Fastball

Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

-- August Wilson (1945-2005), American playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner, "Fences", Act I, scene 1, character Troy Maxson, a former Negro League slugger

DF

Paranoiac In Reverse

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

-- J. D. Salinger (1 January 1919 - 27 January 2010), American author, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)

RIP Howard Zinn

If those in charge of our society -- politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television -- can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

-- Howard Zinn (24 August 1924 - 27 January 2010), American historian, political scientist, playwright and activist, Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991): "American Ideology"

Quake

I'm still looking to understand the magnitude of the event.

-- Haitian President Rene Preval, 14 January 2010, on the 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti

RIP Mary Travers

The longer I live the more I find that people seldom take the time
To really get to know a stranger and make him a friend.
But the power of a simple song can make everybody feel they belong.
Maybe singin' and playin' can bring us together again.
Singin' and playin' can bring us together again.

That music speaks louder than words

-- Mary Travers (9 November 1936 - 16 September
2009), of Peter, Paul, and Mary, lyric to Music
Speaks Louder Than Words

RIP Ted Kennedy

We are all Americans. This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I've seen it. I've lived it.

-- Edward Moore (Ted) Kennedy (22 February 1932 - 25 August 2009), US Senator (D-MA) from November 1962 until his death, speaking in August 2008

RIP Les Paul

It has to be said, we must all own up that without Les Paul, generations of flash little punks like us would be in jail or cleaning toilets. This man, by his genius, made the road that we still travel today. I don't know how he did it, but I'm so grateful he did.

-- Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards

RIP Walter Cronkite

This is my last broadcast as the anchorman of The CBS Evening News; for me, it's a moment for which I long have planned, but which, nevertheless, comes with some sadness. For almost 2 decades, after all, we've been meeting like this in the evenings, and I'll miss that. But those who have made anything of this departure, I'm afraid have made too much. This is but a transition, a passing of the baton .... Furthermore, I'm not even going away! I'll be back from time to time with special news reports and documentaries, and, beginning in June, every week, with our science program, Universe. Old anchormen, you see, don't fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that's the way it is: Friday, March 6, 1981.

-- Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. (4 November 1916 - 17 July 2009), American broadcast journalist, anchorman for The CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962 - 1981)

No Cure

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

-- George Santayana (1863-1952), philosopher, essayist, and poet, Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines"

Here, Have Some Flu

For the first couple of days this week, the national & local TV news reports did their best to beat the drum of panic regarding "swine flu".

Yesterday, that changed. They started discussing simple, rather than draconian, measures to avoid contracting flu. On both the national news (NBC) and the local news (NBC affiliate) the reporters ate pork on-air, and explained that pork is not a vector for transmission of what they now call "H1N1 influenza". Gotta protect those pork producers. They pointed out that only a fraction of people get the flu, and only a tiny fraction among those get a serious case, with a fraction of those dying.

And they (finally) pointed out that, in an average year, 36,000 Americans die of the flu, with 13,000 fatalities so far in 2009 (>100 per day) from "seasonal flu". That's something on the order of a 12% infection rate and a 0.1% kill rate (among the infected) for seasonal flu.

The big unanswered question for H1N1 is, what's the kill rate? Apparently it's higher ... but they're unsure how high, because so many cases are so mild that they go unreported. We're also entering into summer, which allegedly helps reduce the severity of a flu outbreak. If it kills only a few thousand Americans, its impact may be lost in the noise of average flu fatalities. But because they/we are paying attention to it, it'll come off as a really big deal. Imagine the headlines if we have a month of H1N1 flu with an average of >100 fatalities per day!

I'm not convinced.

Ebert v. Columbine

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about Basketball Diaries?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

-- Roger Ebert, in his review of the movie "Elephant", November 7, 2003

False Situations

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

-- Thornton Wilder (17 April 1897 - 7 December 1975), three-time Pulitzer Award-winning American playwright and novelist

Killer Economy

For over 30 years, Dr. Harvey Brenner, a sociologist and public health expert at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Texas Health Science Center, has been carefully studying the link between economic fluctuations and the nation's physical and mental health. Based on the experience of the last half century, he has even estimated how many more deaths, suicides, heart attacks, homicides, and admissions to mental hospitals we can expect when unemployment rises.

After crunching the numbers, Brenner calculated that for every one percent increase in the unemployment rate (an additional 1.5 million people out of work), we can expect an additional 47,000 deaths, including 26,000 deaths from heart attacks, about 1,200 from suicide, 831 murders, and 635 deaths related to alcohol consumption.

-- Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College, "This Economy is a Real Killer," Huffington Post, 10 March 2009

Weekend Planning

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

-- Louise Lague, psychoblogger

Relish The Joys

There is nothing like a cancer bout to make one relish the joys of being alive.

-- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on her return to the bench following cancer treatment, 23 February 2009

Life Was About To Begin

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles WERE my life.

-- Father Alfred D'Souza

RIP Studs Terkel

My epitaph, I hope, will be, "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

-- Louis "Studs" Terkel (16 May 1912 - 31 October 2008), American author, historian, radio personality, and actor, 1999 National Public Radio interview

RIP Michael Crichton

We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us hold these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion.

-- Dr. John Michael Crichton (23 October 1942 - 4 November 2008), American author, film & TV producer, "Mediasaurus: The decline of conventional media" - Speech at the National Press Club, Washington D.C. (7 April 1993)

The Other Attitude

I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me.

