When I have a morning at home alone I work on my lists and I fall into my practice more easily.  The sun is streaming in and I am doing triage on piles of "urgent" items which have become buried under a stream of distractions and amusements like my nonstop study of public health.  One observation this morning is that the strong balancing poses ( Read more... )

Cocaine and booze
are the eggs and bacon
of the addict's world,
the perfect combination.
--Ozzy Osbourne
(in The Week 7/4/14 p8)

The religion of one age
is the literary entertainment
of the next.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was boring! Boring.
How could it be anything else?
You can't see out from the bottom of a canyon.
--Floyd Dominy

(Dominy died in 2010 at age 100)

I haven't watched much TV in this life. It's because my family moved to Austria when I was 12, and I was broken of the young habit. When I returned at age 16, I couldn't believe how inane TV was. I could sit through it, but the most fascinating part for me was always the advertising. What are they selling, and how? If anyone hands me a remote ( Read more... )

(but not associated with anxiety ( Read more... )

Researchers at the Ochsner Health System in Baton Rouge, Louisiana analyzed 14 years of data ('93-'06) on 120,000 people, adjusted for smoking and obesity, and discovered that just plain old sitting is a major health risk. Six or more hours a day on the keester causes women to have a 37% higher risk of dying compared with women who sat 3 hours or ( Read more... )

Where once there had lived a sober and thrifty citizenry, proud of their founding fathers, jealous of their Republic, finding their full expression of being in work and family and their gods, and in their quiet homes and the shadows of their trees, there now lived a motley and rapacious rabble, quick to acclaim, quick to murder, quick to quarrel ( Read more... )

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
--Voltaire

Pixar's latest release...we just saw it. It's getting four stars in lots of different reviews, but in my rating system it gets a 3 or less. The story is cute: widower's house gets surrounded by city, his dead wife didn't get to do her childhood dream, he feels dissatisfied and is unwilling to "retire" in a "home". So he hooks up his house to a ( Read more... )