Many paths up the mountain...

Deep...

No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.

~ Albert Einstein

Unhip, indeed...

To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip

~ Paul McCartney, 1969, heard in Get Back)

Be unstoppable!

Unless you stop yourself, there's no stopping yourself!

~ Paul McCartney (heard in the 2021 documentary Get Back)

Sir, yes Sir!

"Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can, and strike him as hard as you can. And keep moving on!"

~ Ulysses S. Grant

Agreed...

Let me clarify: it is my belief that when the going gets tough, when tempers flare, when it seems like every fiber of society is unraveling, courtesy should be held as an appropriate and commendable ideal.
This is especially true, in my opinion, when one is not getting one's way.

~Alton Brown

Whew, what a game!

When things look grim, be the Grim Reaper…

~ Coach Andy Reid, to Patrick Mahomes, with the Chiefs down by 3 and 13 seconds to go (2022 AFC semi-final championship game, Jan 23, 2022)

Note: Patrick drove the Chiefs down to field goal range. The Chiefs tied the game to end regulation, and then went on to win the game in overtime against the Buffalo Bills

Yikes!

I think they’ve taken us back to cave man time, where you would walk around with a club. “I want what you have.”

You’re not even safe to walk around and go to the train station, because somebody might throw you off the train, OK? It’s a regression.

~ From a January 20, 2022 NYT Article, How 14 Independent Voters Feel About America

I try to not be political on this blog, but..."Ooof!"

"The increasingly casual habit of calling people racist when they disagree with a policy position is the stuff I’ve come to expect from Twitter, not a president who bills himself as a unifier.

And again, it’s political malpractice, at least if the aim is to do more than just sound off to impress the progressive base."

~ Bret (with one 't'!) Stephens, talking about President Biden in a January 17, 2022 opinion piece in the New York Times (!)

Barkis is willing

While reading an 1870 article by Frederick Douglass on southern newspapers' response to Robert E. Lee's death, I came across the phrase "Barkis is willing".

Being a good looker-upper when I'm not familiar with a word or phrase, I jumped onto the google, where I found this:

Barkis is willin'

A phrase emphasizing one's availability or openness to a situation. It refers to Mr. Barkis, a character in Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield, who used the phrase to express his interest in marriage.

This from David Copperfield:

‘Well. I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr. Barkis. ‘P’raps you might be writin’ to her?’

‘I shall certainly write to her,’ I rejoined.

‘Ah!’ he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. ‘Well! If you was writin’ to her, p’raps you’d recollect to say that Barkis was willin’; would you?’

‘That Barkis is willing,’ I repeated, innocently. ‘Is that all the message?’

‘Ye-es,’ he said, considering. ‘Ye-es. Barkis is willin’.’

‘But you will be at Blunderstone again tomorrow, Mr. Barkis,’ I said, faltering a little at the idea of my being far away from it then, 'and could give your own message so much better.’

As he repudiated this suggestion, however, with a jerk of his head, and once more confirmed his previous request by saying, with profound gravity, ‘Barkis is willin’.
That’s the message,’ I readily undertook its transmission.

While I was waiting for the coach in the hotel at Yarmouth that very afternoon, I procured a sheet of paper and an inkstand, and wrote a note to Peggotty, which ran thus: ‘My dear Peggotty. I have come here safe. Barkis is willing. My love to mama. Yours affectionately. P.S. He says he particularly wants you to know – BARKIS IS WILLING.’

...and three for the dealer.

You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt.
You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you are holding.

~ Cheryl Strayed

The Perfect Joke

From Rodney Dangerfield:

“I was making love with my wife, and she had a faraway look in her eyes, and I said, ‘Darling, is there someone else?’ and she said, ‘There must be.' "

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

From the Wikipedia:

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes-no questions.

Ohhhh, I know somebody who badly needs this advice...

Surround yourself with people who are better than you. You are going to move in the direction of the people you associate with.

~ Warren Buffet

Ouch

Not everybody can be John or Paul.
Some people have to be Ringo.

