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.
November 03, 2009 - 12:38 p.m.
I don't know what happened this morning. I got up at 6:00 went back to sleep, got up at 8:00 went back to sleep and slept till after 10:00. I went to bed way too early to sleep that late. I'm going to have trouble getting up for school tomorrow.
Today is Election Day. I have to remember to vote. Not that it is going to do any good. My poor record in New York mayoral elections will continue; Bloomberg is heavily favored to win. I'm not sure there are any judgeships being "contested." Often deals are made and the same person runs on all party lines. When that happens I write somebody in. This year I'm voting for musician friends that live in New York City.
Before I forgot, I have to put in things I forgot to put in my last entry. I not only took photos of Rod and Amanda I took videos.
This is Angels and Acrobats. This was originally a solo song for Rod. Now Amanda sings it.
This is Trouble Girl a song from Rod & Amanda's duo project.
I returned both my editions of Xenophon's Anabasis aka Up Country aka The Expedition of Cyrus. I checked on the book I had reserved, Lords and Ladies: A Novel of Discworld and discovered that it is in limbo. I got a message from the computer that the librarian couldn't decipher. He suggested that I call the Central library and ask them what's going on.
I wanted a book and I browsed a section of the library I never browsed before, the 300s, the social sciences; economics, history, and politics. I ended up choosing Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury. You probably know the film by Martin Scorcese. The book is quite different. It isn't written as a narrative. It's a history book. Here's a chilling fact. The Old Brewery was a notorious tenement in the Five Points. "It has been estimated that for almost fifteen years the Old Brewery average a murder a night an Cow Bay tenements almost as many. " Don't ever let anyone tell you that crime is a modern problem. For comparison the entire City had about 500 murders last year. At the height of the crack epidemic the city of eight million people had 2000 murders. That rate pales in comparison to one tenement with 365 murders in one year. They were poor immigrants and considered disposable. Unfortunately that attitude still persists to some degree.
I said that I was reading The Summer Game but as a collection of short essays I think that I'm going to keep that as my emergency read between books.
I'm so happy that I'm back in the habit of reading. For a long time if you asked me what I was reading I'd have been embarrassed and said "nothing." I read every day but the newspaper is different. I want to always be reading some book. My last few reads have a nice diversity to them, Catcher in the Rye, Anabasis, and Gangs of New York. I need to read something in the sciences soon. I really should keep a list of everything I read. I started to a few times then went through periods of reading nothing and got embarrassed to keep it.
Speaking of reading I still haven' read today's New York Times or eaten breakfast or voted. I better start actually doing things.
It's All Happening at the Zoo - November 09, 2009
It's the latest it's the greatest it's the library - November 08, 2009
Art, a Picasso or a Garfunkel - November 06, 2009
Run With It - November 05, 2009
Elevators 101 - November 04, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile November 03, 2009
