Friday Unrelated Information

1. Happy birthday to Sir William Gilbert, half of Gilbert and Sullivan and the librettist responsible for "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General."

2. Science may be inching ever closer to giving us lab-grown meat. It reminds me of all sorts of science fiction.

3. Here's something to ponder from Ed Abbey, whom I always thought of as curmudgeonly. But maybe he wasn't as hard as I thought:
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

Happy Belated Birthday, Ed Abbey

Saturday would have been Edward Abbey's 84th birthday. (I think he's still waiting for someone to take out the Glen Canyon Dam.*) Here are two of my favorite quotes of his:

"Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation."

and

"A drink a day keeps the shrink away."

Amen, brother.

*dear FBI, if you are monitoring the interwebs, I'm not a terrorist. That was just the plot point of The Monkey Wrench Gang.