a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Neil Gaiman

I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.[/b]

Nothing cultural [or historical] about that, is there?

Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.

Let’s file this one under, “I’ll let you be in mine if you’ll let me be in yours”.

Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.

Here it’s the equivalent of defining things.
Sort of.

Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.

Right, like telling him is all it takes.

Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. ‘The devil made me do it.’ I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives.

And, if they are nasty, brutish and short, it’s their own damn fault.

He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring because yesterday has brought it.

Think about it: Would that really work though?

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophers are just a bunch of wisdom nerds who never outgrew the childish phase of trying to comprehend the world we are thrust into.[/b]

I know what you’re thinking: What if that is really true?
Or, instead, am I the only one?

The first step towards accomplishing anything difficult is always the hardest: actually trying to accomplish it.

Either that or [the easiest] just insisting that you already have.

Ever wonder why there is something rather than nothing? It’s because God is an asshole.

Sure, that is one possible explanation.

A history of Metaphysics, everything is:
500 BC: Water
200: One
1700: God
1900: Matter
2017: Maybe it’s all, like, just a simulation dude…

Water?!

Rule # 34: If it exists there is porn in it.

Or, for some, there certainly ought to be.

There isn’t a single self proclaimed “nihilist” in history who has actually behaved as though they believed in nihilism in fact.

Let’s discuss how that should be.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as “Nothing Places,” in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist, the first was in the bedroom, by the foot of the bed, we marked it off with red tape on the carpet, and it was just large enough to stand in, it was a good place to disappear, we knew it was there but we never looked at it, it worked so well that we decided to create a Nothing Place in the living room, it seemed necessary, because there are times when one needs to disappear while in the living room, and sometimes one simply wants to disappear, we made this zone slightly larger so that one of us could lie down in it, it was a rule that you never would look at that rectangle of space, it didn’t exist, and when you were in it, neither did you, for a while that was enough, but only for a while.[/b]

That’s what we need here. A “Nothing Place” for the Kids.

What about guns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were angry, and if you were, they wouldn’t fire, even if you were a police officer?
What about skyscrapers made with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?

On the other hand, what about reality?

Don’t you find that strange? I can’t believe I never found it strange before. It’s like your name, how you don’t notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can’t help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life.

Clearly, some things are as strange as you need them to be. And other things aren’t.

Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive and thinking is killing me.

It’ll do that sometimes.

One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

Or submit the perfect post. And not believe in it.

I can’t even say ‘hair pie,’ I told him, unless I’m talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits…

I’m not thinking of that myself.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue.[/b]

He thought: Let’s not go there.

Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

You know, in theory.

I’m not the world’s greatest expert, but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue when J.K. Rowling insisted she wasn’t writing fantasy.

Not unlike, for example, Game Of Thrones. I still don’t get the appeal. Unless you’re a kid.

Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.

Okay, then what?

Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

I think I get it.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

He means the average American voter. Or, sure, maybe not.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik‏

If you believe that people change, ask your doctor why you’re not one of them.[/b]

Oh, she’s one of them alright.

You can only feel truly divine when you know that you’re someone’s personal demon.

Come on, be honest: Am I yours?

I could have happened to you. But you got lucky.

Or [of course]: You could have happened to me. But I got lucky.

[b]Russian Literature:

  1. Everything is very bad.
  2. Only 800 pages to find out why.
  3. Only 600 more pages to find out why it will be worse.[/b]

How much worse?
1] Trump
2] Putin
3] All the rest of them

I’m an open book book, you can ask me anything.
Can I read the title?
No.

Let alone understand it.

Bad writers are the ones with the most sublime literary taste since they hardly ever read the bullshit they’ve written.

Bad philosophers too. You know, if only that were true. Here, for example.

