« January 01, 2023 - January 07, 2023 | Main | January 15, 2023 - January 21, 2023 »
January 14, 2023
Ile St. Louis: Best Address in Paris.
Ditch your American companions and learn something. Yank tourists think Ile St. Louis is about an ice cream shop at its edge near Notre Dame. It's really not. You can slurp ice cream all you want when you're back in Elkhart or Sioux City. You are in Paris right now. This is your life, and life's short. Please walk around, okay? As a village it's over 2000 years old. Escape your American Bubble tourist group. Escape, if you must, your family and friends. Go it alone. Hang out with no one. Or meet a South African woman named Zoe who's lived across from Cluny for eight years, plays the viola and has never visited Cleveland or Chicago. Talk to her. Tell her about those places. And about your life. Learn something. Change your life.
By Richard Nahem of I Prefer Paris
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2023
Sensitive Litigation Moment #129: Lawyers Aren't Royalty.
It's not about the lawyers anymore. No one cares you're a lawyer. Not impressive. A big so-what. In America, they made it easy to become a lawyer. Some day, everyone, including your waitress in Richmond, Kentucky, will be a lawyer. So get a head start on those you can. Distinguish yourself by serving clients. And get higher standards.
See Rule 9: Be There For Clients--24/7 from our Mr. Rogers-like but deadly serious 12 Rules.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 12, 2023
Yankee Mystic Ralph Waldo Emerson v. Louisville Slugger Hunter S. Thompson.
Writing in 1841, Emerson, essayist, poet and deeply spiritual Transcendentalist, is almost derisive about our progress. Hamstrung by tradition, routine and yearnings for safety, we (non-Emersonian mere mortals) cannot or will not grow:
To us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks. We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.
We are idolaters of the Old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Essays, First Series, "Compensation" (1841)
Emerson in 1857
Thompson, writing about 130 years later, while covering the turbulent, exhausting contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, including George McGovern's star-crossed campaign against Richard Nixon for the White House, is far more charitable, struggling to be emphatic with 20th century Everyman, and funny, as always--but he seems to reach the same conclusion:
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity. These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.
--Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Thompson circa 2003. He died in 2005.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2023
Armstrong Chapel, 1831
Posted by JD Hull at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)