"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me
with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.
To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me;
a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle."
                                                                   -Albert Einstein

From MarcoPolo

"I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he'd spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell out, 'Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!' We all thought he was crazy. But then we had some growing up to do."  -Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy 

Twenty years ago, I knew Karl Knudson as a Sierra Club member who led canoe trips on the Upper Iowa River. Back then, industrial waste and feedlot runoff poured openly into the Upper Iowa. Landowners fenced across the "navigable stream."

Karl felt strongly about protecting the Upper Iowa. He did everything from pick up trash to lobby for enforcement of pollution laws. He traveled around showing slides of his canoe trips to groups. And he carried wire cutters in his boat.

Then, despite repeated warnings of its illegality, Walmart proceeded to build a new "supercenter" by filling in a floodplain along the Upper Iowa. In the midwestern United States, Walmart is known for building huge shopping centers in small towns and riding roughshod over local regulations.

Until that time, I honestly hadn't known that on weekdays Karl was an attorney. He pursued the issue from zoning hearings to the state supreme court and got an injunction preventing Walmart from using its building, which still sits empty.

Yesterday, a "tentative settlement" was announced where Walmart will pay $5 million to various environmental and civic organizations to gain the use of its store. In addition, the building must be razed in 25 years and the land converted to a public park. 

Environmentalists consented to its being named "Sam Walton Park" after Walmart's founder.

                                  

By Geraldine Sealey

John Granger, likely the only Harry Potter professor in the world, says these critics miss an important point about Rowling — that she follows an impressive lineage of English authors, including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who imbued their writing with Christian themes.

"Rowling is a throwback to 19th-century English literature and earlier. She uses grand themes and organizes the books to strengthen those themes and the books are implicitly Christian. You can't read Shakespeare, Dickens or Austen without understanding their Christianity. Rowling's also writing books implicitly Christian." 

More at http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/Entertainment/potter030619.html 

From Anam
 

     I found a term for my new relationship with the web at www.wordspy.com . It's called "Stendahl's Syndrome."

Stendhal's syndrome

Backgrounder:
In 1817, a young Frenchman named Marie-Henri Beyle — better known to us as the French novelist Stendhal — visited Florence and soon found himself overwhelmed by the city's intensely rich legacy of art and history. When he visited Santa Croce (the cathedral where the likes of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried) and saw Giotto's famous ceiling frescoes for the first time, he was overcome with emotion:

"I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.''

160 years later, in the late 1970s, Dr. Graziella Magherini, at the time the chief of psychiatry at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, noticed that many of the tourists who visited Florence were overcome with anything from temporary panic attacks to bouts of outright madness that lasted several days. She remembered that Stendhal had had similar symptoms, so she named the condition Stendhal's syndrome. (When she first applied this name isn't clear, but it may have been as early as 1979.)

Note, too, that a similar affliction is the Jerusalem syndrome (1987), which hits tourists who visit the holy city of Jerusalem and are overcome by the mental weight of its history and significance.

(This was recycled for dharmabums)

                A SATANIC PIED PIPER: HARRY POTTER

"If you, reader, approve of Harry Potter and even let your children read that Satanic filth, then you are on the devil's side. You either choose God or you choose the devil. Those who accept Harry Potter with all the spells and wizardry are choosing the devil. It is as simple as that!"

"We saw that the Satanic 'S' in the form of a lightning bolt is used with Harry Potter. What does that symbol represent? Well it represents a lightning bolt that means "Destroyer". In mythology, it was the weapon of Zeus. It is worn to have power over others. Plus, this symbol was worn by the feared SS of Nazi Germany (who were also into Satanism). Finally the Satanic 'S' or the lightning bolt symbolizes Satan's fall from heaven..."

More at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/7895/hpdemon.html 

Life Size Human Skulls are manufactured from a plastic resin compound. The jaw is spring hinged and movable.
Skulls in White are $19.00 Plus $5.95 shipping. ($24.95)
Skulls in the Silver, Aged Bone with Decay (left photo) and Mold with Decay (right photo) style are $24.00 plus $5.95 shipping. ($29.95)                    

Touch of Grey, Inc.
2601 South Twenty Sixth Street
Fort Pierce, Florida 34981
(772) 466-5713

"Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are
     not,
   You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
   You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
   You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
   You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

Four Quartets
East Coker

TS Eliot

From go2mo . Stop by her site and wish her a happy birthday.

.

Wrigley has Viagra-type Gum Patent

By Ameet Sachdev
Tribune staff reporter
Published June 13, 2003

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

Two years ago an investor in Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. stood up at the company's annual meeting and asked a favor of Chairman Bill Wrigley Jr.

"My one request is, that being older now, that should you develop a Viagra-flavored health-care product, I would like to be among the first to know," the man said...

More at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0306130212jun13.story