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.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
October 28, 2009 - 4:28 p.m.
I wrote two entries yesterday and haven't done anything interesting today so I could have taken the day off. Since you are reading this you know I didn't. Isn't it spooky that I knew you are reading this?
It took me forever to get through Book One of the Waterfield translation of Xenophon's Anabasis. I got through Book Two in no time in the Rouse translation. Guess which one I'm going to continue reading. The problem is the endnotes in Waterfield. I just lost too much time finding the note at the back then finding my place again in the book. Rouse has fewer notes and puts them where they belong, at the foot of the page. There are some notes that I never figured out in Waterfield; instead of being marked with a * they were marked with a †. Nowhere did I see an explanation of what that meant. There was nothing about it in the endnotes.
I am enjoying reading both translations immensely. It's a great story and Xenophon knew how to write. It's also just fun having someone say, "Xenophon asked the philosopher Socrates his advice." You just don't expect someone to talk about Socrates as a friend to discuss personal matters with. That's what ancient Athens was like though. It wasn't that big a city and people knew each other. Xenophon was not pulling a Ricky Henderson when he referred to himself in the third person. He wrote the entire book in the third person. He just happens to be a character in it.
So now I have a choice of two things to write about that have nothing to do with each other and have totally different moods. Let's go with serious then trivial.
When I got off the subway today there was a guy dressed like Uncle Sam with a sign warning about the national debt. He kept saying, "The debt is a trillion dollars." My reaction is so what? Why is a trillion significant. Is there some economic effect that takes place at one trillion? Does economic theory give a trillion dollar debt a special meaning? Of course not. He was just blinded by the magic of round numbers. If we used another base than ten nobody would even notice. When somebody makes a big deal over something being a power of ten always keep that in mind.
Christine Lavin wrote a song about a statistic she read a few years ago that since the RFK assassination one million Americans have been killed by firearms. Now that isn't the same thing as we know exactly what that means and we know why it is bad. Still I think the point could be made stronger by putting things in context. 2,993 people died in the 9/11 attacks including the hijackers. In that same year there were there were 29,573 deaths from firearms. That is almost ten times as many, yet we turned the country upside down and trashed people's rights and even tortured people because of the one time incident while we've done almost nothing about the firearms deaths.
OK now for the trivial. I love coffee. I consider it one of the three essential food groups. Do you know what the other two are? If you are loyal Gentle Readers you should, and if you are my friend in person you should know too. The others are chocolate and peanut butter. That's all you need to survive, everything else is a condiment.
Now back to coffee. Back in the day when I bought coffee, I'd go to the supermarket and buy a can of whatever was on sale. Things were simple and cheap and it kept me satisfied. No longer. Now I'm spoiled. I need varieties of coffee and I need to grind it myself so I bought a grinder. It is no longer good enough to have one type of coffee. Right now in my house I have five. I have three from Trader Joe's; Kauai (medium roast), Costa Rican Tarrazu (medium dark roast), and Joe (medium roast). I also have Dunkin' Donuts regular and decaf. I switch off every day with the decaf reserved for iced coffee and coffee in the evenings. I drink most of my coffee at breakfast. The irony is that my favorites are the cheapest, the Dunkin' Donuts which I bought on sale the Joe. I considered sticking to those two but I have become used to the variety. Each day what I have tastes new and fresh.
It's funny how people have blind spots. When Dunkin Donuts had a free coffee day a friend couldn't understand why anyone would wait on line for it; "Why not just go to a dinner and buy a coffee." When I said Dunkin' Donuts tastes better he asked "how can that be?" He just didn't know that all coffee wasn't the same. He's a wine drinker and sees the difference there but he just couldn't apply that knowledge to something else.
Tonight I’m doing one of my special things. I'm collecting on my birthday present for Carey. We are seeing Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This is my eighth live performance of it with my sixth different Hedwig. It's Hedwig I can't miss a production of it. It's like coffee, I want to sample all the varieties. I also like seeing it with different people. This will be my first total repeat of companions. I might have the order wrong but here is who I saw it with including tonight.
- Jena
- Jena, Carey (male), and Barbara
- Anita
- Lisa
- Carey (female)
- Gella
- alone
- Carey and Barbara
Next time I'm giving you the heads up and expecting you to join me. Everyone needs to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch and read Jurgen.
Dark Shadows - November 02, 2009
A Met Fan's Halloween - November 01, 2009
Northeastern Comfort - October 31, 2009
Colbert Report Report - October 30, 2009
Lift Up Your Hands - October 29, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile October 28, 2009
