With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2002-01-13 - 2:05 a.m.
I just looked at my buddy list, Joy is the only one to have posted an entry in the last 24 hours, and hers was 20 hours ago. Does that mean I'll have great ratings as the only one updating?
This might be interesting. I'm probably going to write this entry in two sittings. Stargate SG-1 is on in 15 minutes and I want to watch it. I'll finish it when it's over. Will that interrupt the flow of the entry?
I spent most of today home then went to see my father. It is amazing how fast he is improving now. He ate his dinner with a real appetite. He is walking around, albeit with his walker, without a real problem. Before we were measuring his progress in the number of steps he could take. He's coming home on Tuesday and I'm confident that he's ready for it.
I went to the Knick game with Marc tonight. Alan didn't go because he wanted to watch the Jet Playoff game on TV. He is a fan of every major team sport but football is his favorite. He has not missed a Jet home game since 1979. I just checked the Jets lost to the Raiders 38-24.
I don't think I've written much about Marc. I met him around 1987. He was an actuary studying for the first actuarial exam and knew someone who knew Carey. This lead to my tutoring him. The first exam was in calculus in those days, it has since been changed to include statistics, and I was in a perfect position to teach him. In addition to my knowledge of the subject matter I had also had training in preparing people to take standardized tests. I had lots of fun finding ways to beat the test. If I could have found a way to promote it I could have made a good living preparing people for it. I had tricks to allow somebody to answer calculus problems without actually knowing the calculus involved. They often involved numeric methods of estimating and finding which multiple-choice answer was the closest to the estimate.
I saw him for 2 hours every other week and in time we became friends. He is the one that invited me into my baseball league. It was centered on the people in his office. He was the first friend that I went to Knick games with. We didn't have season tickets but we'd go to four or five games a year. Tickets were easier to get in those days. In 1991 Marc moved to Albuquerque. We actually got closer then. We'd started off mainly talking about our rotisserie league team but we then started talking about everything. I went out to visit him when the North American Bridge Championships were held in Albuquerque. I went out there a week before the tournament to spend time with him and his family.
A few years ago he moved back east, to Allentown Pa. We had drifted apart in the mean time. I no longer speak to him every week. It is still always good to see him though. It is extra nice to go to a Knick game with him, as that was the first thing we ever did on a friendship basis. I'm going to try and talk to him more often now and go visit him in Allentown. It is harder for him to visit me as he has a wife and two kids.
Oh yeah, in case you are wondering the Knicks lost tonight. It was a great game though; they came back from a 24 point second half deficit to come within 2 points of the Bucks. Marc and I had a great time.
I actually lost some weight it seems. I was right in thinking that yesterday's 169.5 was an anomaly. Today I weighed 172.5. That means I have lost half a pound, which is right on my planned schedule. Right now I am dying to cheat. I have a real craving for a midnight snack. Writing about it makes it easier to resist.
I'm up to Flotsam and Jetsam in LOTR. I'm a bit torn about what to quote today. The passage I really like is a bit long. I find that the older I get that like Tolkien's son I love the "hobbit talk" so how about a line from Pippin.
'So that is the king of Rohan!' said Pippin in an undertone. "A fine old fellow. Very polite.'
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2002-01-13
