight in Dostoyevsky" by Don DeLillo in the November 30 issue describes a professor of logic. I have not finished the article yet but I think it may already be another example of how people can be fascinating even in their pathologies; or especially in them. The grotesque characters of O'Connor are more stimulating perhaps and she meant to draw "large and startling figures" for those of us who had lost our sensitivities to the wonders of the Same Old Thing (CSL)

Recent interview in "the Talk of the Town" -- December 28 issue -- with Christopher Plummer who appears as Tolstoy in a recent movie. My sister and I tried to see this film but ran out of time and good weather when we were visiting at her house in Maryland. Mr. Plummer states that, " In my teens, I was terribly shy, and people scared me..........." so he went away to become, "... a playboy of every Western -- and Eastern -- world." Which is why he has mostly lived in hotels and apparently still does. This reminds me of another New Yorker cartoon portraying a single adult male walking into a cocktail party and thinking, "Yikes! Grown-ups!" Ever felt like that?



I would also highly suggest reading the lead article in Time magazine, I can't make out the date that it was released, entitled "Why Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny" I was totally unaware of epigenetics and the magnitude of its influence. It will change everything about genetic research, genetic engineering, and possibly history itself. I hope to discuss fragments of this information in this blog. The article isn't that long but it is a little bit technical however the ideas themselves are presented very clearly.