Lofland bLOG

“Be silent! Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I did not pass through death and fire to banter words with a witless worm.” -Gandalf

“If we could assemble all the antimatter we’ve ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.”

In “Seabiscuit” trainer Tom Smith says of Seabiscuit: “They got him so screwed up running in circles; he’s forgotten what he was born to do.he just needs to learn to be a horse again.”

When the prosperous man on a dark but starlit night drives comfortably in his carriage and has the lanterns lighted, aye, then he is safe, he fears no difficulty, he carries his light with him and it is not dark close around him; but precisely because he has the lanterns lighted, and has a strong light close to him, precisely for this reason he cannot see the stars, for his lights obscure the starts, which the poor peasant driving without the lights can see gloriously in the dark but starry night. So those deceived ones live in the temporal existence: either, occupied with the necessities of life, they are too busy to avail themselves of the view, or in the prosperity and good days they have—as it were lanterns lighted and close about them—everything is so satisfactory, so pleasant, so comfortable, but the view is lacking, the prospect, the view of the stars.
—Søren Kierkegaard, as quoted by Vernard Eller in Simple Life

Second Hand Lions - from Hub - “There are some things that a man has to believe in. It doesn’t matter if they are true or not; what matters is believing.”

Gabriel Marcel speaks of “availability” as a “being who is ready for
anything, the opposite of him who is occupied or cluttered up with himself.”

About the Transformers Movie, a blogger (mormon?) said:
It’s like spending a day at the state fair: a little bit of actual entertainment, a lot of embarrassingly cheesy attempts at entertainment, and the faint whiff of bull crap everywhere. –Eric D. Snider

“To a small boy, his father is more than his father - he’s his vision of his future, his portrait of adult manhood. If that vision is discredited, then growing up itself is discredited.” — J. Budziszewski

According to a Christianity Today article:

Charles Spurgeon, when asked to reconcile human freedom with divine
predestination, said, “I never reconcile friends.” He maintained that the
two realities fit together.

“You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.” - G.K. Chesterton

From The Writer’s Almanac:

“It’s the birthday of one of the great American journalists of the 20th
century, A.J. (Abbott Joseph) Liebling, born in New York (1904). He got
his first real writing job working at the New York World, and began
writing about New York City saloons and nightclubs, racetracks and corner
stores, gourmet restaurants and boxing rings. His favorite subjects were
food, journalism, and boxing.

“In 1939, he began to cover the war in Europe for The New Yorker. Unlike
other war correspondents, Liebling didn’t write about politics or combat
strategy. He wrote about day-to-day life among the soldiers and the
civilians. He later said that he missed the war years. He wrote, ‘The
times were full of certainties: We could be certain we were right—and we
were—and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right,
too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. … I know that it is
socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but
subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s
memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their
dead, but also for war.’”

A. J. Liebling also said, “Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of
inexperience.”

Like life at a training center, full of certainty and purpose.

Life, looked at objectively, often does not give the full picture.

Not sure where this came from:

So after Eons of technological, scientific, and general growth human kind
is creating life, exploring the multi/omni/universe, and doing things that
most of us currently can only dream of in our wildest fantasies.

We found God, of course he was never really that well hidden, and he's
been happily walking with us all along.

One day we turn to him and say: "We discovered everything, we don't need
you any more."

So god says: "Oh? Well if thats true then why not create life the same way
I did?"

Confident in our abilities as nearly transcended beings we pick up a clump
of dirt and prepare to spit into it when God stops us, and says: "Get your
own dirt."

"By revolution we become more ourselves, not less."  -George Orwell

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”