“There is one book that I would rather have produced than all my novels,” Willa Cather rued in her most candid interview about creativity. That book was Rocky Mountain Flowers: An Illustrated Guide For Plant-Lovers and Plant-Users (public library| public domain by the pioneering plant ecologist and botanical artist Edith Clements (1874 –1971). Read more

Charles Monroe "Sparky" Schulz - (1922 – 2000) was an American cartoonist and creator of the comic strip Peanuts. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of all time.

"Original Photo courtesy Orange County Archives." More

If you’re a savvy investor like myself, no doubt you’ve been sniffing around the cryptocurrency phenomenon, wondering if it’s time to plunk down some of those 20th Century dollars and trade em in on bitcoins. You might even be wondering what exactly cryptocurrency is, possibly googled it, and undoubtedly come away realizing you haven’t got a clue. But then, what is an Andrew Jackson, really? Just cloth with dyes and inks and watermarks. Worth what it says on the bill if everyone keeps believing it’s real even if no gold is sitting in Ft. Knox to back it up. Economics, a faith based religion?

Cryptocurrency, forget about the gold standard. What you got is blockchain. Okay, I know, you don’t actually understand blockchaining. That’s fine, neither do I and neither do most people who own bitcoins or any other cryptomoney. You just know some economists think this is the future of monetary transactions, safer than greenbacks in your bank account some lowlife hacker can empty faster than you can say Bad Password. Bitcoins, well, their password is unhackable, but … if you forget it, no way can you or the hackers get at it, sorry.

But what you do notice is that bitcoins and their brethren virtual cash move up and down in value the way Apple stocks do, a breathtaking hedge against minimum interest rates on your savings. Now, you could ask yourself, before, hopefully, you convert your life investments and 401-K and the pension to bitcoin, what kind of currency can change value 20% in a day, up, down, you just never know. Would you put your money in a bank that offered the potential to drop in value half overnight?

Well obviously some people would. If it looks like a pyramid scheme and smells like a pyramid scheme and acts like a pyramid scheme, I think you and I know it probably isn’t a real smart investment, it’s just a high tech form of gambling cloaked in crypto-babble. Me, I’d rather bury money out in the yard. Just so long as I don’t lose the map showing where I put it. 
Read more Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Walt Whitman ( 1819 - 1892) American poet, essayist, and journalist.

Quote attribution:  Michaela Chung 

Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978) American cultural anthropologist author and speaker. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University.  Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. More

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily, the remembrance of things as they were" .. …......"Consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind"...... Read more

Thomas Edison - (1847-1931) American inventor and businessman. He invented many devices in fields such as electric power generation, communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.

See more of Randall Munroe's work at xkcd.com - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License,

Simone Adolphine Weil (1909 - 1943)  French philosopher, mystic, and political activist and writer. Weil wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times". More

Carl Gustav Jung (1875- 1961) - Born Karl Gustav Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology and religious studies. He conducted  lengthy correspondence and collaborated with Sigmund Freud for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Eventually Jung established Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from Freud's psychoanalysis.

Johann Friedrich Von Schiller (1759 - 1805) - German playwright, poet, and philosopher. He authored an extraordinary series of dramas, including The Robbers, Maria Stuart, and the trilogy Wallenstein. He best known for his  influence on German literature.