Quote of the Post

"But alas! I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises, that the organ which enables me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity."

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

For Cats (Quote of the Post)

"In 1830 it was a snug collection of modest one- and two- story frame dwellings, whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from sight by climbing tangles of rose vines, honeysuckles, and morning glories....When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there--in sunny weather-- stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then that house was complete, and its contentment and peace made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible. A home without a cat-- and a well fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat-- may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?"

Mark Twain The Tragedy of Puddin'head Wilson

For Squeaky and Bester and Wheezer and Weebles and Tiger and Stymie. And all the other well- revered felines I have known.

Carved in Stone

  Two American tourists were arrested in Italy for allegedly carving their names into the walls of the Coliseum. Good. It is wonderful to see the preservation of history, rather than the defacing and destruction of it.
  Such vandalism was once the norm for tourists. The Temple of Dendur, which now rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is covered with carved names from the 19th century. Mark Twain made the following observation, and wish, in Innocents Abroad: " One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would inscribe their poor little names on the walls of Baalbec's magnificent ruins, and would add the town, the county and the state they came from- and swearing thus, be infallibly correct. It is a pity some great ruin does not fall in and flatten some of these reptiles, and scare their kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments again, forever."
  The bitterest irony, of course, is the complete, and deliberate destruction being committed by the reptiles of ISIS, while the case in Italy plays out.