Never criticize or complain “Poor pitiful me”

when you consider the pain and suffering of the many others world-wide.
Phil Ochs said it best: “There, but for fortune, go you and I”.

I figure, too, that many people have zero perception, understanding, and empathy of others’ pain and suffering as well as others’ inner lives–how they largely experience life and reality. “Who am I to judge so easily and superiorly?”

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The Top 1-Woman Play of All-Time?

Certainly William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst, definitively performed by the late Julie Harris would be a contender.

The play is about middle-aged Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), arguably America’s great female poet, looking back on her life. She discusses her childhood, parents, other family members and friends, her college years, her character, her poetry, her relationship with Nature and two key men in her life, and death.

In addition to many lines quoted, complete poems quoted include:
-“If I can stop one Heart from breaking”
-“I dwell in Possibility”
-“There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House”
-“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee”
-“I’ll tell you how the sun rose”
-“Perhaps the Kingdom of Heaven’s changed”
-“We grow accustomed to the Dark”
-“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”
-“I like to see it lap the Miles”
-“I was the slightest in the House”
-“I taste a liquor never brewed”
-“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”
-“A great Hope fell”
-“Success is counted sweetest”
-“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
-“Wild Nights! Wild Nights!”
-“Again–his voice is at the door”
-“I cannot live with You”
-“I got so I could take his name”
-“Will there really be a ‘Morning’?”
-“A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
-“My life closed twice before its close”
-“The Spider holds a Silver Ball”
-“Nobody knows this little Rose”
-She died–this way the way she died.”
-“Hope” is the thing with feathers”
-“I never saw a Moor”
-“I tie my Hat–I crease my Shawl”
-“I reason, Earth is short”
-“Because I could not stop for Death”
-“This is my letter to the World”
-“It’s all I have to bring today”.

Harris’s Emily is a very intense passionate poet. She maintains a high key in both voice and expression throughout the play, but the viewer has to remember that this is a live stage performance. and Harris has to project. Her performance won several awards including a Tony back in 1977 and an International Emmy later in 1987 for a U.K. performance. This is the best video on Dickinson other than the memorable, 60-minute, illuminating Voices and Visions VHS from 1988.

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Only a Man…

On Weather Network, some guys shown working on top of a snow-covered roof in a blizzard.

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Dolly Parton

has been a much bigger hero than Trump claims to be as far as financing Moderna’s vaccine. Dolly contributed $1,000,000; Trump not a penny.

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Does it get any better than

fresh pumpkin pie for dessert at lunch in November?

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Only $550 US.

The Lego Roman colosseum set. Most number of pieces they have ever issued.

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Biden vs. Trump, the GOPs, and Their Followers

“Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

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Re. Trump Cult and Its Followers

“For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. I: 1920-1925

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Two Major Causes of Human Stupidity and Suffering

1. Treating others as a means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves.

2. Not thinking at all. (U.S. labor data shows that 83% of Americans don’t spend any part of their days just thinking.– Bloomberg, July 5, 2014.

“Most of one’s life is a prolonged effort to avoid thinking.”–Aldous Huxley, “Green Tunnels”

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Life’s long been a little crazy in the U.S.,

but now a crazy sociopath has been running the country for four horror-filled years.
Now the rest of the crazies want to take over and rule everyone and everything in the country.
This is how countries deconstruct, destroy themselves, and implode from within, finally.

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