~ Stella Bak on The Morning Show

Wisdom on a chilly winter day

A single kind word can keep a body warm for years.

~ Fortune cookie, 1//2022

The more things change...

At the end, things were complicated.
But at the beginning, things were really quite simple.

~ Paul McCartney, on the Beatles

Okayyy...

Science was my most favorite subject, especially the Old Testament.

~ Kenneth, on 30 Rock

Tick, tock...

You've been waiting! All this time!
You've been waiting for the clock to run out!

~ Claire, to her husband, when he asked for a divorce, in Outlander

That's been my experience, too

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

~ Mark Twain

Paraphrasing John Lennon (incompletely)

You may say that I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not...

~ John Lennon

A lesson I’ve yet to learn…

1. You must let the pain visit.
2. You must allow it to teach you.
3. You must not allow it to overstay.

~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Eternal Truth...

And in the end,
the love you take
is equal to
the love your make.

~ Paul McCartney, the Beatles, the Abbey Road album

Yes. Yes, they do...

Everybody loves somebody sometime.

~ Dean Martin

Make your vote count, or else...

The forest was shrinking,

but the trees kept

voting for the axe.

For the axe was

clever and convinced

the trees that because his handle

was wood he was one of them.

~ West Asian Fable

Aren't we all?

(Pop is crying)

Son: What's the matter, Pop?

Pop (tearfully): I'm confused!

~ Moonstruck

Good advice with many potential applications

Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.

~ Attributed to Lenin, and a favorite saying of Richard Nixon

I agree. In theory...

For real people, if something works in theory, but not in practice, it doesn't work.

For academics, if something works in practice, but not in theory, it doesn't exist.

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Or shout him down...

When you cut out a man’s tongue, you do not prove him to be a liar, rather, you prove you fear what he might say.

~ George RR Martin

Agreed. But still...

Tis better to have loved and lost,
than never to have loved before.

~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

How, indeed...

How did you do it?
How did you endure four and twenty years of marriage without love?

~ Miss Thompson, Bridgerton

I don't get his point...

Not everything has a point.

~ Norm MacDonald

Good advice, regardless of the subject

Passion is good, but not when it interferes with your judgement.

~ Senator John Kennedy (Louisiana), when discussing climate change

Insight from the G.O.A.T.

The more good behaviors you have, the better things turn out.

It’s just, do people have the discipline to repeat those behaviors? That’s the tricky part.

~ Tom Brady, on discipline

But...but...that SCARES me!

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.

~ Paul Antreides, Dune

How many minutes will it take until I learn?

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it around.

~ David in Vanilla Sky

Or so I've heard...

If we can't finish it, we can't start it.
Not now...

~ Bobby Axelrod to Wendy, on Millions

When the debate is over, slander becomes the tool of the loser.

~ Socrates

Kobyashi Maru for today's age

In life, one must choose between boredom and suffering.

~ Madame de Staele

Now I'm the grandpa

My grandpa often said:

The train is leaving the station.

You can be on board, or you can wave as we pass by.

You decide.

Eternal wisdom

Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are.

~ Proverbs 26:4

Who needs to be in a coma to ask?

Who am I?
Where am I going?

~ Tony Soprano, while in a coma, in The Sopranos

I know the feeling

You do your job and you go cry alone.

~ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

This kind of makes me sad

Learn what the magician knows, and nothing is magic anymore.

~ Richard Bach

Every person, all the events in your life, are there because your have drawn them there.
What you choose to do with them is up to you.

~ Richard Bach

Finders keepers, losers weepers

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding the truth.

~ Ludwig Borne

Been there. Done that...

And I'm under no illusions that she could solve what ails me, but when I'm with her, the world just feels...
...more interesting.

~ Coach Beard, on Ted Lasso

Troubling, indeed

In all my happiest memories, I'm single.
That troubles me.

~ Coach Beard, in Ted Lasso

My new credo

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels
turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down.