#MelvilleMonday From Herman Melville's novel Typee (1846), Ch. 17. 🕯️

#MelvilleMonday "We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death." - Herman Melville, Redburn (1849)

#GetrudeStein #Stein26

Ocean 5 by Piet Mondrian, 1914 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137581

In the literary world of #GertrudeStein: www.craftliterary.com/2024/07/24/c... #Stein26

To be old to ourselves in our feeling is a losing of ourselves just like dropping off into sleeping. To be awake, we must have it that we are ourselves young and grown men and women. #themakingofamericans #GertrudeStein #Stein26

Yes, we, who are always all our lives, to ourselves grown young men & women, when we think back to them who make for us a beginning, it is always as grown men & women or as little children that we feel them, such as them whose lives we have just been thinking. #themakingofamericans #GetrudeStein

Merry Christmas, when disappointments and horrid humans are replaced with wrapped presents, lights, dreams and happy music. Children laughing, adults cooking and eating. Family of your choice and a new year to try again.

Why is #KristiNoem allowed to disrespect rules of law. Here she's grilled but keeps interrupting with boilerplate nonsense. youtu.be/a_-mU8KVdUw?...

What's really going on in American housing. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/b...

Announcing the 2026 Leo Tolstoy Chapter-a-Day Read-Along. Hope you will join! nicksenger.com/readalong/an... #tolstoyreadalong #AmericanReadalong

Don't forget. Another reminder.

Aging is not fun but at least we're warm & cozy amidst our troubles. C.C. & Given don't have that. They're stuck on an old boat & lose hope as people disappear since they lack funds & have to beg. Circumstances left them out to sea. Get into the holiday spirit & give. gofund.me/12f580091

They don't have this in orange?

“His abusive and excessive use of the GV Jet for his personal adventures and the assignment of SWAT-qualified special agents to guard his girlfriend are indicative of his lack of leadership experience, judgment and humility,” Chris O’Leary, a senior F.B.I. agent. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/u...

K thought about it for a while, whistling slightly, not w his lips but through his clenched teeth, letting air out through them. "Well it's hard to work out which is worse off, it's even harder than competing over achievement. One's own troubles are always the worst." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

But the patient's organism isn't aware that our knowledge is divided into separate branches. You see, the organism isn't divided. As Voltaire said, "Drs prescribe medicines about which they know little for an organism about which they know less." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

They talked as friends when they met at a scientific conference. Yet confessing to being ill was like having confessed to a crime: immediately they had lost the key to the equality they had once possessed. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

D. Tikhonovich had suffered from persecution several times during his life: for revolutionary activities in 1902 when he & some students spent a week or so in jail; because his late father was a priest; then for being a brigade medical officer in the Tsarist army during WWI. #CancerWard

"It makes no difference if you had 10 proletarian grandfathers, if you're not a worker yourself you're no proletarian,"boomed K. "He's not a proletarian, he's a son of a bitch. The only thing (Rusanov) is after is a pension, I heard him say so himself." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

He enjoyed taking step after step across the clean, dry asphalt, particularly as it presaged a speedy return first to his beautiful apartment where he would rest, & later to work & activity he enjoyed so keenly. It was not only the treatment that worn PN down, but the dull inactivity. #CancerWard

She was utterly crushed now. No longer Dyomka's senior by a full year in school, she lost her advantage of extra experience, her knowledge of life & the 3 journeys she had made. She seemed to Dyomka almost like a part of him. He was very pleased to see her. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Dyomka was delighted to see Oleg & greeted him like an elder brother. They were like relatives, those friends of his from the former ward. Some of the women patients sent him food; there it was on his bedside table under a napkin. None of the new arrivals would visit or bring anything. #CancerWard

He was observing this patient w the shaggy black hair. The main thing he noticed was his scar. It was an interesting scar; he could imagine it freshly cut, like a case recently brought to him in the surgical ward. He wondered what would have had to be done. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

💯 this is tragic. Without the digital archive from the 1990s and 2000s, historians may never get to assess how the early internet evolved to shape what we are living now.

