Mamacita says:  I don’t blame Mother Nature for being upset; we’ve not treated our planet well and probably deserve some discipline for that.  Even so, I think maybe she’s hitting us a bit TOO hard, and in too many places at once.

Excuse me now, while I go down and hide in the closet under the staircase.  The tornado is only twelve miles away, and the sirens in town are blowing so hard I can hear them all the way out here.  While I’m sitting on the floor in there, back to the wall, I’ll say a few prayers for the people who are being hit by Hurricane Ike.

Today’s quotations, brought to you by a lot of people who can say things much better than I can.

1.  The soldiers fight and the kings are heroes.  –Talmud

2.  People are no longer sinful; they are only immature or underprivileged or freightened or more particularly, sick.  –Phyllis McGinley

3.  How can they say that my life is not a success?  Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?  –Logan Pearsall Smith

4.  We don’t call it sin today – we call it self-expression.  –Baroness Stocks

5.  Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime, is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official; and why?  Because the official is impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a personality.  –Soren Kierckegaard

6.  Obstinacy, and heat in sticking to one’s opinions is the surest proof of stupidity.  Is there anything so cocksure, so immovable, so disdainful, so contemplative, so solemn and so serious as an ass?  –Montaigne

7.  Optimist:  a man who gets treed by a lion, but enjoys the view.  –Walter Winchell

8.  Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form.  –Andre Maurois

9.  Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.  –Don Marquis

10.  Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain.  And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.  –Norman Mailer

11.  Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.  –Tennessee Williams

12.  Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty.  Magical music never leaves the memory.  –Thomas Beecham

13.  In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically.  –Vincent Van Gogh

14.  There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.  –Francois La Rochefoucauld

15.  So long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him – pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?  –Lawrence Sterne

16.  In memory everything seems to happen to music.  –Tennessee Williams

17.  No one is old enough to know better.  –Holbrook Jackson

18.  Never confuse movement with action.  –Hemingway

19.  If you are not a thinking man, for what purpose are you a man at all?  –Anon.

20.  When a man’s life is at stake, no delay is too long.  –Juvenal

21.  You must never disagree with a man while you are facing him.  Go around behind him and look the same way he is looking and you will see that things look different from what they do when you are facing him.  Look over his shoulder and get his viewpoint, then go back and face him and you will have a different idea.  –Will Rogers

22.  All men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason.  –John Henry Newman

23.  A man who reforms himself has contributed his full share towards the reformation of his neighbor.  –Norman Douglas

24.  A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.  –Finley Peter Dunne

25.  If you destroy a free market you create a black market.  If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.  –Churchill

26.  Money don’t buy class.  –Andy Rooney

27.  Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can:  all of them make me laugh.  –W.H. Auden

28.  I wanted a perfect ending. . . Now I’ve learned the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.  Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.  Delicious ambiguity.  –Gilda Radner

29.  It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.  –Oscar Wilde

30.  Applause is the spur of noble minds; the end and aim of weak ones.  –Charles Caleb Colton

31.  No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.  –Andrew Carnegie

32.  The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling him who has injured us.  –Jane Porter

33.  There was one who thought himself above me, and he was above me until he had that thought.  –Elbert Hubbard

34.  Noah’s ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic was built by professionals.  –Anon.

35.  The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has had many people to love.  –Jean Renoir

36.  A stiff attitude is one of the attributes of rigor mortis.  –Henry S. Haskins

37.  It’s not what you are that holds you back; it’s what you think you are not.  –Denis Waitly

38.  Do not offer advice which has not been seasoned by your own performance.  –Henry S. Haskins

39.  It usually takes two people to make one of them angry.  –Lawrence Peter

40.  We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.  –John Stuart Mill

41.  To remain young one must change.  –Alexander Chase

42.  Who ever told you that you have to find the miracles of life in someone else?  –Fran Sawyer

43.  “It can’t happen here” is number one on the list of famous last words.  –David Crosby

44.  It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.  –M.L. King, Jr.

45.  So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.  –Robert Louis Stevenson

46.  If nobody loves you, be sure it is your own fault.  –Philip Doddridge

47.  The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system.  –Earl of Shaftsbury

48.  Some people think that whatever is done solemnly must make sense.  –G.C. Lichtenberg

49.  The past always looks better than it was.  It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.  –Finley Peter Dunne

50.  Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.  –Goethe

Now I’m off to the closet under the stairs.  Hope to see you all in a few hours.

I need some red shoes anyway.