Neal's Musings (Hardly Political)

THIS IS THE DEFAULT CATEGORY on this blog and was previously the General Observations category. Here you’ll find articles about my wife and my cat, anecdotes and jokes—basically anything that doesn’t fit into any of the other, more specified categories.

Most of the pieces here are reasonably gentle—those essays or articles that contain any vitriol will be found in the Neal’s Rants (Really Political) category.

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that’s what I’ve been telling people for fifty years!

September 13, 2020August 19, 2020 by Neal

NOAM CHOMSKY HAD AN INTERVIEW scheduled with Anand Giridharadas for The.Ink website. While each interview promises the potential of unique answers and even the possibility of new thoughts, depending on the interviewer, Chomsky prepared some notes to make certain he mentioned certain points. So, Noam called me and said, “Neal, here is what I am preparing to say in my interview with Anand Giridharadas: ‘The left position is you rarely support anyone. READ MORE

to keep my magic true, you must do one thing

October 16, 2020May 30, 2020 by Neal

HAL HAD IT MADE! He was young, handsome, and smart with a very good job as an accountant with a successful local company. But he had one weak spot: He liked to gamble. A lot. Unfortunately, he usually lost. A lot. To catch up with his creditors, he embezzled $500,000 from his employer, all of which he lost gambling. READ MORE

why I’ve been missing during the coronavirus pandemic

June 27, 2020May 29, 2020 by Neal

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BLOG POSTS GONE, long time passing? The past few months have seen absolutely nothing posted on any of my blogs. This does not mean that I have not been busy. I just haven’t been busy publishing things I wrote. At a time when more people are probably reading things on the internet that they never had time to even find before, I have been silent. READ MORE

I just launched a new publication on medium all about elvis

December 27, 2019November 24, 2019 by Neal

WE LAUNCHED our new publication Tell It Like It Was on Medium on January 1, 2019. The articles within address popular music, primarily rock & roll from the ’60s. “We” are John Ross (my favorite music blogger), Lew Shiner (my favorite novelist), and myself. We love the music (and the books and the movies and the styles and the girls girls girls) of that era. READ MORE

about the bleeding heart liberal petitions page on facebook

December 27, 2019November 18, 2019 by Neal

I HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE titled Bleeding Heart Liberal Petitions. Most days, I receive a slew of emails with petitions for various causes such as saving an endangered species, urging my representatives in state and federal government to vote for or against a particular bill, protest an injustice, etc. I read them all, sign most of them, and add a few to the Facebook page. READ MORE

capitalizing articles and prepositions in your title

August 19, 2019 by Neal

Medium IMAGE PrintingPlate Pixabay FreePhotos 1500 crop

IF YOU ARE GOING TO WRITE FOR PUBLICATION, you need access to at least one English language grammar and usage stylebook. No matter how good a writer you may be, no matter how much experience you may have, you will use that book frequently. (Unless you have a photographic memory). READ MORE

people love farts and can’t seem to get enough of them

March 24, 2020July 17, 2019 by Neal

PEOPLE LOVE FARTS! Not, you know, enduring them. But they love hearing them and hearing about them: fart jokes will probably be with us until Sheldon Cooper’s dreams of our brains being moved to non-tissue bodies are realized. If someone turns their nose up at a fart joke, you’re probably wasting your time in any kind of conversation with that person. READ MORE

twisting with john and lew at the tell it like it was a-go-go

February 2, 2020January 17, 2019 by Neal

FOR THE PAST FEW MONTHS, I have been involved in a rather large project with two other writers, John Ross and Lew Shiner. I assembled a list of every record to make it to #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 chart from the beginning of 1960 through the end of 1969. READ MORE

we keep on keepin’ on telling it like it was

January 13, 2019January 12, 2019 by Neal

Medium IMAGE drums bw Pixabay 700456 Dmaland0 1500 crop yellow

MY ATTENTION remains focused on Tell It Like It Was, my new publication on Medium. And Tell It Like It Was remains focused on music—mostly music of the ’60s but we will get into the rock & roll and rhythm & blues before and after that decade eventually. READ MORE

FAVORITE QUOTES

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – Nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"While all acronyms are initialisms, most initialisms are not acronyms." – Q (lol)

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle