From MSNBC.com:

Report: Palin resigning as Alaska governor

I generally don’t try to anticipate the strategies of politicians, I have a life to live, but I certainly wasn’t expecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to resign her office this early, before campaigning for the 2012 Presidential election began in earnest.

I’m sure even if there is a follow-up announcement regarding the reasons for the resignation, speculation will run rampant.

This is why personalities matter in history. If John McCain had not chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, then much of what has happened in the time since would be significantly different for both her prospects along with the future of the Republican Party.

History is not just massive abstract forces, the Great Man theory also holds sway, individual choices matter, even if the Man (or Woman) isn’t so Great….

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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The headline says it all:

LAPD Under Scrutiny After Jackson’s Death

Let the speculation and creation of conspiracy theories begin…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Years ago, I received one of those multiple forwarded emails titled “Instructions for life in the new millennium from the Dalai Lama”. I’ve subsequently found out that the list was NOT from the Dalai Lama, but I still think it’s worth working on living according to the list anyway.

Here it is:

Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

Follow the three Rs. Respect for self, Respect for others, and Responsibility for all your actions.

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

Spend some time alone every day.

Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

Be gentle with the earth.

Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

By no means do I practice all of them every day, but I still try.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
-Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902)

Men (the gender that is) are actually quite easy to understand…

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Many amazing things were accomplished in the days before computers became ubiquitous and the world wide web became a distraction as well as a tool.

Nazi Germany built the first jet fighter in the world, and was in the process of building a plane that bears a remarkable resemblance to the modern B2 bomber (although I think the stealth aspects of the “Hilter’s Stealth-Fighter” were an accidental byproduct and not the result of considered design). There was no computer modeling available to examine the airflow around the plane, which had no vertical control or stabilization surfaces, yet the plane flew.

The computer in the Apollo 11 capsule Columbia used to navigate to the moon for the first lunar landing, which occurred 50 years ago this July 16, wasn’t as powerful as the engine control unit in your car that moderates the electronic fuel injection and variable valve timing. Yet they made it to the moon, while we use sophisticated GPS systems to travel much shorter distances.

What prompted my thoughts on these amazing accomplishments is the discovery of a web site called The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, which has photos of many of the drawing instruments undoubtedly used to make the precision plans needed to build the plane or the space capsule. The comments below many of the images are very entertaining, and emphasize how much things have changed.

A lifetime ago, in high school, I took a mechanical drawing course, and again when I was in college. I still have my old drawing instruments.

Now, those skills I developed and techniques I learned are almost useless. Wow, things have changed…

I need to dig up my old slide rules and take some pictures of them, maybe along with some of my film SLR cameras.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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People in Europe tend not to get offended by cultural generalizations, to wit:

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French, and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized by the Italians.

I don’t know who first said it, but it passed for a hugely funny joke with more than a kernal of truth among my French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Swiss friends when I lived in France.

Of course, we can’t say things like that in America. Is it really good we can’t laugh at ourselves and our own foibles?

I wonder…

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From a discussion at work today:

“Dude, this is a zombie project, it won’t die and it eats our brains.”

“I know… I’ve gotten out the garlic and stakes to kill it and I’m getting nowhere.”

“Well that’s why, you don’t use garlic and stakes on zombies, that’s for vampires.  You use flamethrowers and chainsaws for zombies. You’ve got to use the right tools for the job…”

We’re too geeky to live sometimes…

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Let no one think that the end of my marriage is a casual matter for me.

I wish it was a casual matter for me, then it wouldn’t hurt so much.

I am simply trying not to dwell on the loss and the future I once anticipated with happiness, a future which now seems irretrievably dark without the black haired woman with big, dark eyes whom I love, and who once loved me.

I cannot forget how her mother asked me to take care of her during our visit last Christmas… and how special that made me feel.

I cannot forget so much.

It hurts to know she no longer loves me, and I grieve for that loss.

I do grieve…

In what seems like half a lifetime ago, I saw the movie City of Angels with her in the movie theaters when it was first released, back when we were in our roller-coaster cycle of starting to date, running away, and then starting to date again. One of the songs from that movie was by Alanis Morrissette, called “Uninvited” which I related to a lot, because I felt excluded, from both her life as well as from any kind of normal life. I often still feel that way, but not today. I’ll likely post on it later, because I’m sure I’ll feel that way tomorrow, but not today…

A different song comes to mind now, after a marriage and in the midst of a divorce. Peter Gabriel has been my favorite musical artist since I was in high school, literally more than half a lifetime ago, and he wrote a song for this movie, a song he included on later albums.

