Barney and the Choir

Don Knotts' favorite episode of The Andy Griffith Show was described as this:

"Barney and the Choir," where no one can stop him from singing.

Second Wind Dreams

This organization is incredible. They fulfill seniors dreams, particularly people with little family, money, or support. You can volunteer to help fulfill a dream. The picture above is a couple on their dream date. My favorite dream belongs to a man from Jasper, Alabama. He dreams of visiting a puzzle factory.

Philippe Petit

He walked across the Twin Towers in 1974. It was illegal. He planned it for a very long time. He placed a cable in between the buildings and walked out in the middle of them.

According to a police officer, when Petit saw the rescue team, "he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire." Later on, Petit explained, "When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk."

It was all there waiting for him

It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday--but when?--he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there--somewhere--waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militarund Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography--that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of Ontario--which to no amount of subsequent correction of experience could ever fully erase. He realized now that this kind of hopeless but ineradicable conviction lay at the heart of his inability to let go...

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Zabar's

I rarely get to shop there, but their food is delicious. Like this chocolate babka.

Strike beards

Letterman looks distinguished, like he's a scientist who plays guitar in his free time. Conan's beard looks pretty cool too.

Movies I saw in 2007 that I would not recommend

Juno
Sweeney Todd

Movies I saw in 2007 that I would recommend

Sicko
Zodiac
Control
Superbad
Knocked Up
Rescue Dawn
I'm Not There
Eastern Promises
Darjeeling Limited
There Will Be Blood
No Country for Old Men
The Wind that Shakes the Barley
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

If you only read one post on this blog, please make it this one

Take, for example, the story of Tonio, in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger. Tonio's father was a substantial businessman, a major citizen in his hometown. Little Tonio, however, had an artistic temperament, so he moved to Munich and joined a group of literary people who felt themselves above the mere money earners and family men.

So here is Tonio between two poles: his father, who was a good father, responsible and all of that, but who never did the thing he wanted to in all his life - and, on the other hand, the one who leaves his hometown and becomes a critic of that kind of life. But Tonio found that he really loved these hometown people. And altohugh he thought himself a little superior in an intellectual way to them and could describe them with cutting words, his heart was nevertheless with them.

But when he left to live with the bohemians, he found that they were so disdainful of life that he couldn't stay with them, either. So he left them, and wrote a letter back to someone in the group, saying, "I admire those cold, proud beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise 'mankind'; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and humor."

Joseph Campbell

Meghan Ritchie appreciation post

I am grateful for our friendship. In this picture, I am looking toward our future as friends, and I am smiling.