Author Archives: nwfries

Some of the most profound moments of any life are lived between three and four in the morning, when you stare at the ceiling as the silence roars.

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King – Rich Cohen

Churchill understood the power of symbolic acts.

He stopped at an air-raid shelter where a bomb had killed forty people and a large crowd was gathering. For a moment, Ismay feared that the onlookers might resent Churchill’s arrival, out of indignation at the government’s failure to protect the city, but these East Enders seemed delighted. Ismay heard someone shout, “Good old Winnie! We thought you’d come and see us. We can take it. Give it ’em back.”

Colin Perry, who had witnessed the raid from his bicycle, saw Churchill and wrote in his diary, “He looked invincible, which he is. Tough, bulldogged, piercing.”

The Splendid & The Vile – Erik Larson

On one sunny day in August, journalist Virginia Cowles found herself watching a major air battle while lying on the grass atop Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover.

“The setting was majestic,” she wrote. “In front of you stretched the blue water of the Channel and in the distance you could distinguish the hazy outline of the coast of France.” Houses lay below. Boats and trawlers drifted in the harbor, agleam with sun. The water sparkled. Above hung twenty or more immense gray barrage balloons, like airborne manatees. Meanwhile, high above, pilots fought to the death.

“You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats,” she wrote. “All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts.”

Flaming planes arced toward the ground, “leaving as their last testament a long black smudge against the sky.” She heard engines and machine guns. “You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky,” she wrote. “You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.”

The Splendid & the Vile – Erik Larson

Among the diversions Benny enjoyed with his grandfather in the summer and fall of 1783 were the grand spectacles of the first balloon flights. The age of air travel began in June when two brothers, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, launched an unmanned hot-air balloon near Lyons that rose to a height of six thousand feet. The Franklins were not there, but they did witness in late August the first unmanned flight using hydrogen. A scientist named Jacques Charles launched a twelve-foot-diameter silk balloon filled with hydrogen produced by pouring oil of vitriol over fiery iron filings. With great fanfare, it took off from Paris in front of fifty thousand spectators and floated for more than forty-five minutes before landing in a village more than fifteen miles away. “The country people who saw it fall were frightened,” Franklin wrote Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society,”and attacked it with stones and knives so that it was much mangled.”

From Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”

⁃ Richard Feynman

“If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?”
– Andrew Stanton, Director of Toy Story, Wall E and more

“In the end, it’s all about what you want to be, not what you want to have. 

To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. 

To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point.

When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.”

– Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

– Dr. Mark Vonnegut, 1985. Letter to his dad.

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” — Socrates

Kurt Vonnegut is good for the soul. Below excerpt from his book Bluebeard, told from the perspective of an older artist looking back on his life.

“How good were those pictures of mine which
Dan Gregory looked at so briefy before he shoved
Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age – a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory.

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people
had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at
night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like
that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with
maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.'”

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say
to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”