CareyMorgan.com - Life and Web

Liberty vs Orthodoxy

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:57:42 -0700

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

— George Orwell

Secret of Happy Marriage: Use Cash

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:13:10 -0700

Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.

— Lazarus Long

Teach them to Long For

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:15:23 -0700

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Dorothy Mae (Pidd) Morgan - A Brief History

Mon, 26 May 2008 08:37:37 -0700

by Frank Morgan

Until the end of her 92 years, “Dottie” has been known by all in her world as a compassionate, loving person whose arms, heart and home were always open. As a mother of 3, she cared for numerous foster children as well as many long-term guests who needed a “home” for a while. When her late husband, Joe Morgan became a chaplain in WW II, and later, when they lived here in a Navy town, she left the front door unlocked and blankets and pillows behind the couch so that service men on leave could slip in and sleep on the couch or on a cot or on the floor (depending on how many of them showed up on a given night) when they had no where else to go.

Dorothy Mae Pidd was born in Los Angeles, California on September 24, 1915. Her mother had been Mayme Nelson, born and raised on a farm in Clear Lake, Wisconsin. We don’t know how long Dorothy lived in Los Angeles, but we know it was at least two years because that’s how old Dorothy was when, in her earliest memory, she recalled falling off of a pier into the ocean. “I remember looking down into the swirling water, feeling dizzy, then the water coming up at me,” she recounted to her children. “My Mother didn’t see me fall. I would have perished if it hadn’t been for some anonymous young man on the beach who saw me topple in and raced out to save me,” she said. Perhaps that was why she always claimed to have a fear of water and of high places.

So I'm No Blogger

Thu, 01 May 2008 16:13:09 -0700

If you're reading this item, it's because you got to my site for some reason other than to read my most recent posts. The reason I know this is because I basically don't have recent posts, so how could you be here to read them?

Yep, I confess, I'm no blogger. No urge to post stuff here all the time. No urge to create a following of people who read what is on my mind. No personal agenda to push. No professional status to promote. No compelling reason to do any of that. And frankly, no time to even try.

But what is here represents a small subset of some stuff I find interesting or important -- kinda my partial collection of thoughts, quotes, links, etc. My del.icio.us links actually are more current than anything else.

So there you have it. I'm no blogger.

Energies of Love

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:16:17 -0800

Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.

— Teilhard de Chardin

Playing with iCalendar Feeds

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:10:04 -0700

We're talking about calendar management at work so I got to looking around at the iCalendar standard and its use. What I learned is that I am way behind the curve on this topic and that people have put some fantastic tools in place already.

Over at netvibes.com they offer a little portlet through which you can subscribe to different calendars offered in iCal format.

Google Calendars offers the ability to subscribe to external calendars in addition to those of other google users.

Outlook can handle individual iCal files, but using an extension called Remote Calendars I read about over at Wikipedia's article on iCalendar, you can subscribe to calendar feeds as well.

PersonalDNA - Personality Test

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 23:03:04 -0700

Yet another personality test, true, but this one seems to accommodate a wide range of variation using sliding scales instead of numbers or letters.

The relative size of each colored box reveals the strength of a particular personality trait. Hover the mouse to see each trait, or click on the name of my type to read a profile or to take the test yourself...

Mento + Diet Coke Fountain

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 11:09:21 -0700

Okay, so there are some things I think I will never get too old to enjoy... Here is a well-documented method to turn Mentos and Diet Coke into a raging fountain of soda.

Gotta try this with the kids!

Planarity Game

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 12:11:39 -0700

A fascinating logic puzzle using dots and lines you must untangle: Planarity

Small but Tough

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 15:56:09 -0700

Not politically correct, but definitely clever! (borrowed from from here)

Starting with Evil - Ending with Trust

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 12:12:50 -0700

I recently received this thought-provoking story via email identifying Albert Einstein as the student. Always skeptical of such attributions, I looked it up on the sites that investigate these things and it turns out not to be an actual account involving Albert Einstein. His name was added to the story in 2004, but a nameless version of the story was around before that so I've removed his name and printed it anyway. Read it for yourself, then I have a comment or two...

Does evil exist?

The university professor challenged his students with this question. Did God create everything that exists? A student bravely replied, "Yes, he did!"

Stein: Confessions for the Holidays

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:35:32 -0800

CHARLES OSGOOD, host: We all have our own thoughts about the holidays. Here's Ben Stein with his.

BEN STEIN: Here at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart. I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are.

(Footage of People magazine; Us magazine)

STEIN: I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I'm buying my dog biscuits. I still don't know. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores who they are. They don't know who Nick and Jessica are, either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they've broken up? Why are they so darned important?

(Footage of People magazine)

STEIN: I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is either, and I don't care at all about Tom Cruise's baby.

(Vintage footage of congressional hearing)

STEIN: Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I'm a subversive? Maybe. But I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are. Is this what it means to be no longer young? Hm, not so bad.

Next confession: I am a Jew and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish, and it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautifully lit-up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees.

(Footage of Christmas trees)

STEIN: I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are — Christmas trees. It doesn't bother me a bit when people say 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they're slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. I shows that we're all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year.

It doesn't bother me one bit that there's a manger scene on display at a key intersection at my beach house in Malibu.

(Footage of manger scene; menorah)

STEIN: If people want a creche, fine. The menorah a few hundred yards away is fine, too. I do not like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat. Or maybe I can put it another way. Where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and aren't allowed to worship God as we understand him? I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we used to know went to.

— Stein, Ben. "Confessions for the Holidays." CBS News Transcripts. 18 December 2005.

Site Pal

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 07:52:34 -0800

SitePal.com has a couple demo tools that make fun toys:

Dr. Sultan on Muslim Tensions: Barbarism vs Rationality

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:19:43 -0800

From For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats - New York Times: "The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."