[b]Peter Matthiessen

Zen has been called the “religion before religion,” which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something “greater” than ourselves, something apart and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one’s own true nature is “a way to lead you to your long lost home.” To practice Zen means to realize one’s existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To “rest in the present” is a state of magical simplicity…out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one need not be a ‘Zen Buddhist’, which is only another idea to be discarded like ‘enlightenment,’ and like ‘the Buddha’ and like ‘God’.[/b]

[i]Sure, maybe. But it still comes down to this:

1] how ought “I” to live on this side of the grave?
2] what is to become of “I” on other side of it?

And, here, their guess is just as good as ours.[/i]

There’s an elegiac quality in watching American wilderness go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

Not counting Yellowstone of course. Unless it does.

Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center.

This [of course] will always only be is as deep as you need it to be. If you need it to be at all.

And as the wary dogs skirt past, we nod, grimace, and resume our paths to separate destinies and graves.

So, how deep do you need this to be?

You mean, Billy exclaimed at last, you mean…his voice rose high and clear…you mean – and he jumped to his feet, and standing there under the giant trees, pointed at himself, a small outraged boy named William Martin Quarrier, aged eight: You mean I just came crashing down into Ma’s under-pants?

My advice: Just say “yes” and hope for the best.

[b]In the book of Job, the Lord demands, Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the eart

I was there! Surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the ‘snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks’ of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe.[/b]

Clearly, one explanation for where religion ends and science begins. And, given miracles, it might even be true.

[b]Joseph Heller

They’re not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?
Who else will go?[/b]

Right, like they actually had a choice. If you know what I mean.

The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!

In other words, there’s not much you can’t put in perspective.

Under Colonel Korn’s rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did.

Let’s call them, say, the masses.

Why don’t you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.
Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees, Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. I guess you’ve heard that saying before.
Yes, I certainly have, mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.
Are you sure? Nately asked with sober confusion. It seems to make more sense my way.
No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.

Well, if I actually had any friends, sure, I’d ask them.

Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian’s lust; but she was willing to take his word for it.

Much like Harvey Weinstein’s lust today no doubt.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

Unless of course you succeed in failing. You know, if that’s what you set out to do.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Confucius[/b]

Or, sure, you can claim to be ignorant of nothing. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henri Bergson

Now that does sound familar.

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” David Hume

Objectively perhaps.

“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.” Voltaire

Not only that but they are everywhere. And, believe it or not, not just here. Or there.
[you know where]

“I am my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Though, for some, so are all the rest of us.

“You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am” Immanuel Kant

Categorically and imperatively as it were.

[b]Steven D. Levitt

If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don’t even know the right question.[/b]

Actually, there are two:
1] ought one to live?
2] and, if yes, how ought one to live?

Are people innately altruistic? is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated–for good or ill–if only you find the right levers.

You know, like dogs.

Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.

Fake facts in particular.

The takeaway here is simple but powerful: just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence".

No, really, Mr. Objectivist: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracrepidarianism

Goalkeepers jump left 57 percent of the time and right 41 percent—which means they stay in the center only 2 times out of 100. A leaping keeper may of course still stop a ball aimed at the center, but how often can that happen? If only you could see the data on all penalty kicks taken toward the center of the goal! Okay, we just happen to have that: a kick toward the center, as risky as it may appear, is seven percentage points more likely to succeed than a kick to the corner. Are you willing to take the chance?

Any goalkeepers here? Let us know what happens.

The more social science we learn, the more we realize that people, while treasuring their independence, are in fact drawn to herd behavior in almost every aspect of daily life.

In other words, Know Thyself.

Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.

Yeah, that’s still around.

[b]Stephanie Danler

There’s no word for it in English. Like tristesse, flâneur, or la douleur exquise, words full of gray. The French do ambiguity so much better than Americans. Our language relies on fixedness because that’s what the market demands. A commodity must always be identifiable.[/b]

Start here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ethics_of_Ambiguity
Then reconfigure this philosophy into a particular world: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_of_Others

You will see it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came. When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent. When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

I never saw it coming, that’s for sure. But [from what I can tell] most of you still don’t.

