Sybil or the Two Nations by Benjamin Disraeli

The "Two Nations" = the Rich and the Poor

A Sampling of Haikus

Cold test-taking room
a grey pencil breaks loudly
soon Ned will chase birds. [#679]

Sad crinkled paper
falling while our teacher shakes
his head in slow mo. [#334]

A navel orange
with a weird textured face here
in the drawer; yikes.

Life is some spicy
enchilada that I have
saved for next Tuesday. [#852]

Golf is a dream I
just can't get used to because
the strokes hurt, each one. [#147]

While driving through town
three drunk hippie protesters
throw flowers at me. [#225]

You found an old coin
I found some stale bread,
ripe with age, rock hard. [#378]

At the library,
my honors class made noise so
Now we can't go back... [#006]

On the morrow good fish

I will give you a reason

to avoid large nets... [#057]

Scream! Gurgle! Kick! Scratch!
I'm in a bad mood! Can't you
tell? I want to cry... [#043]

If you give me those
figs in exchange for 10 bucks,
that will seal the deal. [#078]

A child stares at trolls,
little smiling dolls on tall
shelves - strange how moods change. [#777]

No smoke, no drink, no
reason to self-destruct, no
harm, no foul, just breathe. [#892]

The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France

Jonathan Franzen calls Twitter "Unspeakably Irritating"

Famed birdwatcher and great American novelist Jonathan Franzen has weighed in on the latest communications craze, declaring as follows: “Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring [sign gesturing] The Metamorphosis," said Franzen. "Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium … People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.”

The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner

Bringing Discipline and Focus into Your Life

Adversity's Sweet Milk...

FRIAR LAWRENCE

I'll give thee armor to keep off that word:
Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy,
To comfort thee, though thou art banished.

ROMEO

Yet 'banished'? Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,
Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom,
It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more.

FRIAR LAWRENCE

O, then I see that madmen have no ears.

ROMEO

How should they, when that wise men have no eyes?

FRIAR LAWRENCE

Let me dispute with thee of thy estate.

(Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3)

Trouble in Gotham

"In the early 1960s, uncertainty and menace gripped New York, crystallizing in a poisonous divide between a deeply corrupt, cynical, and racist police force, and an African American community buffeted by economic distress, brutality, and narcotics. On August 28, 1963—the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. Dubbed the Career Girls Murders case, the crime sent ripples of fear throughout the city, as police scrambled fruitlessly for months to find the killer. But it also marked the start of a ten-year saga of fear, racial violence, and turmoil in the city—an era that took in events from the Harlem Riots of the mid-1960s to the Panther Twenty-One trials and Knapp Commission police corruption hearings of the early 1970s.

The Savage City explores this pivotal and traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men:

• George Whitmore Jr., the near-blind, destitute nineteen-year-old black man who was coerced into confessing to the Career Girls Murders and several other crimes. Whitmore, an innocent man, would spend the decade in and out of the justice system, becoming a scapegoat for the NYPD—and a symbol of the inequities of the system.

• Bill Phillips, a brazenly crooked NYPD officer who spent years plundering the system before being caught in a corruption sting—and turning jaybird to create the largest scandal in the department's history.

• Dhoruba bin Wahad, a son of the Bronx and founding member of New York's Black Panther Party, whose militant activism would make him a target of local and federal law enforcement as conflicts between the Panthers and the police gradually devolved into open warfare. 


Animated by the voices of the three participants—all three of whom spent years in prison, and are still alive today—The Savage City emerges as an epic narrative of injustice and defiance, revealing for the first time the gripping story of how a great city, marred by fear and hatred, struggled for its soul in a time of sweeping social, political, and economic change." - from Amazon's Product Descriptor