{"id":6055,"date":"2013-10-14T00:31:54","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T04:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=6055"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:11","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:11","slug":"thought16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2013\/10\/thought16\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts at Large: 16"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Yes, you youngsters are right, this decade is all about pandering to Boomer nostalgia.\u00a0 Example: the Wikipedia entry for “Celebrity Jeopardy<\/a>” (Saturday Night Live<\/em> skit of the 1990s, featuring Norm McDonald as Turd Ferguson) is paragraphs longer than the entry for the eminent physicist Roger Penrose<\/a>.\u00a0 Oh well.\u00a0 Let us old farts enjoy the ride.<\/p>\n

\u2022 I continue to learn things about being 60.\u00a0 The latest thing is that it’s not such a good idea anymore to make non-refundable, pay-in-advance hotel reservations.<\/p>\n

\u2022 In ancient times, the ellipsis<\/a> had six dots.\u00a0 But the Roman Emperor Augustus vainly stole one of them from February to add to his own month, leaving five.\u00a0 Several centuries later, the Black Ink Shortage of 1455 forced printer Johannes Gutenberg to shrink the ellipsis to four dots.\u00a0 Finally, in the early 1900’s, overwhelmed immigration officers at Ellis Island shortened the ellipsis to three dots, where it remains to this day. . .<\/p>\n

\u2022 Consider nice<\/em> vs love<\/em>.\u00a0 We are romantically conditioned to prefer the idea of love<\/em>.\u00a0 But being nice<\/em> involves action that benefits another, whereas feeling love<\/em> does not necessarily affect anything outside one’s own cranium.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Success and failure are superposed quantum states<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 We have a pet betta fish.\u00a0 It is orange-yellow and its name is Carotene.\u00a0\u00a0 We feed it two bits of food in the morning and one bit at dinner time.\u00a0 The way this fish attacks its food, you would think it had the DNA of a brook trout.\u00a0 That’s the end of this story.\u00a0 It is sort of like a Garrison Keillor story in that it just ends, wistfully, crafted so as to make you sit back and think, ahh, isn’t life quietly wonderful.<\/p>\n

\u2022 One of the more disturbing ideas I’ve had lately is that my “Thoughts at Large” posts are the blog equivalent of the 1970’s\u00a0 McCartney song, “Uncle Albert\/Admiral Halsey<\/a>.”\u00a0 If so, I’m so sorry.<\/p>\n

\u2022 As the American public grows ever more weary and cynical of “advocates” (those who stake out positions for which only one side of an argument is ever presented), it learns to distrust and tune out, and it eventually loses the capacity to evaluate evidence, if such a loss has not already taken place.\u00a0 It seems our democracy’s much-vaunted war of ideas is to be won not by fact but by enhanced insistence techniques.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Talk Soup<\/em><\/a>: a good thing to forget about the 90’s.\u00a0 You don’t remember Talk Soup?\u00a0 Good.\u00a0 One less thing you have to think about on your Day of Atonement.<\/p>\n

\u2022 I live only a few miles from I-240, The Billy Graham Freeway, and I drive it every week.\u00a0 Whenever I see its roadside dedication sign, I find it hard to forget these words<\/a> exchanged in April 1973 by President Nixon and Rev. Graham, on the topic of television coverage of Nixon’s speech announcing the resignations<\/a> of his top aides and cabinet members:<\/p>\n

Nixon: \u201cWhat did CBS do?\u00a0 Did they knock it?\u201d<\/em>
\nGraham: \u201cI felt like slashing their throats, but anyway God be with you.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I-240 in Asheville should be rededicated as The Robert Frost Freeway.\u00a0 A road that reminds us of promises to keep and the miles to go<\/a> before we sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Yes, you youngsters are right, this decade is all about pandering to Boomer nostalgia.\u00a0 Example: the Wikipedia entry for “Celebrity Jeopardy” (Saturday Night Live skit of the 1990s, featuring Norm McDonald as Turd Ferguson) is paragraphs longer than the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-at-large"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6055"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28323,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6055\/revisions\/28323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}