"I will be forever indebted to Susan McNamara, who donated endless hours to editing my manuscript. There were times when she had to drag from me the information and stories she knew were inside. Anything that sparks of life in this book is due to her patience and determination." --Elizabeth A. "Liz" Warner, from the acknowledgments in her "Pictorial History of Middletown," copyright 1990. Dr. McNamara is a psychiatrist with an office in an historic Middletown building.
✡ Do you like clickbait? Here are several examples of that “art.” (The title of today's blog is one.) You can Google them for the full story, except for a couple of fakes, but in this space, they're not clickable.
✢ Why All Your Maps Are Wrong!
✣ Think Your Computer Hasn’t Improved?
✤ The 43 Most Overused Movie Tropes!
✥ Book in Harvard Library Reportedly Bound in Human Flesh May Not Be!
✦ Best and Worst Places to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse!
✧ Dog Runs Away in Texas, Is Found Days Later in Ohio!
✩ Match the Arrestee With the Crime!
✪ Underwater Egg Video!
✫ Massive Corndog Spill Shuts Down Louisiana Highway!
✬ Wait, Did Fonzie Drown?
✭ How Much Pee in a Pool is Too Much?
✮ 33 Shocking Facts That Will Change Your View of History!
✰ Earth Even Younger Than Biblical Literalists Believe!
✱ Young Margaret Thatcher Sexy Photos?
✵ “Abbott and Costello Meet Mothra” Lost Film Found!
✳ Rudolf Hess Alive on Skorpios Island, Misses Spandau Prison!
✵ Disturbing Implications of Movie Scenes!
Interlude:
☞ Best laid plans. The radio news told of someone who paid $185,000 to ICANN for the rights to the domain name “.wed” (“dot wed”). The buyer hoped to make money by gathering wedding-related stuff there. Guess what? Someone else bought “.wedding” (“dot wedding”), diluting the brand.
☞ We’re glad we heard that news story. We were about to fork over $185,000 to ICANN to buy the domain name “wrigleyfieldofthespirit.” We hoped to make money from Cubs fans, who spring eternal. Now we’re not so sure.
☢ Now for something largely similar. Here are nuggets from someone whom we will not name, but whose identity is obvious. Hint: he's famous.
✻ Put all your genius into your life; put just your talent into your works.
✼ Count your chickens before they hatch. Afterwards they run around too much for accuracy.
❈ Mystic visions, even if from God, don't guarantee the truth of the mystic's religious beliefs.
❈ Mystic visions, even if from God, don't guarantee the truth of the mystic's religious beliefs.
✽ You can survive anything these days except death.
✾ Prayer must never be answered, or it stops being prayer and becomes correspondence.
❁ Hard work is the refuge of people with nothing better to do.
❂ After the first one, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. After the third, you see things as they are. Nothing is more horrible.
❃ Language is the parent, not the child, of thought.
❄ Being good in the conventional sense is easy. All it takes is fear, lack of imagination, and a craving for respectability.
❅ Please don’t agree with me. It always makes me feel I must be wrong.
❇ The dreamer finds his way only by moonlight. As punishment, he sees the dawn before the rest.
❆ Man is a rational animal who loses his temper whenever called on to act rationally.
❈ If life were only less important, we could afford to take it seriously.
❉ As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.
❊ We’re all in the gutter, but some look at the stars.
❋ Between men and women can be passion, enmity, worship, love, but never friendship.
❋ We learn life’s lessons too late to use.
✣ Being civilized requires one to be out of touch with public opinion.
✦ Believe what you read in newspapers -- these days only poorly written things happen.
✩ Take to extremes whatever you do best; moderation is fatal.
✴ Children love their parents at first, judge them eventually, forgive them rarely.
✾ Death will not be cheated, but can be stalled; fool him for a while by growing younger every day.
❉ In reducing truth to fact, whatever matters disappears.
❁ Reform in Russia is impossible. Every attempt is tragic and ends in farce.
✵ Giving advice is silly; giving good advice, dangerous.
✺ Nature is lacking in design, curiously crude, extraordinarily monotonous, and absolutely unfinished. Art must choose whether to imitate or flee.
❃ Consistency is the virtue of the unimaginative.
❆ A thing is not necessarily true because someone dies for it.
✿ Nothing brings warmth and richness to life like the consciousness of loving and being loved.
❀ Love is wiser than philosophy, though philosophy is wise, and love is mightier than power, though power is mighty.
✺ The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
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