You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.

Let’s try to pin down why.

So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.

Not counting the ones in the supermarket that taste like soggy cardboard.

I didn’t know what a date was and I wasn’t an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn’t get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination.

After all, we are civilized now.

You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night?

Let’s ponder how Baby Jake might explain it.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.[/b]

Okay, okay, we won’t go there.

Criticism is a privilege that you earn — it shouldn’t be your opening move in an interaction.

What crap, right, Mr. Objectivist?

People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they are ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth.

Perhaps, but I’m sure the wealthy will take their chances.

We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over 50 times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categories we can make and the number of people we can truly love and the number of acquaintances we can truly know. We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma. All of these things are expressions of the peculiarities of the human mind and heart, a refutation of the notion that the way we function and communicate and process information is straightforward and transparent. It is not. It is messy and opaque.

Or something like that.

Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you’ll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time with each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids?

So, is this a “dumb question” or not?

…the futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it.

Let’s consider some actual examples.

[b]André Gide

The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good”.[/b]

Well, He is mysterious, right?

They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.

And fuck you if you don’t like it.
Where applicable of course.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.

The very things that separated me and distinguished me from other people were what mattered; the very things no one else would or could say, these were the things I had to say.

The perfect “general description” as it were.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death’s reach.

Sure, this works for some.

I prefer granting with a good grace what I know I shan’t be able to prevent.

Just don’t let them know that.

[b]so sad today

people just want you to be ok so you will shut the fuck up[/b]

I know that I do.

i’m an organ donor and it might be time

Go for it.

university of insomnia

Full scholarship.

[b]my daily affirmations:

  1. uh oh
  2. oh shit
  3. oh fuck
  4. hell no[/b]

[i]Or, on some days:

  1. uh oh!!
  2. oh shit!!
  3. oh fuck!!
  4. hell no!![/i]

by happy i mean moderately depressed

Doesn’t everyone?

breaking news: no one really knows why we exist

Let alone why we ought to.

[b]Roland Barthes

I have a disease; I see language.[/b]

If only all the way to the grave. Unless, of course, there’s more.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

And then the part [here] where words become swords.

The Eiffel Tower is not a usual spectacle; to enter the Tower, to scale it, to run around its courses, is, in a manner both more elementary and more profound, to accede to a view and to explore the interior of an object (though an openwork one), to transform the touristic rite into and adventure of sight and of the intelligence.

Or just take a selfie in front of it.

It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.

Recognizing of course that it works much the same the other way around.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Unless perhaps you are doing it wrong.

My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time.

Right, like that actually matters to anyone.

[b]Charles Seife

Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and
yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science
and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and
infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy,
of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a
zero – and an infinity.[/b]

There is zero chance that anyone really understands this more than everyone else.

If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it.

For example, this thread has 267,751 views. And, over at KT, the Chimp Talk thread has 23,884 views.

We tend to shy away from data that challenges our assumptions, that erodes our preconceptions. Getting rid of our wrong ideas is a painful and difficult process, yet it’s that very process that makes data truly useful. A fact becomes information when it challenges our assumptions. These challenges are the raw material that forces our ideas to evolve, our tastes to change, our minds to grow.

Not their data though.

[b]There are many ways to generate numerical falsehoods from data, many ways to create proofiness from even valid meaurements. Causuistry distorts the relationships between two sets of numbers. Randumbness creates patterns where none are to be found. Regression to the moon disguises nonsense in mathematical-looking lines or equations or formulae, making even the silliest ideas seem respectable. Such as the one described by this formula: Callipygianness=(S+C)x(B+F)/T-V)
Where S is shape, C is circularity, B is bounciness, F ir firmness, T is texture, and V is waist-to-hip ratio. This formula was devised by a team of academic psychologists after many hours of serious research into the female derriere. Yes, indeed. This is supposed to be the formula for the perfect butt.

