But Don't Quote Me

"...a cloud of dust and a hearty "Hi-ho, Silver..."

According to the "What Do You Think?" poll on MSN.com, when asked the question, "What was your favorite part of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia?", readers of the website responded thusly:

            ~Amazing athletes...........................................29%

            ~Mishaps/memes............................................3%

            ~Team USA gold-medal performances............9%

            ~Bob Costas' eye............................................10%

            ~DIDN'T WATCH........................................49%

These numbers were taken from 323,986 responses, as of 4:00pm CST on 2/25/14.

Your Pope Guy didn't watch either.

FYI, the Pope Guy is yours truly, John The Tall of the All John All The Time World Church and All-Night Diner; if you're interested, there's an almost viable explanation as to how this travesty occurred above (see above).

Recently, your Popeamundo has immersed himself in Presidential and Founding Fathers history, for reasons undetermined at this time; mostly, it just kinda' happened that way.

It probably started about a year ago when I read, back to back, two outstanding biographies: that of Abraham Lincoln, entitled cleverly, "Lincoln", by David Herbert Donald and of Harry S. Truman, also cleverly entitled, "Truman", by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, David McCullough.

Both were outstanding.

Before long, caught up in a desire to learn more about the background and thinking processes of the various men who have risen to become the most powerful leader in the world, I went on a feeding frenzy of reading, which is my normal routine anyway (being forced to choose between reading and eating, I would have to give the proposition serious consideration), and devoured the following tomes over the last several months:

            ~"John Adams" again by the above-mentioned David McCullough

~"Team Of Rivals" by Doris Kearnes Goodwin, which was the book the movie "Lincoln", with Oscar-winner Daniel Day Lewis, was based on

~"Theodore Rex" by Edmund Morris, which described the Presidential years of Teddy Roosevelt's life

~"Eisenhower" by Stephen E. Ambrose

~"Washington, A Life" by Ron Chernow, an excellent work

~"Thomas Jefferson, The Art Of Power" by Jon Meachum, a wonderful book

And sitting on my shelf waiting patiently are:

~"The First American, The Life And Times of Benjamin Franklin" by H.W. Brands

~"John Quincy Adams" by Harlan Giles Ungar, a distant cousin of Felix, I presume

(Yes, I know Franklin wasn't a President, but he was one of the most influential of the signers of the Declaration Of Independence, so I figured, why not?)

The thing that has struck me about all of the above is number of "quotes", or if I were to use the current vernacular, "sound bites", that appear in the pages of these books.

So I thought to myself, Pope, you should share some of these treasures, with your loyal followers, all three of you, along with some of my own pithy and occasionally deeply profound gems of wisdom, as well as a number of comments, wry and ridiculous, from other famous commentators, Presidential and otherwise.

In no particular order then, here they are:

~"Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?"

            John Adams

~"Blessed are the tall, for they can reach the top shelf."

            PJTT

~"What would Jesus Christ have preached if he'd taken a poll in Israel?...It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It's right and wrong."

            Harry Truman

~"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been out of college, you don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

            Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Akroyd in "Ghostbusters")

~"Free speech is a restraint on government, not an incitement to the citizen."

            Dean Acheson (Secretary of State under Harry Truman)

~"...and blessed are the bewildered, not because they're cool or anything, but because they can use all the help they can get..."

            PJTT

~"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

            Thomas Jefferson

~"A blind horse upon a treadmill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be-all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly."

            Abraham Lincoln (speaking of a slave society)

~"I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."

            Winston Churchill

~"Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours."

            Ronald Reagan

~"America and Britain are two nations divided by a common language."

            George Bernard Shaw, playwright

~"The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words."

            Thomas Jefferson

~"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

            Yogi Berra, catcher

~"Blessed are the lazy, for although they don't accomplish much, they're well rested."

            PJTT

~"If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim'."

            Lyndon Johnson

~"They read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

            Abraham Lincoln (speaking of people of the North and South during the Civil War)

~"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
            Mitt Romney, wannabe President

~"I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress."

            Ronald Reagan

~"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

            Leona Helmsley, wannabe human being and billionaire

~"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country."

Michelle Obama

~"It's like deja-vu, all over again."

Yogi Berra

~"I am on my way to Massachusetts, where I have a son at school, who, if report be true, already knows much more than his father."

Abraham Lincoln

 And my all-time favorite...

~"Never tease an armed midget with a high-five."

            PJTT

Love and quotation marks,

PJTT

copyright 2014 Krissongs Inc.

Cross Your Eyes And Dot Your Tees

"Klaatu barada nikto".

No, that isn't the Latin translation of a sentence from the liturgy of the All John All The Time World Church, as performed by your Pope Guy, John The Tall, leader and head-chef of the AJATTWC, in my quest to spread the message of the "soothing balm of Johnism"; it's the Roman Catholics that used to do that Latin thing, although I understand they've pretty much dropped it now, considering that, well, d'uh, Latin isn't spoken anywhere in the world these days.

