Quoteable

If you don't go to somebody's funeral, they won't come to yours.

-Yogi Berra

I think this is a pretty good definition of what friendship is all about. If you aren't there for people in the hard times, in the sad times, you can't really expect them to be there for you when you're having it difficult.

A Sunset

There is something about the sun setting. Some ethereal power it imbues. This picture doesn't even do it justice, it only serves to remind us of that feeling. It is both a feeling of time's limitless and its inevitable end. The sun has stood and will stand well beyond my short life. It is timeless, from my perspective at least, while I am not.

But none of that seems to matter in the warm yellow light of the setting sun.

If you sit for awhile and watch the sun sink beyond the horizon, it can feel as if life has imperceptibly slowed, and the meaning of every moment is lent added significance by the sun's preternatural light. One is truly alive in a moment like this because one is truly living in the moment. Thoughts and actions may distract, but the depths of the soul are stirred below the surface of our unceasing thoughts. The simplicity of light becoming dark, of shadows swallowing the earth whole in their cool indigo silhouettes, of the sky's radiance as it breaks into the diffusions of the rainbow, all of this opens the mind to see not with the eyes but with the heart. And in allowing the heart to see, the mind is provided with the knowledge that there is depth to life, if only in its awesome beauty.

Not Much Doin'

I'm wondering when the democrats are going to start actually accomplishing things in Washington. Since they've been in office, they have only managed to engage in some meaningless fights over the Iraq War with Republicans that they were bound to lose anyways, created a sense of impropriety around the Bush Justice Department by overly-investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys (the law is political!!!! no! get serious!), and generally made a lot of noise without much resonance. Where is the minimum wage bill? Where is environmental legislation? Even this new immigration bill was crafted largely by the White House, even if it does concede plenty to the democrats. Nancy Pelosi's first 100 hours or whatever was a joke. They can't even pass ethics reform, and it was the patent need for ethics reform that brought the democrats into office in the first place. I know that politics is often a frustratingly slow business, but enough with the pontificating already. Let's get down to business.

Istanbul. Where I have always wanted to go.

View Over the Bosporus.


Isn't it spectacular. All the colors, all the history, the two continents, the great cultural divide. What a vivid place. It has stood out for over two thousand years as one of the great cultural centers in the world. Even today with Turkey's battles between Secularist and Islamist conceptions of the political sphere Istanbul continues to bridge the east and the west.

hilarious

I cannot look at him and not laugh.