From The New Yorker, daily cartoon archives.

A Book Book

The Dish calls this a "Cool Ad."  That to me is an oxymoron, and yet, here it is. I like it.  Clever.

Last Stop

This is the site where a nine-year-old girl accidentally shot the instructor who was helping her fire an Uzi.  The rule was, you must be an least eight to partake of this experience.  I have an eight-year-old grandson.  I can't think of any reason he would need to fire an Uzi.  It seems it is considered entertainment at Last Stop.  As Leonard Pitts says below, it's an example of our country's "stubborn stupidity" about guns.  It's time for another letter to your representatives.

Guns Again

After a nine-year-old girl shot her instructor with an Uzi at a shooting range Leonard Pitts wrote a thoughtful rant, and here is some of it:

God bless America. We legislate against Sharia law in places where there are no Muslims, much less an inclination toward Sharia. We pass laws to curtail election fraud despite the fact that election fraud, as a practical matter, does not exist. Yet we endure a yearly toll of gun carnage that makes civilized people in civilized places shake their heads in wonder and our only action is inaction.

Why We Travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. (Pico Iyer)

I have posted the above passage before.  But I’ve just returned from two weeks in Ireland, and I don’t know what else to say.  The picture above was taken by my brother-in-law, and he has captured some of the magic.

Thoughts

Good and  bad, happy and sad, thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.  (Trungpa Rinpoche quoted by Pema Chӧdrӧn in Start Where You Are)