Overheard on the Way to the Mensa Meeting

Man walking shaggy dog: Is that a whippet?

Dan: Yeah.

Man: They look like small greyhounds.

Overheard by: Albert Weinstein

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From skid row to riches to an early grave

From Susan.

Me Gusta

Jay goes Spanglish.

Another good new one here.

Brothers in Arms?

It happened again the other evening.

Out with the dogs, we encountered a couple doing the same. They live up the block, but we'd never met them before. The man was easy on the eyes -- and very chatty.

"Are you brothers?" he asked.

"Partners," said Dan.

"Oh, partners," said the guy, then launching into a rapid monologue about how great gay people are and how it's all cool. "But you look just like each other. Same haircut, even."

This led to a more novel query: "Are you military?"

"No," Dan replied. "Are you?"

He's in the Navy, which he informed us is chock full o' gays, and that's A-OK with him.

'Crippled for Life'

Danger Around Every Corner

Source

Just My Type

A kindred spirit, albeit better natured and more ambitious:

A Man, A Plan And A Sharpie: 'The Great Typo Hunt'

From Peggy.

Tony Judt, 1948-2010

Poverty is an abstraction, even for the poor. But the symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid, and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it. And yet something is seriously amiss. Even as the US budgets tens of billions of dollars on a futile military campaign in Afghanistan, we fret nervously at the implications of any increase in public spending on social services or infrastructure.

From Ill Fares the Land

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

From "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?"

Obituary here; more writings here.

Greetings From Gnashville

"Contrary to what you may have heard,
opossums are susceptible to gingivitis."

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