December 13, 2005 - 6:24 p.m.

MISC (Clear my mind for Christmas!) tis a friendly season.

   Fairytale of New York

   It was Christmas Eve babe
   In the drunk tank
   An old man said to me 
   Won't see another one

   And then he sang a song
   The Rare Old Mountain Dew
   I turned my face away
   And dreamed about you


      Got on a lucky one
      Came in eighteen to one
      I've got a feeling
      This year's for me and you

      So happy Christmas
      I love you baby
      I can see a better time
      When all our dreams come true 


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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mikhailovich_Prokudin-Gorskii
1915, colour photographs of central asia.

http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/
"I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A 
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of 
liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is 
logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical 
and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is 
at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial 
celebration is not even that."


“..humanistic studies, like childraising, is an irrational 
but meritorious form of altruistic activity.”



Harold Bloom at Yale: three criteria for whether a work 
should be read and reread and taught to others, and they 
are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom.
 Everyone is now much more concerned with gender, sexual 
orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation, ... whereas I 
am talking about ..wisdom. But I am not a wise man, I am a 
very old-fashioned aesthete – I have been realizing that 
increasingly.


any powerful literary work is holy

"Anything that we are able to speak, to say or formulate, is 
something which is already dead in our hearts" -Nietzsche

Shaman to the Rain God: erotic persuit=>lachrymose despair ;(

"Mythology — like religion — is an art form."

Bloom:"the United States is not a dead country – the 
lifeblood of this country has always been immigration. I 
teach my clases at Yale and what cheers me up are my Asian 
American students...my hope is that this country would be 
saved by the Hispanic Americans, the Asian Americans – the 
new waves of Europeans. This is still a vibrant and living 
culture, whereas the English are incorrigible. They have no 
minds at all. My book had a mixed reception in the United 
States, a terrible reception in England, a very good 
reception in other countries...they try to understand me, 
the English don't. I really don't want to go there again, 
it's an absolutely dead culture. It no longer has any poets, 
it no longer has any novelists, it cannot produce a composer 
or a painter anymore. The French are not much better."

我是流氓，我怕谁？

In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times 
the national average—and since then, murder has increased.


http://www.humansecurityreport.info/
.since the end of the cold war the number of armed conflicts 
has decreased by more than 40%
.the number of autocratic regimes is decreasing

Pericles: "We consider a man who takes no interest in the 
state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a 
few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it."


"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely 
energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one 
consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no 
such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the 
imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

The madness in Australia is completely depressing.


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Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas one and all!

The years keep rolling on - better read some books quick so I can play the Wise Old Man on my deathbed!

 
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friendly mcvittie