Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Friday ADD Irregulars, WSN Speculators, PHAM & Misfits, Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Later Dayers, Conversant, Lurkers and all the rest of good souls wandering about on Locals on a Friday.
A little read from Viva la Repartee complied by Mardy Grothe,
In 1882, the twenty-eight-year-old Oscar Wilde embarked on a yearlong lecture tour of America. During that much heralded trip, he traveled to more than seventy cities and towns across the U.S. and Canada, lecturing on art and the aesthetic movement to intellectuals in Boston, farmers in Nebraska, and miners in Colorado. With his velvet coat, frilly silk shirts, and patent leather shoes, Wilde looked every inch the English dandy. He also shocked people with his open displays of sensuality (when he met Walt Whitman in New Jersey, the two men greeted each other with a kiss on the lips). Wilde’s tour started with a bang on January 2, 1882, when he arrived at New York Harbor. Asked by a U.S. Customs official if he had anything to declare, he famously replied:
I have nothing to declare but my genius.
A decade earlier, when the teenage Wilde was a student at Trinity College in Dublin, the provost of the school was a larger-than-life figure named John Pentland Mahaffy. An ancient history scholar, Mahaffy was an extraordinarily clever fellow whose witty replies were legendary. In one popular story, he was engaged in a heated debate with a women’s rights advocate when the woman charged, “What is the difference between man and woman?” In an instant, Mahaffy answered:
Madam, I can’t conceive.
Mahaffy’s brilliant reply—simultaneously blending the two separate meanings of the word conceive—has been celebrated by language lovers ever since.
In the age of WOKE witty remarks and funny quips are enjoyed by fewer and fewer individuals. Many are conditioned to join the ranks of the pre-offended or perpetually offended. I cannot think of a more miserable state of mind or operative attitude to embrace than one of anticipated offense and every ready injury. You will not know any happiness and probably experience a ton of emotional or mental maladies in your inability to laugh at reality let alone trying to appreciate it.
I would think to think I am a common sense skeptic, I am conservative in many regards but not all, I am a major fan of wrestling with reality rather than engaging in words games to deny reality. I tend to be a let bygones by bygones and as long as people aren't exploiting others in their actions. Exploitation- my simple definition - taking advantage of the naïve or innocent because of their ignorance or trust (especially children) or acting against the expressed will of another by the use of shame, guilt or intimidation to bend their wills to your beliefs. Yes, yes, I know about the abuse scandal of 2002 and the Inquisition and know the irony, but only the WOKE believe in zero forgiveness and holding others to the worst chapters of the past. Personal and communal reform are always needed, but reform honors and sifts the past and does not completely condemn it. You will never know wholeness of person if you do nothing but reject your past. You gut your personal narrative and will suffer the consequences.
Remember gentle reader, you can never escape the sins of the past with the Gospel of WOKE and you are an inescapable inheritor of the failings of you ancestors. Only the atonement and willingness to public degrade yourself and uncritically accept the ideology of the WOKE can you enter the lowest rung of acceptability. Stay in you lane racist and acknowledge your superiors.
I am listening Nerdrotic talking about season 3 of Picard. I am a kindred spirit with Gary and almost 100% accept his analysis of destroyed franchises and corrupted story telling in the age of WOKE. I am still suffering a bad case of curmudgeon shock at the desecration of Luke Skywalker in the Last Jedi. The Mandalorian won me over temporality to Disney+ for two seasons but that was about the only reason to subscribe to it. When the "Don't say gay" lie was promoted in the media and the Mouse signed on for it, I was done. The Evangelical Wokes never bothered to read the bill or if they did they immediately embraced the lies and repeated it often enough to make it credible.
Sorry for digressing on my curmudgeon rant. I am a mostly joyful realist, not an naïve one, and my inner curmudgeon is nourished by what I see as the rejection of reality and the constant churning of the narrative crock of crap I see the outpouring from the CABAL day in and day out. Skepticism, mockery, a playful wit and sense of humor make watching the crapfest manageable. Of course faith is the bedrock, but that is a given in my engagement with reality. I am a realist because of my faith, not in contradiction to it. There is one reality - try to make some headway into it before your expiration date catches up with you. Have a great day my friend and thanks for indulging me if you have read along this far.
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
Padre - Tom Miller invites you to a Coffee Talk, Speakeasies, Schmoozes, Tea Times, Afterhours and other gatherings.
https://teams.live.com/meet/93792382189049?p=DiBHsYfuECPgDrG7vO
2026 Coffee Talk with the ADD Irregulars
Thursday, January 1, 2026
6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (CST)
Occurs every day starting 1/1 until 12/31/2027
Coffee Talk - Daily beginning at 6:00 AM Central Time Zone - USA
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Other chats as posted in the community.
From Aloha Hawaii
In 2007, the state froze its spending. The school in Hāna still had teams to send out.
Hāna is a town of about 1,500 people at the end of a 52-mile road from Kahului. About 620 curves. 59 bridges, 46 of them one lane wide.
The man up the road had been a lot of things before Hāna. A general's son from Brownsville, Texas. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. An Army captain who flew helicopters. A janitor at Columbia's studio in Nashville, sweeping floors.
Then the songs came. Me and Bobby McGee. Help Me Make It Through the Night. A Golden Globe for A Star Is Born. The Highwaymen, with Cash, Willie and Waylon.
In 1990, Kris Kristofferson moved his wife Lisa and their young children to the far end of that road. "It reminds me of where I grew up in Brownsville, Texas. It's like coming home."
At Hāna's school, they were parents like everybody else. "They are regular parents who helped out a lot," said Rick Paul, then the principal. Lisa drove the kids and chaperoned years of overnight ...
XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
