• Do the best you can within your limitations. Don’t half-ass things because of your limitations.

• There is no useless information. Relevancy is the measure. All information is useful if it is relevant at a given point in time.

• Some ignorance is best left untainted.

• “The purchase of art is one of the few instances of socially acceptable conspicuous consumption”.

• SETI is Back!

• So you wake up one fine fall morning, tempted to think of San Antonio as a dynamic, burgeoning metropolis. To keep enthusiasms in check, the photograph below is a stark reminder that at it’s core, our city is still a rinky-dink cow-town with a fort attached to it, same as a couple hundred years ago. Some days, one still gets a sense that bands of Comanches roam the streets craving scalp, wampum and women. Darn purty city though…

• There are always people willing to die for a cause, and people willing to kill for a cause. Moral examples are set by the first. History is written by the second.

• If you just keep on going, you’ll get there.

• All gun, no God.

• There’s only so much you can do before what you do becomes all you can do.

• For centuries, scores of unmitigated do-gooders and difference-makers have tried to do good and make a difference. Granted, thanks to the efforts of a few enlightened folks we have better gadgets now. But really, is the world inherently a better place than it used to be a thousand years ago?

• Fibonachos = Nachos so good you can’t help eating 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21… of them.

• Regardless of how greatly the notion of civil society is parsed and euphemized, it all comes down to food, sex and shelter.

• Long Shtick = When the BS supersedes the journey.

• The finer the raiment the deeper the gayment.

• The depth of a culture –or a community– is reflected in the quality of its dumplings.

• San Antonio’s zeitgeist is not fond of itself.

• PTSD = Post Traumatic Spurs Disorder

• Circumstantial ignorance is understandable and sometimes tolerable. Willful stupidity is neither.

• Habemus Ché Paco.

• Eggs Benedict on their face they’ve got…

• Undo the naughts.

• Is it me, or does everything seem to run on a “complex set of algorithms”?

• Thomas Friedman is to economics, what Ken Burns is to documentaries, what Kenny G is to Jazz.

• A mayor creencia, mayor carencia.

• Making efforts effortless is being efficient. Making effortless efforts is being lazy.

• Not to diminish at all from the might, the significance, and the importance of China as a global entity, but it seems that too many have extrapolated too much from the very impressive drummers at the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics; creating what has become an über-urban legend of world dominance by cadres of disciplined state workers. The march of history is never that simple, context and circumstance are fluid, and human nature is always a wild card.

• There has got to be a better option than forcing people to purchase health care from insurance companies.

• USA downgraded. Apes rise.

• Existential surrealism is the refuge of a disenfranchised polity. When costumes of superheroes show up –cheered and celebrated– at political rallies, the escapist reveries of surrealism have effectively trumped the aspirational ambitions of symbolism.

• My fellow husbands (redux): Albeit with a huge disparity in the severity of the circumstance, there is undoubtedly a commonality between Bin Laden’s wife rushing an armed commando and Wendi Murdoch rushing a foam-pie-evil-doer. Both women, outstanding women by any regard, are the epitome of warrior-wives; that is, women of a certain character who, among other things, appear to take their marital vows very seriously. So the question again, a little differently: My manly friends, Is your spouse a warrior-wife willing to throw herself in front of bullet or foam pie to keep you from harm?

• Clowns are important. They provide distraction and entertainment prior to the main event. A good ringmaster knows when to bring in the clowns, and, more importantly, when to take them out. Yet at the moment, it seems the ringmasters are on leave. As it is, the clowns are freelancing and are enjoying themselves much more than we enjoy them. Could someone please call curtains on the clowns?

• If something can be lowered why can’t it be highered?

• Weaselopochtli = The conniving, ne’er-do-well, half-brother of the Sun God Huitzilopochtli

• From the Audacity Of Hope to the Paucity Of Nope. From nowhere to nowhere in no time at all.

• Texpertise = What makes every Texan uniquely qualified to give advice or opinion on any subject. We are all Texperts.

• Good or bad is defined by whose fingers are on the purse strings.

• It always impresses to see the depth of conviction of those who take a principled stance –without irony– to exercise their inalienable right to be idiots.

• Morality, in and of itself, does not pose an intrinsic problem when considered as a general fundament for ethical behavior. What is a problem is when ascribed morals come into play. Typically, ascribed morals advance subjective notions of moral imperatives and moral implications, which eventually end up as hidebound moral hazards: a compounded pile-up of interpretive values purported to be significant, legitimate qualifiers of circumstance. All in all, an abject denial of common sense.

• Truth is inevitably distorted by consensus.

• It is disingenuous to celebrate the outcome of an election when 93% of the electorate does not show up to vote.

• My fellow husbands: Could you declare, with complete certainty, that your wife would willfully rush an armed commando in an effort to save your life? For that matter, would you do the same for her?

• This is a nation of immigrants. Any notion to the contrary is benightedly delusional.

• There’s a thing for everything.

• In societies that allow utopian constructs, intellect tends to be untethered by context. In dystopian formulations of society, context is what drives intellectual conceits. In both cases, the outcomes are extreme and fallible. Yet, of both, it is only dystopia that allows random quirks fancies and foibles into its equational sequences.

• It is when ignorance colors judgement, that judgement can only distinguish black or white.

• Yo no niego la cruz de mi parroquia. Pero de hecho tengo muchas parroquias y no veo razón alguna para guardarle devoción a solo una.

• In the absence of grand gestures there are no magnificent failures, just the periodic petering-out of ineptitude.

• It’s surprising how general theories frequently apply only to the most specific of circumstances.

• Celebrity for a cause invariably subjects any cause to the vagaries of celebrity.

• On its own, fortuitous circumstance is a weak foundation for sustainable enterprise.

• At the intersection of art and non-profit is where art becomes diminished.