Noted. I'll be sure to keep an eye on it then!Kilmatead wrote: ↑2024 Jul 10, 09:12When I was young we used to steal those old fashioned Mercedes-Benz bonnet-emblems off the streets and use them as a poor-man's brass-knuckles, or at least we pretended as much. This version of the plugin is what the kids from your neighbourhood will use to adorn their keychains and mantelpieces for years to come. And if, by chance, one of those scallywag hoodlums should find a way to use it to become the street's newest discount dentist, then, yeah, this version is indeed the bastard halfling I would want guarding the integer representations of my folders.
Wait, what? You preceded me 3 years, exactly, to the day?Kilmatead wrote: ↑2024 Jul 10, 09:12Around 1.77 trillion milliseconds ago back in nineteen sixty-and-eight during the Ides of March, little Kilmatead came into the world with a dangling Gauloises off his lips and a bedraggled (yet still stylish) Fedora perched atop his head.johngalt wrote: Or is that a perennially 56 years old birthday that you've settled on celebrating for the rest of your life?
I have friends who are Ides babies from '69, '67, and '73, but never have met a '68 Ides baby. Until now.
You'll find this part hilarious, in that my sister was born some years later on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. My only sibling, and we were both born on dates of infamy, both being assassinations, no less.
Brilliant exposition on both the burden of identity that some, if you'll pardon the pun, burden themselves with, but also on the the part about chemicals, in that, other than my on-going love of the 'eins' - caffeine and nicotine (yes, we spell things boorishly sometimes), I cannot agree with you more about the massive need I have to avoid overt ingestion of all things branded as 'medications'. It's getting harder to do so, but I'm happy to say that I still am not on any 'prescribed' medications, and as my last physical investigator mentioned, I'm as healthy as a horse. It was touch and go for a bit last year, but I suspect it was more latent effects of COVID paired with a violent resurgence of my allergies, than anything else, and yet I still received a nice bill of health, my last few weeks notwithstanding.Kilmatead wrote: ↑2024 Jul 10, 09:12 At least in my imagination he did. In reality I should think he was spanked, he spit, he cried, and promptly sought out the nearest teat. That in later years he misremembered that teat as belonging to La Lupa Capitolina is, of course, purely the product of whimsy, conjecture, and youthful exuberance. Don't all men reinvent the past to fit the form they are most pleased to inhabit?
That I raised Eric Hoffer to a hero's pedestal was not only to honour a stevedore philosopher's contrition to the hard labour of hard men, but also to draw attention to the last line of his wikipedia entry, which happily spits in the face of the Ivory Tower biographies of lesser-intellectuals:
My continuous surprise at the many people who desperately cling to the identities with which they were assigned and burdened at the whim of officialdom, is always balanced by the multitudes whose imaginary claims of "ages not their own" parade quietly through their own biographies. I've never been bothered by getting older - I neither embrace it nor fear it - but I do like to study it. From the daily morning pains engendered by my workaday 8-tonne excursions, to the entropy which inhibits a willingness of the eyes to see unaided, the process is probably not one to be challenged or retarded by chemicals from, and ablutions to, the "miracles of modern medicine". Rather, I'd like to strive to a mindful stasis, remaining acutely aware of the diminishing sunsets and the lessening grip of mental disciplines pervading my days... not with regret, or sad refrain, but instead with the child's surprise and curiosity as to why it is he will never see "that" blade of grass again, or coax the same cicada up the same tree as he remembers he may have done in his yesterdays.To this day, no one ever has claimed to have known Hoffer in his youth, and no records apparently exist of his parents, nor indeed of Hoffer himself until he was about forty, when his name appeared in a census.
So yeah, in 3 years time I'll have 16-tonne of gravel delivered to your door, and I'll pit my Hoffer to your Rand, and we'll see which of our dead geriatric idealogues can fling the dark stones of their unrepatriated youths the furthest in mind and space.
If nothing else, you'll get a new driveway out of it, and I'll just have another twinge in my back to complain about the next day. Such is life.
As for the gravel - if you could see my so-called front yard, you'd note I have no need for it, sirrah, as I have carefully crafted my very own gravel-laced planting - taking over my entire front 'yard', as it were (with 147 plantings, last I counted).
But the visit itself will be cherished, for sure. We'll see if Rand is all she is cracked up to be, for sure. I've less doubt about Hoffer than her, to be frank. Or, perhaps, more appropriately, how her ideas are being (mis)used in modern society by fools that don't actually understand what she stood for in the first place.
Hang the rich!