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.
October 06, 2004 - 12:27 a.m.
Yesterday I wrote about the things I put off writing on Sunday. Now I have to catch up on something I did yesterday and forgot to write about. I went to the Library to request Captain Horatio Hornblower. That is the edition that has all three books in the trilogy in one volume. I have only read the middle one. Not the best idea. I checked online and saw that the only branch of the Queens Library with a copy was the Central Branch in Jamaica which is not convenient. They have four copies. That seems a bit unfair. It is all part of the same system though and three of the copies they have are “requestable” so I that’s what I did. It wasn’t quite as easy as I thought though. I went to the circulation desk and they told me I had to go to the information desk. They first told me that the book was not requestable but then noticed that the other copies were. Then the ran my library card through the scanner and told me it had expired. I wouldn’t have minded except that there is no expiration date on the card. If it expires they should tell you that. To get a new card I had to go back to the circulation desk. I got my new card then went back to the information desk and got my request processed. When I asked how I’ll know when it is in I was told I’d get a postcard. I asked if I could get an email was told no. That seems so inefficient. It means that I have to wait longer to find out and that the book is out of circulation longer since no one can take it out till I pick it up. It also costs the library more money in postcards, postage, and labor handling the cards. There seems to be no downside to emailing except the initial costs of changing the system. Ideally they’d just scan the book when the received it and an email would automatically be sent to the person who requested it. So is anyone other than Jaci interested in any of that?
I had a dream last night where I made a joke that actually still made sense when I was awake. In the dream I was Dan Bern was giving a concert in my house. Not really a house concert, the only people there were Lisa and me. It was more of an informal private show. At the end of the set I started thinking about an episode of Star Trek where they said that WWIII was averted on earth because of a “series of small bush wars.” That was an obvious reference to Vietnam but in the dream it hit me that they could mean “Bush wars” referring to the wars of George and Dubya. I said the joke made sense, I didn’t say it was funny. I thought of this as we were leaving my house to go to dinner or maybe a gig of Dan’s. I wanted to tell Dan the joke but he was up a bit ahead of me and I had to catch up. As I was walking I saw an actor that played a Klingon on the street and decided to go over to him and tell him the dream. As I was telling it another actor that played a Klingon joined us and told me that he had thought the same thing when the were filming the episode. He thought it was very prophetic.
You know how they say you should write down a dream so you can remember it? Well all I wrote down was “Bush War Dreams” and that was enough for me to recall the whole dream.
Calculus class today moved very slowly. I had to move back the day of the test. I was hoping to finish off the last part of one section and then do another one. I just barely had time to finish off that one section. It was denser material than I realized. It had to do with applying the chain rule in more complicated cases than we had gone into so far. It is something that I find easy and natural and didn’t really need to have explained to me. I know that isn’t the case for most people and most students find it difficult. It really is just a matter of maintaining concentration. I used it to show how what you learn in the course is useful even if you never use calculus again in your life. The ability to break down a problem into smaller parts and give your full concentration to each of them is a skill that is used in almost any difficult task.
I flew through the materials in my fundamentals class today and the class had no trouble keeping up. I kept on going on giving them problems and they were able to do them all. They are now conversant in adding subtracting, and multiplying polynomials. I covered three sections in the time allotted to two, covered them in great detail, and let the class out a bit early.
I’ve been thinking of a recurring theme in my life. There are things that I want from other people that will really only be of worth if I don’t have to ask for it. It is always a tough situation since there really is nothing I can do about it. You just sit there and hope it happens.
I just saw that it is October 6. I can’t think of that without thinking that was the date that the Black Riders wounded Frodo on Weathertop. Each year the scar would hurt on that date.
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 October 06, 2004
