“I remember the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, in high school sometime. I read the last few pages, in which the hobbit Frodo sails in his old age for the lands of the West, where heroes go, the awful price of carrying the ring and breaking the back of darkness paid at last. I went out onto the patio of my parent’s house, and I stood for a long time, looking at the sunset. No story, no history, no instructive biography or sermon had ever made me feel the way I felt then: that humanity had an infinite capacity for nobility, for goodness, for strength used with wisdom and informed by mercy, and that I was part of that.”
–Emma Bull, “Why I Write Fantasy” (1990)
Day: December 19, 2003
Music is a constant in my life. It’s a rare day that I go through without listening to or making music in one form or another.
And it occured to me on the way back from lunch with kitanzi this afternoon, as I cranked up a particular song, that there are some tunes that just never fail to make me happy.
Here are five of those songs, in no particular order:
Love Shack, B-52s
Sledgehammer, Peter Gabriel
Every Day I Write The Book, Elvis Costello
Got To Get You Into My Life, The Beatles
Linus and Lucy, Vince Guaraldi Trio
What are some songs that always leave you more cheerful than before? That make you dance in your seat? When you’re down, what music do you turn to to pick yourself up? What songs make you instinctively reach for the volume control to crank it up?
Share in comments. 🙂
“Besides, to believe in Santa Claus is to believe in magic. The belief in magic in many respects is a pernicious thing. Because of it you’ve got countless multitudes thinking that aliens abduct people, that Elvis is alive, that you can earn big money stuffing envelopes in your home, and that the TV preacher can cure you if you send him 50 bucks. A certain class of persons, of whom your columnist is one, will go through their lives attempting to extinguish these foolish hopes. No doubt in the main it is good that we do so. But even the sternest among us remembers the wonder we felt as children to think there was a force having a kindly interest in us that wasn’t bound by the rules of this drab world. Wherefore if there’s someone who’s going to say flat out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, it’s not going to be me.”
–Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope
http://peterdavid.malibulist.com/gmlog/00000683.html
In other news, Bakersfield prostitute strips attacker and takes him to police
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) – A skinny rapist met his match in an angry, 275-pound prostitute, police said.
Adrian Castillo Ramirez, 140 pounds, allegedly tried to sexually assault a 24-year-old Bakersfield prostitute who was nearly twice his weight.
But she took his knife, stripped him naked and paraded him in front of other prostitutes, after asking how many of them had ever been forced into sex at knifepoint. Then she tried to take him – still naked – to the police station, reports said.
Castillo was charged with failing to register as a sex offender, and with committing forcible sex acts on the 24-year-old and on a 37-year-old woman in a previous incident. He also was convicted of four counts of rape in 1988.
Castillo pleaded innocent Wednesday, and is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail, police said.