I found this in an old journal & really like it.
Tom says, ??we may be the smartest & dumbest people of all time.? He was referring to our indescribable ability to foretell the future but incapacity to act on it.
It was one of those mornings utterly distorted by the night’s dreams.
Why go to court to change my name to Gaspar de la Nuit in order to
avoid thinking of myself as a silly, fat old man? At midmorning I
looked at the dogs as possibilities for something different in my life.
I was dogsitting both daughters’ dogs plus our own: Lily, Grace, Pearl,
Harry, Rose and Mary. I shook the biscuit box and they assembled in
the living room on a very cold windy morning when no one wanted
to go outside except for a quick pee and a bark at the mailman. I sang,
“He’s got the whole world in his hands,” as they waited for their snack.
Harry was embarrassed and furtive and tried to leave the room but I
called him back. I tried, “Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas
today,” and Lily, the largest of the dogs, became angry at the others
who looked away intimidated. I tried something religious, “The Old
Rugged Cross,” to no particular response except that Mary leapt up
at the biscuit box in irritation. I realized decisively that dogs don’t care
about music and religion and thus have written up this report. This
scarcely makes me the Father of the A-bomb, I thought as I flung the
contents of the full box of biscuits around the room with the dogs
scrambling wildly on the hard maple floor. Let there be happy chaos.
“Science” by Jim Harrison from Saving Daylight. © Copper Canyon Press. (buy now)
This is a clever way to characterize requests for the production of documents.
The difficulties surrounding requests for documents can resemble those that might be encountered in a large library staffed by hostile librarians who respond to research queries only if asked precisely the right question. Yeazell, Civil Procedure, 5th ed. 2000 p. 502.
Only, the editor missed a redundancy in there. Isn’t ??Hostile Librarian? a little like ??Criminal Lawyer?; I mean, sure that adjective goes well with that noun, but is it really necessary?
Suffer any indignity that can be done you rather than come [to the courts of chancery].
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
- Oscar Levant
When lawyers don’t understand what they’re doing, they often try to make it seem more defensible by clothing it in Latin.
The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
George Burns
(link)
My new friend David is a gifted Nero-Scientist. I asked him the other day if we have figured out the human brain yet.
He said we’ve made a lot of headway with men, but despite thousands of years of research the female mind is still beyond classification.
Keep studying brother.
Granddad just forwarded this to me. I post it in honor of my Brother’s wedding last weekend.
1. Two times a week, we go to a nice restaurant, have a little beverage, good food and companionship.
She goes on Tuesdays, I go on Fridays.…
5. We always hold hands.
If I let go, she shops.…
8. She got a mud pack and looked great for two days. Then the mud fell off.
…
10. Remember: Marriage is the number one cause of divorce.
11. I married Miss Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.
12. I haven’t spoken to my wife in 18 months. I don’t like to interrupt her.
Like gamblers, baseball fans and television networks, fishermen are enamoured of statistics. The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers, the disciples of Jesus, couldn’t resist backing up their yarns with arithmetic: when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not a ??boatload?? of fish, nor ??about a hundred and a half??, nor ??over a gross??, but precisely ??an hundred and fifty three??. This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that in the net there were ??great fishes?? numbering precisely ??an hundred and fifty and three??. How was this digit discovered? Mustn??t it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting ??one, two, three, four, five, six, seven??? all the way up to an hundred and fifty three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman??s compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics.
The River Why
by David James Duncan
Chapter 3a: Concerning Statistics
