February 5, 2009 - The Caribou - Homewood Illinois

Twelve degrees this morning with a wind out of the south at 4mph. The humidity is 65%. The high today is expected to be 29°. Ila dropped me off again at the Bou on her way again to work stocking Hallmark cards at Wallgreens. Iggy was running around as if he had hit the catnip again. Iggy are Wriggly were playing together, a highly unusual circumstance – running is circles through the dining room, the living room, the kitchen and back into the dining area where we sit. Jerry does not like cats and the cat is too dumb to stay out of his way and picks the most inopportune moment to jump up on the counter. It’s Joe’s cat or it would have been booted out the door. What we will put up with for the sake of the kids even if they have grown up and left home for good.

That the universe is a totality does not deter useful concepts from being constructed using a totalizing universal metaphor

Our pre-immense: we live in an age of comparison, we can verify as has never been verified before [therefore] we enjoy differently, we suffer differently, our instinctive activity is to compare an unheard number of things – Friedrich Nietzsche

The Goloshes of Fortune
by
Hans Christian Andersen
(1838)

I must tell you,” said she [Fortune], “that to-day is my birthday; and in honor of it I have been intrusted with a pair of goloshes, to introduce amongst mankind. These goloshes have the property of making every one who puts them on imagine himself in any place he wishes, or that he exists at any period. Every wish is fulfilled at the moment it is expressed, so that for once mankind have the chance of being happy.”

“No,” replied Care; “you may depend upon it that whoever puts on those goloshes will be very unhappy, and bless the moment in which he can get rid of them.”

“What are you thinking of?” replied the other. “Now see; I will place them by the door; some one will take them instead of his own, and he will be the happy man.”

This was the end of their conversation.
Being against what someone else is for is a form of acquiescence as it lets the other control the agenda

At this moment he wished he were a man without qualities. But it is probably not so very much different for anyone. Few people in mid-life really know how they got to be what they are…, but they have the feeling that from this point on nothing much can change – Robert Musil

Silence is not the absence of sound
But the absence of significance
And all things meaning everything
Is a form of quietude

In the beginning there was nothing
And in the end there was silence

Factoids:
·12% of American women and 34% of men do not wash their hands after using public restrooms
·Fewer than 50% of health care workers regularly wash their hands while on the job
·A sampling of New York doctors’ ties found staph bacteria on a third of them