spooky juices

Lived faith is not, generally, belief, but a social undertaking that yields belief.  The non-social adjunct to faith is not belief but spiritual wonder.

Radok Blocks

The screen itself may be manipulated in a presentation.  Ordinarily this is not done, or if done, to create a buzz, rather like the ripple of blank verse across a play's dialogue or the expression effect of an organ with a true swell division.  If heightened, it becomes more than a finish: a marquetry and physical poem.

Llewellyn

In business, practice is a second law.

now

I look out to the dawn sky, familiar strips of rose and pink, mauve and blue grey, and up through the foreground, a dragonfly, more carried by the rising draft than flying.

rippling

Good writing flows in a clear, cold stream of lucid concision past shoots of flowering style.

dawdling

The silent cry of young people in developed countries these days, unheard even by themselves, is: Oh, for a seizing purpose!  I know plenty of quack purposes, some of which would convince most of them.  But I don't know one that, really and firmly, touches bottom.

malaprop

I was telling a friend of mine about an inconsiderate thing a group of kids did the other day and he replies: "You should have read them the fifth!"

not helpless

One of the great lessons of childhood is how to cope with one's own incompetence.  To learn to manage dependence, conditional trust, and the dance of pressing forward with letting it be.  Taken into adulthood, we apply these lessons in obvious ways (with doctors, police) and subtler ways (showing willingness to play along while maximizing the chance one does not have to play undesirable games at all).

to have and to hold

What is the ultimate toy for a child?  Not in any esoteric sense, nor in terms of cherished individual memories, but in at large, for ordinary fun and development?  Candidates that come to mind for me: a sandbox; blocks; stuffed animals.

connections

Was there ever so delicious a queen as Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia?  Rains gets as much out of his knuckles, physically, as he gets out of his arch intonation of lines.

But what is going on between him and Lawrence?  Lawrence does seem to be a little more than a promising personel dossier to Dryden - perhaps a protege?

That strange first scene alone together, in which Dryden conspicuously unlocks his office's doors, with their panels of frosted glass, yet Lawrence immediately notices a sculpture and says that's new!  Has he been inside before?  Often before?  Or is it just that he is so aware of archeological finds that he can recognize recent additions to the British catalogue on first sight?

homogenized

How strange to think there was milk in 1947.  It lasted a week or so in the icebox.

an obscure one

"Paris is burning.  There is enough space on the floor to do all that you intend to.  We're not going to be shady, just fierce."

at ease

A gear is made to spin,
But wants to sit on its pin.

A spade has a taste for the garden bed,
But leans against the shed instead.

A box of tools is a happy crew,
Dreaming of nails and bolts
and Phillips-head screws.

pleasures

Aha!  A sentence in a brief I'm writing works better as a chiasm.  Late night made more fun:

The Supreme Court declared that “[a]n elementary and fundamental requirement of due process in any proceeding which is to be accorded finality is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to be heard.”  Mullane, 339 U.S. at 314.  The Supreme Court recognized, however, that actual notice is not always possible.  It therefore held that due process requires actual notice to known parties but that for unknown parties, reasonable publication notice is sufficient.

layering

Truly, life is confection.  But being so, is the more real.

His eye is on

Work began early for me so I stepped out to get coffee and a pastry.  Rounding the sidewalk corner from the coffee stand, fiddling with the lid of my disposable cup, I stepped onto an unwary little house sparrow.  I felt the bird before I saw it, sensed the queasy pressure of its little body underfoot, and could only slow my landing stride a bit.  The sparrow was fast and strong and spread its wings against the sidewalk and pulled against the grippy vise of rubber sole and rough concrete that clamped it.  It escaped!  It all happened in a fraction of a second and left both of us a little stunned.  I stared down at the bird; for a moment it staggered.  The sparrow flew unsteadily away; as unsteadily to work trod back the lawyer.

perspective

There's another risk besides a reputation for exaggeration to making a mountain out of a mole hill.  It's that others will conclude you're small.

wagons get hitched, too

New bosses mean new workers.