No, that's a phrase from one of the all-time great sci-fi movies ever, the 1951 classic "The Day The Earth Stood Still" (not to be confused with "The Day The Fish Came Out", a 1967 comedy about "a weapon more dangerous than a nuclear weapon", which seems like an unusual theme for a comedy), starring Michael Rennie as "Klaatu", the space alien that came to Earth to give us the somber message that if the people of this world didn't clean up our collective acts (speaking of nuclear weapons), the planetary alliance to which his planet belonged would blow the living bejeezus out of us, and that would be that.

They never identified the planet that Klaatu was from, but I suspect it was Zatox. It's also noteworthy that the movie was released the same year I was born, making us both geriatric cases, which is much evidenced in the movie by the rather primitive music and special effects; I have neither.

We were also deeply invested in the Korean War in '51; President Truman was the initiator of the American foreign policy of involvement in "police actions" in far-away countries that waste vast amounts of treasure and cost thousands of lives unnecessarily, and accomplish nothing. (I remember the first time, as a kid in school, when one of the nuns at St. Jude's mentioned Truman by his full name; I thought she was calling him "Harry Ass" Truman, and I couldn't believe she said it.) Despite Harry's getting us involved in Korea, which I'm not sure he had much of a choice about, and being a Democrat, I have always thought him to be one of the better Presidents this country has ever had.)

But I digest.

Anyway, Klaatu told Helen Benson (played by a very good-looking Patricia Neal), one of his fellow boarding-house roomies, after she guessed that he wasn't from Akron OH, that she was to say this to Gort, the 8 foot tall robot that was standing guard outside the spaceship in which Klaatu came to Earth, in case anything bad happened to him (Klaatu), like say a bunch of xenophobic Earthlings shot his butt.

Which of course they ultimately did.

I love this movie, but I've always had a problem with that line. Obviously, given the context, if translated to English it would read, "Klaatu has bought the farm, now go find his dead butt and save him from the heathen Earth aliens before they eat him, or worse, turn him into a Republican."

More or less.

Here's my objection: based on my translation, painstakingly derived from the original Zatoxian, there should be a comma after "barada", as in "Klaatu barada, nikto." You could even have used a semi-colon, which is, according to my Webster's New World Dictionary Of The American Language, which is not to be confused with English necessarily, "a mark of punctuation indicating a degree of separation greater than that marked by a comma and less than that marked by the period".

In American, there should have been a comma at least; in Zatoxian, hard to say.

(George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, once remarked that England and America were "two nations divided by a common language".)

I can't speak for the English, or the French, or the Belarusians, but Americans tend to screw up punctuation pretty regularly, assuming they use it at all.

Case in point, from a real CraigsList ad I saw recently on the Huffington Post, in an article naming the "Eight Strangest Ads Ever On CraigsList", from a guy trying to sell his pick-up truck (and just ignore the fact that the reason he's selling the vehicle is because it has become a four-wheeled bee-hive; that's another issue altogether):

"$1200 obo this has been a good truck for me but i have to sell it because i cant ever get to it with all of the bees around it they have been in and around it for almost 2 months now and i havent been able to get near 5 feet or else i get stung and im sick of it i still have welts from months ago stingings and i cant even get to work because i cant get to my truck so i have to sell it test drives at ur own risk i cant go with you too many bees"

Not bad...a one hundred and four word paragraph with not one punctuation mark. As in none, nada, zip, bupkis, zilch, close your eyes and how many do you see, zero, none. (His spelling and use of capitalization leave something to be desired as well.)

The antithesis to this lack of sentence discernment is the person who over-uses punctuation, another horror.

(Full disclosure here: I am guilty of being a serial abuser of commas and semicolons; if you've ever read any of my posts, you'll know from whence I speak. I tend to beat the crap out of quotation marks and parentheses as well.)

But to my way of thinking, better too many than that abomination above. But that's just me, and what do I know?

I have a family member whose punctuation mark of choice is the exclamation point, as in any sentence that she is trying to express any enthusiasm or shock or surprise is punctuated thusly:

"The grass was green!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I will not reveal the name of this abuser of the "sudden, vehement utterance" point (thank you again, Websters), other than to say that it's my lovely daughter. (Oh, that was subtle.)

Apostrophes are another source of frustration for those of us who believe that written American is rapidly going down the shitter.

Simple rule...if it belongs to someone/thing, use an apostrophe; if its merely plural, don't.

Geez; what in the world are schools teaching kids today?

My only comment on periods will be that I'm sorry women have to have them every 28 days or so; I understand they're unpleasant.

Did you know that bologna is made from cow elbows? For that matter, were you even aware that cows HAD elbows?

Love and !";:(,.'s,

PJTT

copyright 2014 Krissongs Inc.

"Dilbert" cartoon, copyright Scott Adams