Deer Does ‘n’ Bucks:

You’re familiar, I’m sure, with the concept of tough love. I’ve been thinking that this helpful concept ought to be extended to include not just love, but other interactions between people. For example, how about tough consolation. “Yeah, yeah ,okay, so your dog died.
Boo hoo, boo hoo. Now, can we please move on?”

Have you been watching the new brain series on The Science Channel? Wow. They showed a guy totally paralyzed by an aneurism, whose only mode of communication was to blink his eyes. If I understood correctly, an electrode was implanted in his brain, in the area that controls voluntary muscle movement in the hand. The man was instructed to try to move a cursor on a computer screen, which, of course, he couldn’t do, being paralyzed and all. However, new synapses grew and somehow attached to the electrode. As a result of this, and months of trying, the guy actually developed the ability to move the cursor by “thinking” it from one spot to another. His brain connected itself directly to the computer. A heretofore insurmountable barrier has been surmounted. Is that not a mind-blower?

Meanwhile, the front page of the Sun-Times that day bemoaned the plight of some high school girl who couldn’t attend her prom because she had play rehearsal.

Were it not verboten to mix religion and business, I might have mentioned that the recent gathering of Bishops in Houston was a waste of time because they were just preaching to the perverted. But it is, so I won’t.

Geri and I combined a celebration of our 30th anniversary (thank you) with a trip to visit daughter Holly during spring break at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The weather was uncooperative, even by local standards. Record rainfalls, constant overcast, quite cool. We had a great time regardless. Holly was studying Hemingway, many of whose books she found funny haha. Hmmmm . . .

Anyway, as we drove by Mt. Ranier, which was invisible due to low-lying clouds, I had one of those moments. It dawned on me in mini-epiphany fashion, just what Donovan [that lesser folk singer who rode in on Dylan’s coat tails during the late sixties, and who, by the way, can be heard singing sha la la la la la la la la la la ti da (or is it lucky duck?) on Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl] was talking about 30 odd years ago when he sang First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. I assumed all this time he was making some so-profound-as-to-be-incomprehensible allusion to mysticism and enlightment, when he was merely talking about clouds sometimes obscuring our view of mountains. Bummer.

Palestine, Palatine and Pakistan all share five letters, which, if pronounced phonetically, sound like “Patton.” And what a great movie that was, yes?

Stoically,

 

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” -- Steven Weinberg

Schizophrenics, I read recently, can tickle themselves.

“Everything that can be said, can be said clearly. “ Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Huh?]

“Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.” -- Norman Douglas

“Necessity knows no laws.” -- Mark Twain

“Ads stink in direct proportion to the number of people who have to approve them.” -- Ross Sutherland, Y&R