Good Riddance Annus Horribilis

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time. —Jean Paul Richter

Happy New Year's Eve Weekend

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to. —P. J. ORourke
Nothing is worth more than this day. —Goethe

My New Charlie Rose Blog

I've finally done it. So that I may cease foisting my Charlie Rose obsession on my regular readers, I've constructed my CHARLIE ROSE BLOG. The advantage to this blog is it looks cooler than charlie's show site, yet contains all the links to said site and boards. This new blog is a good bookmark for Charliemaniacs. (& Ricky Martin exposed at Streaming)

Minutemen: Securing America's Northern Borders, One Undocumented Alien at a Time

Caption thanks to Andy from The Last Debate

Decisive Victory in 'War on Christmas'

The "War on Christmas" ended over a century ago... and Christmas won. I love spending Christmas curled up by the fire with a fat stack of Supreme Court decisions. Did you know: the "unscriptural" observance of Christmas in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was punishable by a fine? The fathers of the colonies condemned Christmas as "Popery". It took a long time for this yuletide inanity to take hold here in the new world—read a brief history of Christmas in America... to the fathers of our great country Christmas truly was: Humbug.

Stream Of Christmasness

Noel Holly Stockings Merry Yule Candles Fruitcake Tidings Tradition Holiday Snow Greetings Eggnog Bells Poinsettia Gold Icicle Cranberry Chimney Jolly Plum Ribbon Cupid Gloria Dasher Ivy Prancer Cedar Sleigh Tinsel

A Very Harry Christmas

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. —Henry Louis Mencken
I'm finishing the last of my three Mencken tomes, and I added another box of bulbs to my fiber-optic tree (Humbug). Tonight I attended the last of the Great Composers lecture series— Lennie Bernstein— wow, fascinating faggot. How do people live without lectures? The Art Institute has a promising schedule for January.

"Kneel Before Zod!"

Wait... that's not Zod, Non, & Ursa... it's Francisco, Ragnar, & Dagny!!! (okay, I know, I'm really pushing it, I'll try to stop... soon) This year's cover is Richest, Rich, and Richest's Bitch. I'm a huge fan of U2's tunes, and I'm using Bill's product to post this... but what did Melinda do? Oh yeah, she slept with Bill... so yes, she earned it. Got a funny caption? ... add it to comments....

My Sanctuary

My Heart, of course, remains in Bali, but my Mind and Soul reside here. What would I do without this— my sanctuary?
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. —Barbara Tuchman
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it - the life of that man is one long sin against mankind. —W. K. Clifford
The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts. —René Descartes

A Daily Dose of Ayn Until I'm Settled

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. – A. Rand

On That Freedom

Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else. Tell me then, you men, do you wish to live in error? We do not. No one who lives in error is free. Do you wish to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in tension? By no means. No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude. - Epictetus

Yes, I'm out... and Unspeakable gratitude to those of you who sent books: Breakfast at Tiffany's (thanks Michael G in the Big Schmapple), Learn Indonesian (nice refresher), The Glass Bead Game, To Kill a Mockingbird, 100 Years of Solitude (OMG, wow, Michael G), Merchant of Venice (Folger edition, nice), The Children of Men, Gertrude, All Quiet on the Western Front, Angela's Ashes (NYC MG again!), The Sound and the Fury, Turgenev-Short Stories (thanks Yale Mark xo), Walden (OMG, so dangerous to read in jail), and Civil Disobedience, Jane Eyre (of course), Love in the Time of Cholera (holy God thnx), Notes from Underground (Fyodor, ugh), Crime and Punishment (touche!, ugh, enough of this lunatic Russian though), Widow For One Year, Setting Free the Bears, David Copperfield (of course JM), 1779 (oh yeah!, xo), Dream of the Ridiculous Man (okay Yale Mark, stop with the Doestoyevsky ;)), Mencken's 35 Years of Newspaper Work (heaven), Mencken's Chrestomathy (FL!), Pinker's How the Mind Works (wow), The Life of Birds (okay, why not), 2005 Almanac (hallelujah), The Elegant Universe (thnx Doc), Just Six Numbers, World at Arms, Atlas Shrugged (okay Yale Mark - you are a god - and I forgive you for Fyodor), History of India, Masterplots, Sup Ct. Decisions, Dictionary of Popes (huh?), The Last Three Minutes, Holidays in Hell (hilarious - xo JF), Heloise & Abelard, Wuthering Heights (Modern Library ed.), Classical Myth & Religion (thnx MS), Random House Word Menu (thnx Car), Heathen Days, Happy Days (both Mencken - thnx jules - xo), Herod (thnx KP), Benedict Arnold (xo MRT), His Excellency George Washington (thnx CL), Mark Twain (xo Christopher), and the countless letters. I fucking love you bibliophiles. xoxoxox