It fact, it’s merely a formula for a perfect ass.[/b]

Anyone know the formula for the perfect penis?

See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.

Nope, didn’t feel it was necessary.

The Mayan system made more sense than the Western system does. Since the Western calendar was created at a time when there was no zero, we never see a day zero, or a year zero. This apparently insignificant omission caused a great deal of trouble; it kindled the controversy over the start of the millenium. The Mayans would never have argued about whether 2000 or 2001 was the first year in the twenty-first century. But it was not the Mayans who formed our calendar; it was the Egyptians and, later, the Romans. For this reason, we are stuck with a troublesome, zero-free calendar.

Wow, it’s a miracle we’re still around at all.

[b]Mary Roach

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.[/b]

Not that it explains much.

Please beware, came his reply, There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don’t have an explanation for something, it’s quantum mechanics.

And that’s practically God.

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance, and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that’s not accurate. People object. They object a lot.

So, is there a rendition of this for shit?

I like the term “decedent.” It’s as though the man weren’t dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.

With the Devil maybe.

For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. “Don’t say stiff, corpse, cadaver,” scolds The Principles and Practice of Embalming. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don’t say ‘keep.’ Say ‘maintain preservation.’…"Wrinkles are “acquired facial markings.” Decomposed brain that filters down through a damaged skull and bubbles out the nose is "frothy purge.”

Frothy purge? They can’t do better than that?

Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.

Sounds like something Satyr might make use of.

[b]God

I’m God, I know all your thoughts and prayers, and pretty much none of them are with Somalia.[/b]

Go ahead, Google it.

I’ve run out of special places in hell.

Does Satan know that?

This is all really happening, by the way.

With or without Him no doubt.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, and here we are.

Amen?

Just because a lot of people on the other side are total assholes doesn’t mean a lot of people on your side aren’t also total assholes.

That settles it then.

Most terrorists are white. Me, for example.

If only back in His fire and brimstone days.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.[/b]

We know what that means.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope in the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.

So they keep telling me.

I was in those days all about the ‘fuck you’. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am.

So, how great were you?

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse — there is more than one reading. The story won’t stop, can’t stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention.

Autonomically as it were.

In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.

We’ll need a few examples of course.

Book collecting is an obsession, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

In other words, there’s gene for it.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

A Schopenhauer t-shirt sends a message that
a) life is pure suffering
b) time is a tyrant with a whip
c) they were out of Kierkegaard shirts[/b]

C right?

Lenin: What is to be done?
Sartre: Nothing
Camus: Less than nothing
Schopenhauer: Infinitely less than nothing
Beckett: You naive optimists!

I wonder what they’re all doing now?

[b]Monday To-Do List

  1. Pretend that the radical contingency of existence has not left me in the grips of abject terror and despair
  2. Buy milk[/b]

Or, sure, put it all off until Tuesday.

Philosophy 101: Nietzsche explained everything
Philosophy 201: Derrida explained everything
Philosophy 301: Wikipedia explains everything

Philosophy 401: Know Thyself explains everything to ILP.

Your philosopher name is your name - your name + Spinoza.

He means + Nietzsche of course.

Philosophical Growth
18: I’m the next Nietzsche!
24: I’m the next Deleuze!
30: I’m next in line for the Taylor Swift tickets!

Let’s debunk this.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Last week he tried to commit suicide, one waiter said.
Why?
He was in despair.
What about?
Nothing.
How do you know it was nothing.
He has plenty of money.[/b]

There are other reasons though.

For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her.

Or is that as it should be?

It’s this way, see—when a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn’t get any; then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and finally, if the writer’s any good, he doesn’t get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.

Fortunately, I was never a good writer myself. Perhaps even unfortunately.

Creation’s probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.

Indeed. But you can’t help but wonder how the Lord might respond.

Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I’ll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.

Just short of actually beaming Him.

Everything kills everything else in some way.

Or another.