Thursday Thoughts
Ah, the Doctor is feeling giddy today! It's been a while. The world makes some semblance of sense again. A few brief notes:

RK: Thanks for the Shakie shirt. Got it yesterday. No Holes Bard, indeed. ;-)

Anne: Another lovely chat today. For everyone else, we were having one of those 'drunken' arguments, wherein we were saying things at *exactly* the same time over and over again, not just in terms of general responses, but in terms of specific cultural references and so forth. Hilarious, as always, kiddo. I still think you should lead the charge in a new feminist revolution that would address the inconsistencies and inanities of the current, already deeply-fractured (and increasingly self-defeating) movement. In the words of Betty Friedan, "Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves." And this one's for you....

Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
--- As Good As It Gets

And this one is from Groucho Marx: "Women should be obscene and not heard." LOL. Somehow, Anne, the one thing you could never be is "not heard" (but obscene, definitely). ;-) We really need a few drinks next time you're in the area, kiddo.

*Shakes head*: Apparently the ditz on Fox's Good Day Live-- a horrible, horrible excuse for a talk show-- went to Mohawk College. I find this profoundly disturbing but eminently chuckleworthy.

RP is looking for plays (theatrical pieces, that is) circa 1980 or later about addiction, but found myself only able to come up with a few odd suggestions. Any ideas, anyone? I don't know if she checks this site, but if she doens't I'll glady pass on any ideas to her.

This is interesting: we knew someone had to do it sooner or later, writing a treatise "On Bullshit." Long, exhaustive, and debatable in places-- but intriguing nonetheless. It figures, though, that it ends with a very typical conclusion. In academic parlance, black inevitably becomes white, left inevitably becomes right, and so here, too. We can never have a word mean what it means: it has to mean its opposite as well.

RK: From Robert Frost: on "T.S. Eliot and I like to play games. I like to play euchre, and he likes to play Eucharist."

From James Joyce: "Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives." No kidding: it's the seventh circle of hell.

From Oscar Wilde: "The central problem in Hamlet is whether the critics are mad or only pretending to be mad."

From Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

Clive James: "Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts." He he he... right on....

And another classic: An unknown MP asked Winston Churchill, "Must you fall asleep while I'm speaking?" The reply: "No, it is purely voluntary."

Groucho Marx, again: "I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin." Ah, he may have been 'a male chauvinist piglet,' as Betty Friedan put it, but he was a thousand times wittier than Friedan ever will be.

Another wonderful one from Wilde, to be used often: "How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say." (Something to write on student essays, perhaps?)

And a personal fave from Carly Simon: "You're so vain, / You probably think this song is about you, / Don't you, don't you?"

I should stop writing on this silly thing.... Off to Mr Eliot and Mr Stevens....