Happy Fourth of July!

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” – George Bernard Shaw.

We'll see to it that Elvis lives

Charlemagne was born on this day in 743.


"Kings are not born: they are made by universal hallucination." -- George Bernard Shaw.

We'll drink to that

Prohibition was repealed on this date in 1933.


"Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life." -- George Bernard Shaw.

Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever...

Alcohol was a great sage and a great liar. Its way was toward life, and toward death. That is, it revealed life for what it was, a dream, and hastened one toward death, that dreamless sleep. The dream of life would give way to death, and death in turn, as a nullity abhorred by nature, would give way to new life, not a botched one this time but a fully realized one at last.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.