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Monday, July 27, 2026

Web Log for 7.27.26

Music 

Stephen Bishop.




The Coral.



Quotes, Misattributed 

A few weeks ago the Poets & Storytellers United were running with a quote, misattributed to C.S. Lewis, about being "never too old to pursue goals." 

Considering the ages at which he took on new jobs, new styles of writing, new languages, his marriage and stepfatherhood, it does seem as if Lewis would have agreed with the idea. But he didn't say it. "Goals" was a buzzword of the 1980s. The quote about "You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream" was actually first recorded about twenty years after Lewis died; it was spoken by a Christian motivational speaker called Les Brown, who published a book called Live Your Dreams in which these exact words don't appear, but they've been traced to transcripts of his speeches. 

Another thing Lewis never said was "I sat with my Anger long enough until she told me her right name was Grief." 

In A Grief Observed Lewis did document his movement through the emotional stages of grief, beginning when it "felt so like fear" and going on through other stages Kubler-Ross counted as main and secondary...but he didn't write that line. Any number of grieving people might have written it. It's normal to feel angry about our losses, then feel that anger subsiding into "pure" grief as we accept that the losses are irretrievable. So far, all Google knows about who did write that line is that it wasn't Lewis.

And Lewis never wrote "You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body," either.

Nor did Oscar Wilde write the exact words "Be yourself! Everyone else is already taken," although he might have chortled at that line if he'd ever heard it. The line has been traced to an anonymous journal entry someone made in the 1960s.

Einstein didn't say "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Rita Mae Brown did. Though some say she was quoting a Narcotics Anonymous document.

Nor did Einstein say "You don't really understand a thing until you can explain it to your grandmother." Google thinks Kurt Vonnegut said something like that "first," in the 1970s. I know firsthand that Herbert W. Armstrong said, at several times and in several ways, that if you really know what you are talking about you can explain it to a reasonably intelligent ten-year-old child. He had said it several times, and Dad had tried to test it on my brother and me, well before I was ten years old. Armstrong's genius was for synthetic reading and explanation, not for original phrasing, and he probably got the line from someone else. It's in his Autobiography and in several things he'd published before that.

Arthur Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes say "Elementary, my dear Watson." According to Google, P.G. Wodehouse had Psmith say it in Psmith Journalist, which I've never been able to find.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi did write "“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.", which sounds close, but he never actually wrote "Be the change." That phrasing is of our time, not his. Thoreau wrote something similar to "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams," too, but it was less succinct.

What Machiavelli actually wrote has been reasonably translated as "One must consider the end result," but "The ends justify the means" is just too good a line in English to be an accurate translation from anything anybody ever wrote in Italian. 

Voltaire of course never wrote "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," either. He wrote in French. Apparently what he wrote can't be accurately translated in those exact words either; the quote comes, Google says, from a summary by an English writer.

Happy browsing from these beginning points:






Graphic from Google. Lincoln never said that, either. 

Sports 

Video of Sepp Kuss's narrow escape in the Tour de France.


Women's Issues 

To hold their lead, especially with the CHD "Moms" contingent, the non-Left needs to establish itself as the party of women. So, gloating when a misguided left-leaning woman CEO is replaced with a more "conservative" man is out of order. It should have been possible to replace Cracker Barrel's Julie Fels Masino with a woman who was more attuned to what customers expected. 

Instead of jeering at Fels Masino for being a "woke girlboss," we might do better to jeer at, e.g., Satya Nadella of MicroHubrisSoft with his rape-your-computer philosophy, or Bill Anderson of Bayer, David A. Ricks of Lilly, Rob Davis of Merck, or Albert Bourla of Pfizer, as "macho d'head boybosses who need for someone to feed them Ritalin and put them in time out until their nannies can take them home."

Considering job performance in terms that go beyond male employees' willingness to dodge family responsibilities by working overtime, males really should become rarer at every echelon of corporate management, vetted for things like their respect for the customers, for the company's reputation, and for Life Itself. Taking time off to have a baby may be irresponsible in this overcrowded world, but raising costs while slashing benefits to customers, like Hans Vestberg, should be even worse from a business's point of view. 

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