Lara Herscovitch: random thoughts

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." -Mario Andretti

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live." -Lin Yutang

So if they're both right, I figure the thing to do is spend the afternoon driving fast but just round and round in circles (and in that case I guess Andretti wins, but then again so does Yutang... hmm maybe there's something to this NASCAR craze after all...).

"Good week for Scrabble enthusiasts, after the Hawaii state legislature passed a bill declaring that from this day forward the official state fish of Hawaii shall be the small, rectangular humuhumunukunukuapuaa." -in The Week

"Bad week for playing Santa Claus, after a 23-year-old California man forgot his keys and tried to enter his house through the chimney, shedding his clothes to reduce friction. Police found him trapped in the chimney, naked and crying for help." -in The Week

"Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries." -James Michener

Juror Number 13 is now available! Recorded mostly at NRS Studios in Catskill NY, and also featuring musicians Scott Petito, Brian Melick, KJ Denhert, David Goldman, and Pierce Campbell. Photography by Michael Benson (studio shots and Ugandan landscapes) and graphic design by Susan Fazekas.

"Merv Griffin estimates that he has made 'close to $70 million to $80 million' in royalties from the Jeopardy! theme song. He wrote the tune in less than a minute." -New York Times

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

"The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe."

"Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy."

"Bad week for rude surprises, after a number of Chicago drivers left their cars in what appeared to be free, legal parking spaces. When they returned, they found that parking meters had been installed and they'd been ticketed."

"...a judge dismissed a $54 traffic ticket issued to the owners of a chicken who crossed the road. Lawyers for the chicken's owners argued successfully that the California law against livestock impeding traffic applies only to farm animals, whereas the chicken in question was a pet." -The Week 06/10/05

"...the best life for me would be to get up in the morning and go to a cafe and have coffee and meet friends and read the newspaper. But you can't do it everyday, because if you did, your life would be effortless. And an effortless life is a meaningless life."

"Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood."

"When rival kayak suppliers Harmony and Werner Paddles recently introduced new paddles with the same name - Cascadia - the companies decided to settle the dispute in a paddle-off between top executives. Werner president Bruce Furrer won, and Harmony renamed its paddle Tortuga." -Business Week

"I'm on my way to the future, she said & I said, But you're just sitting there listening & she smiled & said, It's harder than you'd think with all the noise everyone else is making."

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."

"It's much easier to trust the universe when it's going well, she said."

"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it."

"Democracy doesn't work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn't work much better than trickle down economics... What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does."

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

"Flowers and pricker bushes grow out of the same dirt."

"I don't care if no one likes it, she said, unless no one likes it."

"Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give the world the best you have anyway..."

"All journeys have a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware."

"True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning. When we are making vases, we should listen to the advice of those who know about turning glaze into Fe3O4 at 800C; when we are making a ship, it is the verdict of those who construct triremes that should worry us; and when we are considering ethical matters - how to be happy and courageous and just and good - we should not be intimidated by bad thinking, even if it issues from the lips of teachers of rhetoric, mighty generals and well-dressed aristocrats..."

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."