I grieve…

As was written for a different song:

Don’t look back, you can never look back.

I thought I knew what love was, what did I know…

Those days are gone forever, I should just let them go… but…

It’s the “but” that kills you, no matter what the context, good or bad.

That word, “but”, has created more hurt and despair than any other word in any language, closely followed by the phrase “if only”…

I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun…

And I always will see her that way.

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It’s a good thing that blood seems to be water-soluble (at least when relatively fresh) and doesn’t soak into carpets made from artificial fibers. Otherwise, I’d lose the deposit on my crummy apartment, despite the fact there are far worse problems here.

It’s too long a story to write now, as late as it is. I’ll just leave it at the quantities involved were relatively small, and the injury was both inadvertant and unnoticed until I looked down and saw spots on the carpet.

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Usually, I am at no loss for words, but lately I cannot seem to express myself. Fortunately, or not, I am continually running across music that conveys at least in part feelings that seem like they would need paragraphs or pages to get across properly. The lyrics express my conflicted feelings about God in a way that I can’t seem to do with words, and only with some of my photographs in an incomplete fashion.

I’m surprised Sarah McLaughlan recorded this song. If it got widely noticed, it might hurt her sales in the United States at least. We’re not known for tolerance of doubt when it comes to God.

We’re not so open as we think…

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I often feel this way, but many likely won’t get the wordplay nowadays…

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.

-William H. Mauldin

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A couple of years before I went to France as an expatriate, things were going very badly at my company, and there were layoffs galore, including some of my close friends. At the time, my plan if I was laid off was to take my severance, cash out everything, buy a sailboat, and sail around the world.

I’ve wanted to do that since I was a teenager and read my first Horatio Hornblower novel.

Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to afford to do it.

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…that is what has been proven to me the past few days; I am alone.

So, there it is…

The end…

I don’t understand what happened to our love…

I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun…

The woman I love and I are getting divorced.

I will not spend the rest of my life with my black-haired girl with big, dark eyes…

Don’t look back, you can never look back…

I thought I knew what love was, what did I know?

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From an episode of House : You can’t feel that much guilt without love.

Love is difficult, very difficult in such a graceless age.

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It’s almost 15 minutes long, but it’s very funny. John Hodgman, the “PC” in the “Hi, I’m a Mac… And I’m a PC” commercials speaks at the Radio and Television Correspondent’s Dinner:

President Obama flashes the Vulcan salute twice, so he really is our first nerd President.

Cool…

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Thanks to TrekMovie.com for the link to the video.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Sometimes, one cannot encompass the heart of the matter until it’s too late…

How can love survive in such a graceless age?

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When I think of number of disagreeable people that I know who have gone to a better world, I am sure hell won’t be bad at all.
   -Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

There is a humorous aphorism regarding friends that I like to recall at times:

Friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies…

I’m fortunate enough to have at least one friend like that, and possibly one other, although he and I fell out of touch when I made a decision he regarded as a huge mistake, and the situations in our lives forced a drifting apart.

There are many classic friendships of this type in the arts, ranging from Holmes and Watson in the Sherlock Holmes series of stories to House and Wilson as depicted in the House television series, which had several characters and situations based upon those created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his Sherlock Holmes stories, to the friendships of Kirk and Spock, McCoy and Kirk, and Spock and McCoy as depicted in the Star Trek series of television, novels, and movies.

My life and the people in it do not follow any straighforward archetypes, however, making things messy and hard to describe.

I won’t be revealing what characteristics combine for me (as I have commented elsewhere, I don’t reveal much about myself willingly), but the lack of archetypes is not surprising, as life is rarely as clean as fiction.

Unfortunately, my life seems to be rarely clean at all.

I do have friends, though, even if I haven’t done what I should have done to keep them, they are still there, and I appreciate them for it.

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There has been a series of posts at the collective weblog The Huffington Post called “the happiness project” which are very thoughtful and thought provoking. The most recent one is “5 Mistakes I Make In My Marriage” and makes a lot of sense, regardless of your gender. I know I’ve made the same mistakes as she does.