№ 335. Vintage Americana

Santa Monica Sunset

Budget Mozart in Central Park

№ 334. LA Envy

In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer hates Los Angeles. He worships New York. LA, he thinks, is the antithesis of NYC. 

Seinfeld and the gang definitely loved New York, its minutiae, and nonsense. 

№ 333. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 4

"If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” But, really, how can you tell? So much of what is happening between the public and Silicon Valley is out of view — algorithms written and controlled by wizards who are able to extract value from your identity in ways you could never do for yourself."

№ 332. Forgiveness in the Time of Terror

"The incident that led to the first-ever legal challenge to President Rodrigo Duterte's Oplan TokHang is a story made for the movies."

I wonder, after enough years have passed for all of us living this age to care, would reconciliation be possible? Would forgetting help us heal and move on? Is this an unexpected or even an unwelcome purpose of forgetting?

We forget in order to forgive. Time will erase from our collective consciousness the scarred memories of the killings today.

And sometimes we do things so stupid that even God struggles to forgive us. --- Crime and Punishment

The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I [The quality of mercy is not strained]

№ 331. Waking Up To Binary Dreams 3

Is it safe to assume that being tongue-tied lost in translation will become obsolete with Google's new technology? 

Yes? No? Maybe? Don't know? Who cares?

№ 330. Barak Obama

"My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up — their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.

№ 329. Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Nature’s first green is gold, 

Her hardest hue to hold. 

Her early leaf’s a flower; 

But only so an hour. 

Then leaf subsides to leaf. 

So Eden sank to grief, 

So dawn goes down to day. 

Nothing gold can stay.

№ 328.Lies, Lies and More Lies 2

To rebuild belief in the power and value of truth, we can’t dodge its complexity. Truths can be and often are difficult to understand, discover, explain, verify. They are also disturbingly easy to hide, distort, abuse or twist. Often we cannot claim with any certainty to know the truth. We need to take stock of the various kinds of real and supposed truths out there and understand how to test their authenticity.