Quotes for Today

 Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

Have a new Quotes for Today up on my Substack. As I've mentioned doing this as a way to thank those who have Subscribed. If you are a Subscriber - you should have received an email. Thanks!

Quotes for Today

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

"A friend on the Times said he didn't mind the nightmares so much so much as the waking impulse to file on them." - Michael Herr 

"History never repeats itself, man always does." - Voltaire

"Innovation comes from questioning the way things have been done before." - Elon Musk

"But I will accept any rules you feel necessary for your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them, if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." - Robert Heinlein

Quotes for Today

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

"Ask yourself at every moment, is this necessary?" - Marcus Aurelius

"The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned." - Albert Einstein

"There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in war." - Michael Herr

"For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered." - John Dryden

Michael Herr - Dispatches

"Combat spared far more men than it wasted, but everyone suffered the time between contact, especially when they were going out every day looking for it, bad going on foot, terrible in trucks and APC's, awful in helicopters, the worst, traveling so fast to fast toward so frightening." - Michael Herr Dispatches

Dispatches by Michael Herr

The recent anniversary of the death of Errol Flynn made me think of the Vietnam War book Dispatches by Michael Herr which features Flynn's son who was described thus: Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had thirty years before as Captain Blood, but sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input! The input!

Is it any surprise that Herr was also the co-writer of the screenplays for both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. Gives one a new respect for the prose of Dispatches which could be summed up by the following paragraph:

In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters I'd flown in began to draw together until they formed a collective meta-chopter, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder. Men on the crews would say that once you'd carried a dead person he would always be there, riding with you.

Yeah - the whole book is like that. Maybe why I'm re-reading it.

Books

It's that time of year again for me to break out my well worn copy of Michael Shaara's masterpiece The Killer Angels. The book is a slightly fictionalized account of the Battle of Gettysburg which began June 30, 1863. One of my favorite books of all-time and a I book I think every high school senior should required to read.

Once done with The Killer Angels next up with be Michael Herr's classic Dispatches. Normally I don't read books I have already read back-to-back but with the passing of Michael Herr I feel the need to make an exception. Even if you haven't read Dispatches you may be familiar with Herr's work as one of the screenwriters of Full Metal Jacket.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

There has to be more to the story behind why the Bruins traded Dougie Hamilton for such a small return... I love Sangria. At some point this summer I will be using this recipe... I like the word "turgid" but think it would be much more effective if it was spelled "turdgid"... The donut tent design actually looks pretty cool... If you were a hiring manager and your only two options were a guy with a large neck tattoo and a white guy with dreadlocks - who do you pick?... Meanwhile in Ireland... I wasn't aware that Michael Herr had a screenwriting credit on Full Metal Jacket. His book Dispatches is one of the best books you'll ever read on Vietnam... Who knew? Humans and giraffes actually have the same number of vertebrae... "Prohibited" means "not allowed". So does that mean "hibited" means "allowed"? I hope "hibited" is a word. I'll be very gruntled if it is...