3 minutes ago, Stormbringer said:

This guy is cruelly laughing at us and our desperation... 

 

 

If you think that's bad, Check out Robert Caro's series- He's been writing the Lyndon Johnson biographies since 1982.  He releases one book every decade...and he's 80 years old now.

9 minutes ago, Cult Icon said:

 

If you think that's bad, Check out Robert Caro's series- He's been writing the Lyndon Johnson biographies since 1982.  He releases one book every decade...and he's 80 years old now.

 

Oh, and I was felling really bad for those who started reading A Game of Thrones back in 1996  

20 hours ago, Stromboli1 said:

I messaged Lo. She read my message, but didn't respond.

 

did you by any chance asked her to sit on your face?  

6 minutes ago, Stormbringer said:

 

Oh, and I was felling really bad for those who started reading A Game of Thrones back in 1996  

 

are you going to watch S6 after the new book comes out?

That's the plan. But it depends on when the book comes out...

Maybe I'll just watch it. I haven't decided yet.

3 hours ago, SuperG.Girl said:

did you by any chance asked her to sit on your face?  

 

I might have asked her to do that while she smiled down at me and called me her bitch.  

 

 

Spoiler

I will send you the transcript if you're interested. 

 

It's going to be a long day, 7:30am to 11:30pm.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/02/what-cats-can-teach-us-about-how-live

What cats can teach us about how to live

We should celebrate the solitary hunters among us.

 

 

 

 

A philosopher once assured me, many years ago, that he had converted his cat to veganism. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan food? Had he presented his cat with other cats, already practising veganism, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and convinced it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor wasn’t amused, and I realised that he really believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a simple question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was supplementing its diet by covert hunting. If it ever brought home any of the carcasses – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.

It is not hard to imagine how the cat on the receiving end of this experiment in moral education must have viewed its human teacher. Perplexity at the absurdity of his behaviour would soon have been followed by contemptuous indifference. Seldom doing anything unless it serves a definite purpose or gives immediate satisfaction, cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply go their own way..........

 

For most of the time in which they have cohabited with people, cats lived outdoors. It is only relatively recently that they began to live in human households in large numbers. What is it that has allowed them to make this evolutionary step? Ailurophobes will say it is the anthropomorphism of cat lovers, who treat their feline housemates as surrogate human beings. But for many cat lovers, I suspect the opposite is true. What they cherish is not how cats resemble us, but their differences from us. Living with cats opens a window into a world beyond our own and teaches us something important about what it means to be human.

 

One of the most attractive features of cats is that contentment is their default state. Unlike human beings – particularly of the modern variety – they do not spend their days in laborious pursuit of a fantasy of happiness. They are comfortable with themselves and their lives, and remain in that condition for as long as they are not threatened. When they are not eating or sleeping, they pass the time exploring and playing, never asking for reasons to live. Life itself is enough for them.

 If there are people who can’t stand cats – and it seems there are many – one reason may be envy. As Jeffrey Masson, whose The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats is the best book on cats ever published, has written:

 

In English, if not in “cat”, the word contentment conveys something of a feeling of being at peace with the world or with yourself. It is more of a state than a fleeting emotion. A person can be happy (momentarily) without being content. Contentment cannot be purchased; happiness, on the other hand, has a price. For us, happiness is a serious business.

 

 Whereas human beings search for happiness in an ever-increasing plethora of religions and therapies, cats enjoy contentment as their birthright. Why this is so is worth exploring. Cats show no sign of regretting the past or fretting about the future. They live, absorbed in the present moment. It will be said that this is because they cannot envision the past or future. Perhaps so, though their habit of demanding their breakfast at the accustomed hour shows they do have a sense of the passage of time. But cats, unlike people, are not haunted by an anxious sense that time is slipping away. Not thinking of their lives as stories in which they are moving towards some better state, they meet each day as it comes. They do not waste their lives dreading the time when their lives must end. Not fearing death, they enjoy a kind of immortality. All animals have these qualities but they seem particularly pronounced in cats. Of all the animals that have lived closely with human beings, cats must surely be the least influenced by them.

 “When I play with my cat,” Montaigne wrote, “how do I know she is not playing with me?” With creatures that can be understood only partly by us, one can only speculate about their inner life. Yet it is tempting to suppose that the secret of feline contentment is that cats have no need to defer to a picture of themselves as they imagine they should be. Certainly they have a sense of dignity: they avoid people who treat them disrespectfully, for instance. Yet cats do not struggle to remake themselves according to any ideal self-image. Not inwardly divided, they are happy to be themselves.

 Again, it will be said that this is because they have no moral sense. There are many cases of heroic devotion in which cats have risked pain and death to protect their kittens. But it is true that they cannot be taught moral emotions in the way dogs have been taught to feel shame. Cats are certainly not virtue signallers. Nor – except when it concerns their offspring – are they at all inclined to self-sacrifice. But given that cats, consequently, do not kill other cats or anything else in order to become martyrs to some absurd belief system, that may be no bad thing. There are no feline suicide-warriors.

 The moralising philosopher who believed he had persuaded his cat to adopt a meat-free diet only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than seek to teach his cat, he would have been wiser to learn from it, as Montaigne did. Living in accord with their nature, cats do not need moral instruction. Dissatisfaction with our natural condition, on the other hand, seems to be natural for human beings. The human animal never ceases to strive for some higher form of life. Cats make no such effort. Without any process of laborious cogitation, these lucid, playful and supremely adaptable creatures already know how to live.
 

@Prettyphile

 

I found the marbles you lost

 

Probably only Swedish people will understand this but poor Loreen.. Her song got eliminated at Melodifestivalen, a great song IMO

What a shock, she was the favorite to win and she didn't even go to the final 

 

 

I kind of want to see Baywatch.

 

It looks like it will be rated R from the trailer, but I don't know if I want to see it if they edit it down to a PG-13 rating.

 

Also Alexandra Daddario boobs in movement!

 

 

Many things I wish/was told to do around my place

 

So little money to do them  

@Stormbringer

 

Bro, Wanna come visit it's only march and it's gonna be so warm  

 

 

American version:

 

^  

^

                                                                                                    

 

Did you even know those temperatures existed outside the arctic and Russia?  

8 minutes ago, Limerlight said:

Did you even know those temperatures existed outside the arctic and Russia?  

 

Of course. Antarctic gets even colder.

Also when preparing my graduation exams - the Arrangements one - we worked with a Canadian trumpet player who was in Chile and he talked us about those horrifying temperatures.

It's going to be a tough week coming up, but at least I'll get 9 days off after this week.

I just realised I can pay for all my flights without spending a dime for my potential trip to Americanland™  

I may/probably will be doing this

 

Hmm, why do Americans put cinnamon on everything!? I've figured out Muerica's palate...

 

Cinnamon

Cheddar Cheese

Sour Cream N' Onion