Good morning,
FIRST LINES OF GREAT BOOKS
I love lists. Here’s a list of great opening lines from books. I’m not going to cite the source and let you guess! Feel free to send me your favorites:
Call me Ishmael
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.
The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I am an invisible man.
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.
And, no, I didn’t memorize all of these word-for-word (though I remembered some generally). I went back to make sure they were correct!…
How many can you get?
YOU CAN PAY NOW OR PAY LATER
From Mark Ferrell, thoughts about how the movie Don’t Look Up! speaks to society’s inability to see things right in front of them:
“Don't Look Up! was a comedy that made me sad. It was far too accurate and the people it lampooned most likely are unaffected by it…
The way I see most things is; either we pay for it now or we pay for it later. But, we pay one way or the other. We eat healthily and exercise when we're young or we pay for it later — with our health and its associated costs, both personal and societal. We clean up the air now or pay for it later. Which is more expensive? Paying FEMA and insurance companies to clean up and rebuild after the destruction of natural disasters? Or finding solutions for clean energy and switching over? What about loss of life? We pay now or pay later. The same with Superfund sites and species extinction. We pay to filter waste and dispose of it, or we pay more for the clean up, cancers and other healthcare issues. But we pay — we subsidize the companies that pollute, so they can keep their costs down and make more profit. Then we pay for their clean-up.
Housing criminals costs between $45,000 to $85,000 per year per inmate and we imprison 2.3 million people in the U.S. What if we took that money and invested it in education, healthcare, and prevention instead? Either way, taxpayers pay for police, courts, prisons, parole officers, etc. What if we shifted that expense to prevention in the way of education and opportunity?
…The saddest part for me is that these taxpayers, or at least those on the right, are completely bamboozled by their media sources and their politicians to vote against legislation that will actually improve their lives. They'd rather pay for bombs, planes, tanks, prisons, cheap gas, more police, and unaffordable healthcare than to spend smart money on the front-end to prevent war, global warming, crime, etc. Their mantra for services that will actually help society is, "Who's going to pay for that??" Which is something they'd never say for more police, soldiers, and war machines. Because "patriotism."
Where are our priorities as a people? As Americans?
Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, ended slavery and brought the country back from division. Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Big Stick Republican, established the National Park System. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, built the Interstate Highway system, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and ended the Korean War…
Now we have Trump. Trump. We have a lying, cheating, stealing, immoral, unethical person leading the once proud Republican party — the Good Ol' Party.”
Have a great day,
Glenn
From the archives:
Moby Dick, Metamorphosis, don't know, guessing 1984?, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, don't know, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, guessing The Invisible Man, and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
As for Mark Ferrell's thoughts on Don't Look Up, confirmation bias results in people usually seeing what they want to see not seeing what they do not want to see, which is all driven by what they have already seen (and refused to see) before and the opinions created before the then current experience. No person nor political perspective has a monopoly on truth. For as heinous a person as Trump is, the relentless criticism, discrediting and devaluing even when Trump did something well or got something right since the day in November 2016 that he won the Presidency (and even before then) exposes his critics as much as him in with respect to the ability to see things right in front of them.
When I saw Don't Look Up (while in quarantine recovering from Covid infection), because of the movies utter lack of subtlety, I understood the point they were trying to make about Manmade Climate Change, but it was astounding to me how tone deaf they were about how it could just as easily be applied to the underreported and intentionally suppressed evidence of (1) ineffectiveness and potential dangers of the universal Covid vaccine rollout, (2) potential affordable, safe and effective alternative treatments for Covid, and (3) alternative virus origin evidence.
The world is short on humility, introspection and self-criticism, starting with me.
Thanks Glenn...very uplifting.