The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.
An interview with Sarah Zerina Usmen, of Outsourced: “I’ve noticed that in casting calls women are still cast according to descriptions like ‘hot surfer chick.’ For one of my films I’d love to make a casting call for a non-alcoholic, burka-wearing troll and throw them all off!”
President Obama was in Indonesia this week, but was forced to cut his trip short. As of this writing, Indonesia’s Mount Merapi is still spewing clouds of ash into the sky, and the death toll from the eruptions that began two weeks ago has grown to 191. Mbah Marijan was among the victims of he recent eruptions. He was eighty-three years old, and the juri cunci of the volcano, a “guardian of the key,” responsible for maintaining a relationship to the spirits of the mountain.
“Cease and desist” was Sarah Palin’s rebel yell at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last week, in a speech attacking the Fed’s plan to buy up $600 billion in government debt to stimulate the US economy.
A week before an election that saw Oklahoma pass Measure 755, forbidding the use of international and Shari’ah law in state courts, Literary theorist and New York Times contributor Stanley Fish penned a piece for the Times.