On the Inauguration of Donald Trump

             The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
  William Butler Yeats

Quote of the Post

"You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. but I just kept pushing."
Rene Descartes, quoted by Sal Khan at Khan Academy

Descartes makes me feel a bit better about my own shortcomings. (A little-tiny bit.)

I saw this quote during one of Khan's lectures on algebra. I can't remember which one, just now, but I promise to correct it.

Quote of the Post

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'"
   Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn, short story

Fans of Ray Bradbury (and we are legion) know the immense depth and richness that make his stories unforgettable. I've read The Fog Horn perhaps a half-dozen times over the last forty years. It is always as fresh as a slap on the face.

  If you need a list: The Martian Chronicles; Dandelion Wine; The October Country; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Fahrenheit 451; The Illustrated Man; A Medicine for Melancholy and, The Golden Apples of the Sun, which contains the story quoted above. This is a just a partial list, but it should get you started.