As the world turns

Well -- well, the world must turn upon its axis,
   And all of mankind turn with it, heads or tails,
And live and die, make love and pay our taxes...

    From "Don Juan' by Lord Byron 

Remember

Remember
that you have only one soul;
that you have only one death to die;
that you have only one life,
which is short and has to be lived by you alone;
and there is only one Glory, which is eternal.
If you do this,
there will be many things
about which you care nothing.

    Saint Teresa of Ávila, The Complete works of Saint Teresa of Jesus Volume III

 

 

 

Poem: The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska

Too bad you weren’t here six months ago,
was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska.
You could have seen the astonishing spectacle
of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them
feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River.

There was no point in pointing out
the impossibility of my being there then
because I happened to be somewhere else,
so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment
if only to be part of the commiseration.

It was the same look I remember wearing
about six months ago in Georgia
when I was told that I had just missed
the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas,
brilliant against the green backdrop of spring

and the same in Vermont six months before that
when I arrived shortly after
the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked,
Mother Nature, as she is called,
having touched the hills with her many-colored brush,

a phenomenon that occurs, like the others,
around the same time every year when I am apparently off
in another state, stuck in a motel lobby
with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee,
busily missing God knows what.

                                Billy Collins

The rabbit hole of measurements

From a list of humorous units of measurement on Wikipedia

Helen (beauty)
Helen of Troy (from the Iliad) is widely known as the face that launched a thousand ships.
Thus, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship.
Other derived units such as the negative helen (the power to beach ships) have also been described.

Bee's dick
An Australian term for a very small distance, as in,
"He missed crashing into the truck by a bee’s dick."
It is derived from the presumed small size of a male bee's penis. 

Lots more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement

 

Fascinating

People are much more fascinated by your interests
        than they are by your opinions.

            Arlene Francis, That Certain Something: The Magic of Charm

 

 

 

 

 

Precious resources

Trust and integrity are precious resources,
        easily squandered, hard to regain.

                Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keep this in mind when you are stuck in traffic

People on horses look better than they are.
    People in cars look worse than they are.

            Marya Mannes, More in Anger