Seán Collins

A professor of mine at Washington University had a poem that included a line describing the experience of opening the morning paper and seeing a story so outrageously fucked-up that only yesterday it seemed impossible.

This, boys and girls, is life imitating art.

YouTube video by BMK Young Frankenstein - Care for a brandy

Would the Doktor care for a Brandy before retiring? Some warm Milch, perhaps? Ovaltine?

youtu.be/lcgEN3CaqXs

My condolences Father. May he rest in peace.

OKC

Mary Kay Gumerlock, MD
neurosurgeon
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

DC is FORTY-ONE PERCENT Black.

Do you understand?

You could make a whole channel of this sort of footage and I’d subscribe.

I’m curious: how was it? I’ve always felt an allegiance to Lion’s Choice as a STL guy.

Thank you !!

My baby boy's first wonky media mention.
www.newsweek.com/donald-trump...

Wow. Thank you for sharing this with us. I’m grateful.

“Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died...,those who loved them forever questioning "this unnecessary death," and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one.”
—Norman Maclean

Eldon Diettert, 19

3/3

Norman Maclean, known for his book, A River Runs through It, was haunted not only by water, but fire as well. His other book, Young Men and Fire, is about those smokejumpers—guys in their teens & twenties—and their extraordinary bravery.

To this day people follow them onto the hills.

2/3

On 5 Aug 1949, a lightning strike in Western Montana started the Mann Gulch Fire which would take the lives of 13 smokejumpers from a crew of 16. That event would change how wildfires are fought.

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It will be the mothers in America that end this dangerous game.

It’s extraordinary

Given anonymously

Guy Pène du Bois, Americans in Paris, 1927 #artbots #moma
https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1134725

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” I love the thing that I most wish had not happened. I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

when i think of Colbert, i think of an interview he gave to GQ when he first took over The Late Show, and had this to say about losing his father and brothers in a plane crash. www.gq.com/story/stephe...

The whirring sound you hear is Murrow spinning in his grave.

Superman is a classic story laid out in a classic film, and it only seems “on the nose” because the world’s IRL villains are so cartoonishly evil.

I'm looking forward to another day free of tobacco use.

If you’re thinking of quitting, give yourself a chance. (And enjoy those vegetables.)

/fin

Realizing that the stimulant nicotine was my way of self-medicating my ADHD was an insight that helped me quit. It has meant finding other ways to deal with my neurodivergent brain — and that adventure has been fruitful and ongoing.

7/8

The deep inhalations that are part of cigarette smoking have real physiological benefits (apart from the awful reality of the smoke) and learning that breath work can continue to be part of my life has been another fantastic brain hack.

6/8

“Where’d Collins go?”

“Oh, he’s outside smoking.”

No, I was outside smoking AND getting away from YOU people.

5/8

Cigarette smoking is a complex behavior and it helped me to separate the physiological addiction from the behavioral habit.

One advantage for me as an introvert was the “escape mechanism” a smoking habit provided.

4/8

Rather than to tell yourself that you’re never going to smoke again, tell yourself, instead: “If I still want to smoke 15 minutes from now, I’ll go ahead and smoke. but I’ll wait it out.” Every craving ends.

I have been sober from tobacco and nicotine for 11 years today.

3/8

The third truth I’ll pass on comes from the neuroscientists: an episode of the acute craving for nicotine that you feel early in withdrawal lasts around five minutes.

2/8

"Sex and fresh vegetables" was the advice my colleague Lorin Cuoco gave me in the early 80s when I made one of many attempts to quit smoking.

The second bit of wisdom I picked up over more than 40 pack-years of nicotine addiction: “If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit again.”

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