Quote of the Day

The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

- Germain G. Glidden

In the Background

The Ultimate Techie Lawyer

Lawyer. Poet. Husband. Father. Techie. Owner of Parrots.

FutureLawyer points to an interview in which he relates, among other things, his first day in boot camp and the priceless words of a drill sergeant.

Happy Birthday!

This is a back-channel message to Doris, an Old Trout.

Recovery

Major dental work this morning. The Novocaine is wearing off.

Lent

Cultural Offering is adding things for Lent.

A sound practice.

Nokia's Dumbphone

In The Atlantic: Ian Bogost examines whether Nokia may have the antidote to the smartphone.

Sounds smart to me.

Alert the FutureLawyer!

First Paragraph

Take a man with a nice face and sad eyes, fifty or more winters on his back, living a moderately pleasant life in a tranquil country. He is a bookish fellow, the sort you would expect to find in a good publishing house or at a local university teaching how to compare one literature with another. He might even be a literary agent with a flair for dissident writing: texts bearing witness against oppression and inhumanity. Sometimes, in the evening, he reads Latin classics. There is no question anymore of his being able to do a version. He learned Latin in great globs to pass whatever examination happened to be blocking his path, always in the very nick of time; his knowledge was never precise. Fortunately, the power to grasp meaning and to remember has remained. He reveres the Aeneid. That is where he first found civil expression for his own shame at being alive, his skin intact and virgin of tattoo, when his kinsmen and almost all the others, so many surely more deserving than he, perished in the conflagration.

- From Wartime Lies by Louis Begley

Too Often

Too often, we are autocrats when we should seek the opinions of others and then we are pliable when we should be strictly executing the elements of a plan.

Too often, we withdraw from society when faced with pressing questions and yet that is precisely the moment when we need to engage with others and benefit from their perspectives.

Too often, we turn perfection from a worthy goal into a paralyzing potion.

Too often, we spend massive amounts of time wondering what the world is doing to us when those hours would be better spent considering what we are doing to ourselves.

Problems are often accompanied by "too often."

Quote of the Day

None but a good person is really a living one, and the more good any person does, the more he or she really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs with it.

- Cotton Mather