Plato's career change

How to make it to the age of ninety-seven?

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, shares his secret.

More homicidal than Taliban and Somalian pirates!

Somalian pirates kill four Americans

(The Telegraph, Feb. 22, 2011)

Taliban kill seven Afghan police

(Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 2014)

New Year rice cakes kill nine in Japan

(BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, Jan. 5, 2014)

Homicidal rice cakes? Couldn't the imbeciles at BBC News have worded the headline in a saner way, e.g., "9 choke to death in Japan while eating New Year rice cakes"?  Oh well...

The final nail in Jean Piaget's coffin...

Boy, 2, accidentally shoots and kills mom in Idaho Walmart

The Associated Press  

Posted: Dec 30, 2014 3:29 PM ET

What a thrill it is to live in a world in which a fatal shooting by a 2-year-old is described by the media as accidental.  Could this act have been intentional?  A revenge for infrequent diaper changes and cheap baby formula?  A cold-blooded publicity stunt to secure a seven-figure book deal for the future memoir "The tot who fucked Jean Piaget and the entire field of Developmental Psychology"?

While the world contemplates the plausibility of such alternatives, I'm sure the retards at AP, BBC, Reuters, and other news outlets are struggling right this very moment to come up with headlines for the first day of the new year.  I feel like being helpful on this New Year's Eve, so how about this one: 

Cheerleader at Bennington College accidentally fellates six members of the basketball team.

People are strange...

As one who deeply admires the otherworldly, alien music of Helmut Lachenmann, I was jolted when I recently read an interview with the pianist Rolf Hind in which he said that Lachenmann's favorite composer is ... Ennio Morricone.  (Rolf Hind worked closely with Lachenmann on the composer's piano concerto Ausklang.)

A truly biblical way to make a living...

The two or three thousand dollars ... I am paid for commissions recompenses my work at the rate of about twenty-five cents an hour.
Elliott Carter, "The Orchestral Composer's Point of View", The Orchestral Composer's Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Music by Those Who Wrote It, R.S. Hines, ed., University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.

The minimum wage in the U.S.A. as of February 1970: $1.45 an hour.
source: Minimum Wage and Maximum Hours Standards Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1988 Report to the Congress under Section 4(d)(1) of the FLSA.

... to be esteemed is better than silver or gold. 
The Book of Proverbs 22:1