Libraries matter. Access matters. After years of legal battles, the Internet Archive is still here—and still fighting for a world where everyone can read, learn, and remember. @arstechnica.com tells the story: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Don't you? Certainly not the weak and despised tyrant DT.

This was a really cranky argument. "It's not the duty of science to create ethical values," explained Vadim. "Science creates material values, that's how it earns its keep. Anyway, what valùes do you call ethical?" "Values directed toward the mutual illumination of human souls," he said. #CancerWard

Vadim had a throbbing sense of loneliness...These hopes & despairs beat so insistently in his headthat he found it was no longer fully grasping what he read. He would read a whole page & then realized that he hadn't understood it. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

No matter how quietly they talked, there was an atmosphere of strain bc Sulubin was obviously listening in to their conversation all the time. There he sat, the eagle owl, silent & motionless on the bed. Ever since the man had appeared on the ward, his presence was impossible to forget. #CancerWard

Chaga tea is made from the chagamushroom, which typically grows on the trunks of birch trees in the Northern Hemisphere. Substances present in chaga may effectively prevent cancer & slow tumor growth. It inhibited growth & promoted the death of colon cancer cells. WebMD. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

On Vadim's windowsill stood a jar containing a dark brown infusion of chaga. The other patients used to come up & look at it curiously. Are you drinking it? Yes, I am. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

"He has to know everything doesn't he?said Vera Kornilyevna, shaking her head from side to side. These days our patients are so educated, we'll be handing them over our white coats soon." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Of course doctors must carry greater responsibility, but at the same time their patient quota ought to be lowered by 2 or 3 times. Look at outpatients: 9 an hour! Isn't it appalling? Give us a chance to talk to each patient in peace & quiet, & to think in peace & quiet. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Every Tuesday and every Friday we surgeons take enormous risks, we walk into minefields. Our work is entirely based on trust. A mother ought to entrust her child to us, not stand up as a witness against us in a courtroom. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Silk thread was commonly used as a non-absorbable surgical suture material in cancer operations and other surgeries during the 1950s. It was a standard material alongside catgut, linen, & cotton before the widespread adoption of synthetic sutures. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

She was a bit of a psycho, u only had to cross her to see that. There was no way of being certain whether her silk thread was properly sterilized. And this was what the whole operation depended on...Damn these women! They don't know the simple masculine rule: working & sex don't mix. #CancerWard

Everything was discussed in euphemisms & half-allusions (sometimes rven substitutes for substitutes), or else in a way that was a direct antithesis to the truth. #CancerWard ##Solzhenitsyn25

There were times when the pressure of it all got Lev Leonidovich down & he felt he couldn't carry on another day. All he wanted to do was to break w the clinic & go somewhere else. But where could he go? Any new place would have its own senior dr who might be worse..." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

"...You'll be clutching at it next year, even though it's not there. But when it hurts you, try to remember: it's not there! It'll make you feel better. The most important thing is ur going to live now, see? As for your leg__to hell w it!" #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

DT helped so much w the tariffs that I just had to pay $6 to get a package from India. Listen people, check where your purchase is coming from since you'll get a surprise notice from FedEx. Thanks DT, the people wind up paying again. What good r tariffs then? What good are you, except to yourself?

The holidays are coming. Be of good cheer and generosity for my destitute, unwell, aging friends. Whenever you give, something good returns to you. Yes, America is hurting but fling some cash to CC and Given. It's worth it.

What's really going on. substack.com/@senschiff/n...

Another loser getting hired to go after professionals who criticised Trump. Wasting taxpayer money AGAIN! wapo.st/480vRIK

"We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves." -Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"...with winter looming, and assuming successful outcomes of further cardiology (for both Given and me) in Rome, we will likely begin a fourth year aboard Wrack, ignoring the challenges of old age..." Please read our latest update. We really need your help. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

“The purpose of propaganda is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” ― Aldous Huxley

We know who the real freeloaders are. The question is how do we change that.

Oh, for a painter of emotion and deep skill. Now all we get is graphic design.

Some great Dr. Seuss mocking DT: