George Orwell said, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

And he said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

This morning I replied to a post in one of the discussion groups in CBC's ZeD website. The topic was about developing a sense of Canadian culture. (You can check out the website at www.zed.cbc.ca . My member name on the site is donaldb. I'm currently #7 in the Top Ten list of members.) Below is the reply that I posted.
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Good topic! I think that one of the main things we can do to make Canada have a stronger sense of culture is to WATCH CANADIAN TV, SEE CANADIAN MOVIES, AND BUY CANADIAN BOOKS, MAGAZINES, ART, CDS, etc.

We need to to SUPPORT OUR ARTISTS, both with funding agencies and individual support, so that we can hear "our stories" (ex. someone hitchhiking or driving across the prairies when it's -40) instead of being inundated with movies/TV shows/books/songs set in NYC and LA.

Poet John Ciardi said, "The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow."

And he said, "A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."

Here's some more Buddhist wisdom. I don't think that it means you can't enjoy anything in life. It just means you shouldn't spend a lot of time and energy craving pleasure and being attached to it.


"There is pleasure when a sore is scratched,
But to be without sores is more pleasurable still.
Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires,
But to be without desires is more pleasurable still."

-Nagarjuna, "Precious Garland"

Novelist Ian McEwan once called fiction "a higher level of gossip."

Today is Father's Day, which isn't a special day for me because my father died a few years ago. Mother's Day isn't a special day for me because my mother died many years ago. Even though I'm in my forties, I sometimes think of myself as an "orphan".

Robert Frost said, "You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular."

I didn't have a very good relationship with my father for much of my life, but it improved in later years, which I could tell by the grief I felt when he died. My grief when my mother died was visceral and impossible to describe.