I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made....
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Halloween is almost here, the time of year when we take perverse delight in getting the hell scared out of us, and what better way to get the hell scared out of us than by a creature from Hell? Of course, I'm talking about the Devil, a.k.a., Satan, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, Belial, Old Nick, Old Scratch, the Evil One, the Arch Fiend, the Serpent, and the Antichrist.
Did I leave a name out? Oh, yes. Blair:
John Cleese offers this perspective:
So you might want to consider chipping in a few dollars. It will do your soul some good. Assuming it hasn't already been sold.
Cartoon by Nick Anderson
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| 1946-2025 |
Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me.
--Diane Keaton (née Hall)
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Joan Kennedy, the oft-troubled and soon-to-be-divorced wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, glances up at herself in 1981.
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| 1936-2025 |
When, in the early 1960s, I brazenly used such words as "childhood", "adolescence", "motivation", "excitement", and "mood" I was much criticized. Even worse was my crime of suggesting that chimpanzees had "personalities". I was ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman animals and was thus guilty of that worst of ethological sins—anthropomorphism.
--Jane Goodall (1934-2025)
Norman Rockwell. It's not his birthday or anything. He just happens to be on my mind. I think as time goes by, Rockwell's work is seen as increasingly sentimental, increasingly old-fashioned. Here's one such example:
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| Freedom of Speech, 1943 |
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| 1936-2025 |
