THE JOHN WAYNE WALK

According to Bette Davis in BETTE DAVIS SPEAKS, John Wayne walked the way he did because he had one inch risers in his boots.


SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS WARS

Xmas Eve my wife and I went down to see "Syriana" and before that we looked for a place to eat, but we wandered and wandered the streets of our little Bethlehem and could not find an inn which would allow us to rest and eat. Seems everyone was too busy escaping work to be there for our little band to find warmth and shelter. Why this war against us Buddhists and atheists on this holiday of brotherhood amongst the Xtians? Why are we shut out from the inns? But at last we did find one, Fugazzi's, on that cold night and ate well and went to see a movie and, there you go, Hollywood was also there for us when all the Xtians had shut their doors against us. Why are these Christians making war against those of us who don't share their holiday?

I think we should respect their holiday, though. We should end it as being a national holiday, leave them alone to celebrate their days, to say Merry Christmas to one another without our being forced to respond in a way which they find inappropriate. If there were no Christmas holiday, there would be no pressure for anyone to find a correct way to speak. Among themselves, they could speak as they please. No stores would be having sales or trying to entice us all to buy gifts. No stores would have policies about how to greet shoppers, and, as I say, among themselves in their churches and in their homes, they could speak and pray as they please and they wouldn't have to be bothered with the rest of us, nor try to police the language the rest of us speak to speak to them.

Let's support the Xtians on this one and end Xmas as a national holiday. That should also de-commercialize their holiday too, and that would also increase their pleasure because the rest of us would have nothing to say about their holiday.


THE BLUE STATES TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN

This week (Oct. 10, 2005), US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, a center/right publication, featured health care and in an interesting chart they listed an "Honor Roll" of the best commercial, medicare and medicaid health care plans around the country. When I looked at it closely, I noted that if the blue/red split means anything, it means that if you live in a Republican red state, you probably aren't being offered the best health care plans. Here are the states and regions with premium health care plans:

Massachusetts (several), Maine, New Hampshire, NY (many), Rhode Island (two), Connecticut (two), Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Hawaii, Pennsylvania.

Where are the red states on the list? Where's the compassionate conservatism? Huh? You say, What?


MORE: WHERE GODS COME FROM

"Metaphors like those about celestial campfires or galactic backbones [early ideas about the stars and the Milky Way] were eventually replaced in most human cultures by another idea: The powerful beings in the sky were promoted to gods. They were given names and relatives, and special responsibilities for the cosmic services they were expected to perform. There was a god or goddess for every human concern. Gods ran Nature. Nothing could happen without their direct intervention. If they were happy, there was plenty of food, and humans were happy. But if something displeased the gods—and sometimes it took very little—the consequences were awesome: droughts, storms, wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics. The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry. But because the gods were capricious, you could not be sure what they would do. Nature was a mystery. It was hard to understand the world." ( Sagan's COSMOS, p. 173)

Around 540 BCE Hippocrates wrote: "Men think epilepsy divine merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would no end of divine things." (COSMOS, p. 179)
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"He was a wise man who invented God," —Plato

"Plato is a bore." —Nietzsche

But what, then, are we to make of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Man is a god in ruins."

"Religions change; beer and wine remain." —Hervey Allen

[Some of the above quotes are from Robert Byrne's THE 2548 BEST THINGS ANYBODY EVER SAID]