Caught up in the onrush of technology, ever conversing virtually, one suddenly finds oneself age 70 with little meaningful to show for it.
Observatory: Rats Have Empathy, Study Finds — NY Times
A new study in the journal Science has found that rats can be helpful — the first instance that such behavior has been documented in rodents. . .
Jennifer L. Scott arrived in France as a California girl, but she returned home as a Parisienne. . .
One nice thing about yoga is that you don’t have to stretch beforehand.
Macaulay Culkin reprises his role in the remake of Home Alone.
“Modern life is about having to foresee everything: take zero risks, and live from your cradle to your grave. But there’s nothing worse than that. . . Even though man wants to absolutely know what tomorrow will be made of, the excitement of life is from not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Tomorrow is another day. That’s all. . . something different. Something will happen, must happen. Otherwise, it’s going to be dull. Life can only be made of unpredictable things.”
—Robert Maloubier, agent in Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, swashbuckler, special ops trainer, bush pilot, businessman, unretired retiree
“Let us not forget that culture and language were the first virtual realities. A child is born into a world of unspeakable wonder. Each part of the world is seen to glow with animate mystery and the beckoning light of the unknown. But quickly our parents and our siblings provide us with words. At first these are nouns; that shimmering pattern of sound and iridescence is a ‘bird,’ that cool, silky, undulating surface is ‘water.’ As young children we respond to our cultural programming and quickly replace mysterious things and feelings with culturally validated and familiar words. We tile over reality with a mosaic of interconnected words. Later, as we grow in ability and understanding, the culture in which we find ourselves provides conventionalized relationships for us to model. Lover, father, investor, property owner. Each role has its own rules and its own conventions. These roles, too, tile over and replace the amorphous wonder of simply being alive. As we learn our lines and blocking that goes with them, we move out of the inchoate realm of the preverbal child and into the realm of the first virtual reality, the VR of culture. Many of us never realize that this domain is virtual, and instead we assume that we are discovering the true nature of the real world.”
— Terence McKenna, in The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
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