World Press Freedom Day
Sunday was World Press Freedom Day. Enjoy press freedom for the few more days left before its death. “First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that,” is true, and a riff on Niemollers famous recitation, which ended “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
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Alexei “Whoever Could He Be Talking About” Navalny
 Quotes Of The Week (clarifications are in [])
In [place]  an authoritarian leader is running the country. You can’t fight [glorious leader]  with elections because he controls them. That’s why demonstrations are the most effective approach. Unfortunately [place]  has sunk to this primitive level.
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I really [despise]  the people in power. I [despise] them with every fiber of my being. That is what drives me in almost everything I do.
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Quote This Quotation
How often do you see this: “A battle of wits between unarmed opponents”
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Purity Tests Revealed
I took a 100-question as a freshman. A decade later, there was a 400 question test at The Tech. There is also an MIT Dr. Seuss test. A quick Google search claimed there are tests with 1,000 questions. Continued Here
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“Continued Here” Proliferates
When the Internet became ubiquitous, it was no longer true that “Every story you are interested in is too short; every story you don’t care about is too long.” Thus, “continued here”marches across a column striving to meet a 750 word limit.

Tom Rush recently joined me in the “I’ll be hornswoggled” club. For 50 years (almost long as Tom has been touring) I have been quoting Winston Churchill, as he did: “On being criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition, Winston Churchill responded, ‘This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put!’”

The widely respected Quote Investigator website published a lengthy, well-researched article about the quote, concluding, more or less, that Churchill probably never said it, and if he did he was not the first.

I am required to include a final note of Cambridge humor: Tom probably learned the quote at Harvard. As there are no numbers in it, I certainly didn’t learn it at MIT.

I ran across this quotation: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so:” Hamlet in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2).

Along the same line: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional,” Buddha did not say. It’s an important idea.

I know this idea of pain/suffering changed my life. A half century of grudges, anger and hatred melted away when I reframed it. Changed nothing. Changed the way I looked at it. (You Can’t Change History But…)

– – -Stop reading here unless you are fascinated by details – – –

I couldn’t find a citation to Buddha ¹ but One Mind Dharma solved the mystery.

“[The quote] is often attributed to the Buddha incorrectly… Although this is a teaching that is certainly in-line with the Buddha’s teachings, the origins of this quotation are murky. According to Bodhipaksa of Fake Buddha Quotes, the earliest known attribution is in 1983 to Karen Casey.”

This is in line with my experience of quotations. ² Most of the universally adored quotations have been polished to a fine sheen by the game of Telephone. A word or two dropped or added by the wisdom of crowds maintains the essence of the wisdom or humor of the original, while boiling it down into a clearer and more concise expression.³ Best way to check most citations is Quote Investigator

Footnotes:

1. 1. No AIs were harmed in the search process ↩︎
2. 2. Regular readers will have heard this before. ↩︎
3. 3. Unlike this sentence ↩︎

In the movie A Lonely Place (1950) Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart): “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” This was my experience a few times in life; I hope it was yours too. Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

But…

Would we still remember this brilliant summary of love if Andrew P. Solt had said it at a party, or even before a full house at Carnegie Hall? No. Yet these are not Bogart’s words; he read them. Creation of the words makes them possible; performance make sthem memorable.

Continued over here…

Kevin Sullivan: Naming AI

My long-time friend Kevin Sullivan suggests we refer to AI as what it really is, “Artificial Information” at its best, and “Artificial Insanity” when it crashes on the shores of discussion requiring context, meaning, emotion, and abstract thought.
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Tom Rush: Odd Number, Literally

Odd Number, Literally
“A sign on the 405 going to LAX warns that the High Occupancy Lane requires at least 2 people in the vehicle, and violators will face ‘A Minimum $341 Fine’! How in the world did they arrive at that very specific number?”

Well, I decided to look it up, and of course the answer is bureaucracy.

The total cost of a first-time carpool lane ticket in California is significantly higher than the base fine suggests. The total amount includes state and county penalty assessments, surcharges, and fees that are added to every traffic infraction. Like a spa fee at a hotel.

These charges include a State Penalty Assessment, a County Penalty Assessment, a Court Operations Assessment, Conviction Assessment and an Assessment Assessment. OK, not that last one. Additional fees and a state surcharge further increase the total payable amount, explaining why a minor ticket results in a substantial financial penalty.

Tom Rush: Ageism

On the flight out we were all given slips of paper that said, among other things, that to consume alcohol you had to be 21. Just not fair! Very few of us on the plane were 21 years old.

I learned years ago, from an Irish friend at CMP, that only the ignorant call it Londonderry; the town is Derry. I have been schooled again about the Irish Tangle.

My friend Kevin Sullivan, on the recent meme Crime Shows Distributed by the BBC and Set in the Following Locales: I understand that brevity is the soul of wit, but still took some umbrage with the inclusion of the Republic of Ireland in the map showing “British” <anything>.  In a broad sense, “British” could historically mean “once part of the British Empire.” though that seems to be a stretch in applying it to modern pop culture.  Unfortunately, “Crime Shows Distributed by the BBC and Set in the Following Locales” doesn’t pass muster as being concise, precise, or witty. I suspect only someone with an Irish heritage would notice or care.

Note: He did conclude “no harm/no foul.”

My response:

PSACOT, like the BBC, tries to inform educate and entertain. Or for that matter, RTE, the Irish public broadcaster, tries to challenge, educate and entertain. I would have thought RTE would have included “disparage all things British, in an unfair and imbalanced way.” I meant the BBC crime shows to entertain not inform. I have other Irish readers; I am sure their umbrage is in the mail.

Einstein: Right Again
Tom Rush (fantastic folk singer, reformed Harvard Graduate) quote collection for August 2025: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
—Albert Einstein
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Gandhi: Advice to Our Leader
“Before you act, if you are confused, or have difficulty knowing what to do, think of the poorest person you have met and ask yourself, ‘Will this act be of any benefit to them?'”
 — Mahatma Gandhi
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Medical Advice
“Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.”
 — Dave Barry [Thank you Jim Berger!]

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
—Mae West
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“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
— Saul Bellow
and
“Sometimes it is genius. Sometimes it is gibberish.”
Folksinger Tom Rush on the same subject
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 “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, on getting what you voted for.
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“Every decision brings with it some good, some bad, some lessons, and some luck. The only thing that’s for sure is that indecision steals many years from many people who wind up wishing they’d just had the courage to leap.” [as I said in my series There Are No Little Things.]
—Doe Zantamata

If this were a government site, this item would be instantly deleted for use of the word equal. Maybe my whole column. Maybe my whole life on line. Maybe my social security checks. You get the idea.

While at MIT, I didn’t recognize the origin of the frequently used phrase “All things being equal, which, of course they never are.”

“All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.”
–William of Occam

I’m “Things are never as bad as we fear nor as good as we hope.”
–François Théodore Thistlethwaite
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 “The answer to all question headlines is no.”
— Ian Betteridge…
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“Every choice you make makes you.”
–John C. Maxwell