-- Paul Leonard Newman (1925-01-26 - 2008-09-26), American actor and film director, founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all profits and royalties to charity, in "Paul Newman's Road To Glory", interview with Paul Fischer, Film Monthly, 1 July 2002

RIP Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within the power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008), Russian novelist, dramatist and historian

RIP Bozo The Clown

We didn't have satellite, syndication and networking like today. So, I created my own network of local clowns and productions, a cross-country operation that kept me on the road for 50 weeks a year for decades.

-- Lawrence Weiss (2 January 1925 - 3 July 2008), American entertainer better known by the stage names Larry Harmon and Bozo the Clown, on training 200 actors to portray the clown for local TV stations and other programs franchised around the country

Jesse Helms Exit

I've been portrayed as a caveman by some. That's not true. I'm a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they Slants, Beaners, or Niggers.

-- Jesse Alexander Helms (18 October 1921 - 4 July 2008) 5-term U.S. Senator (R-NC), North Carolina Progressive, February 6, 1985

Violence

Victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. ... [W]hen you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color, or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who are different from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies. Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great. But we can perhaps remember, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life, that they seek as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness. Surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common roles can begin to teach us something, that we can begin to work a little harder, to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

-- Robert Francis Kennedy (20 November 1925 - 6 June 1968), American politician, "On the Mindless Menace of Violence", speech, City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, 5 April 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated

RIP Utah Phillips

It takes a long time just to plain shut up and listen.

-- Bruce "Utah" Phillips (May 15, 1935 - May 23, 2008), labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet, and self-described "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest", 2004 Democracy Now interview, on the difficulty of learning the lessons of life

RIP Albert Hofmann

Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child.

-- Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 - 29 April 2008), Swiss scientist best known for first synthesizing Lysergic acid diethylamide, "LSD: My Problem Child" (1980) Foreword

RIP Charlton Heston

Take your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty ape!

-- Charlton Heston (4 October 1923 - 5 April, 2008) as astronaut Colonel George Taylor in "Planet of the Apes" (1968)

Sane And Happy

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.

-- Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008), British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, "3001: The Final Odyssey" (1997)

RIP William F. Buckley, Jr.

I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven't just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.

-- William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 - February 27, 2008), American author and conservative commentator

Disturbed

Rule #1: Disturbed and/or violent individuals will continue to risk their own lives in ways that risk public lives, sometimes many more than we expect.

Rule #2: People cannot change Rule #1.

All we can do is mitigate the effects as much as we can.

-- Comment at http://www.schneier.com/blog/, by clvrmnky, February 20, 2008 08:29 AM

Crash And Die

You might do it well one time and try another time and crash and die.

-- Looc Jean-Albert, of France, better known as Flying Dude, on jumping from planes without a parachute, New York Times, 10 December 2007

RIP Bobby Fischer

I play honestly and I play to win. If I lose, I take my medicine.

-- Robert James (Bobby) Fischer, (3 March 1943 - 17 January 2008), American chess player, World Chess Champion 1972-1975

RIP Hillary

Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

-- Sir Edmund Hillary (20 July 1919 - 10 January 2008), New Zealand mountaineer and explorer, in "Wise Guys : Brilliant Thoughts and Big Talk from Real Men" (2005) by Allan Zullo, p. 5

JJ

At 4:32 PM yesterday my number one daughter Tia gave birth to my second grandchild. Joseph Allen Schum Junior weighed in on arrival at 7 pounds 3 ounces, and 18.5 inches long.

Diary

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

-- J. M. Barrie

It Takes An Instant

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

-- Voltaire

RIP Benazir Bhutto

I put my life in danger and came here because I feel this country is in danger. People are worried. We will bring the country out of this crisis.

-- Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 - 27 December 2007), Pakistani politician, first woman elected to lead a Muslim state, at a rally in Rawalpindi minutes before her assassination

The Most Useful Gift

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Half Time

In the game of life, nothing is less important than the score at half time.

-- anonymous

RIP Norman Mailer

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more, or retreating into less. One is always living a little more, or dying a little bit.

-- Norman Mailer (31 January 1923 - 10 November 2007) American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director, in "Hip, Hell, and the Navigator", Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959)

Not Necessarily True

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

-- Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

The Devil's post -- entry number 666

Marcel Marceau

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

-- Marcel Marceau (March 22, 1923 - September 22, 2007) The Reader's Digest (June 1958)

Finish?

Well, that was an exciting finish.

-- Steve Fossett, millionaire adventurer, reported missing Monday 3 September, 2007

The Chain Of Change

And, oh! what beautiful years were these
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.

-- Langdon Smith

Crying And Rejoicing

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.

-- Cherokee proverb

Saiya

At 6:27 AM today my number two daughter Sheena gave birth to my first grandchild. Saiya Marie Schwartz weighed in on arrival at 8 pounds 6 ounces, and 20 inches long.

Life, Love, And Death

Life is eternal; and love is immortal;
And death is only a horizon;
And a horizon is nothing
Save the limit of our sight.

-- Rossiter Worthington Raymond

RIP Deb Zoller-Fisher

I was working at Chanute AFB near Rantoul, IL, and I dropped DZD a pnote commenting on the heavy system load (something like 900 on-system, on the way to a peak around 1200 users). Her reply ...?

* zoller-dykema / o / cerl  8/21/80  7:50 am *

        munch a bunch a crunch a bunch a munch a bunch a
                USERS!

Our Death Is Not An End

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

-- Albert Einstein