Charlie Chaplin speaks

I hadn't before seen Charlie Chaplin's movie, The Great Dictator, but it ends with a rousing speech. First, a bit of background from Wikipedia:

Chaplin spent two years developing the script, and began filming in September 1939. He had submitted to using spoken dialogue, partly out of acceptance that he had no other choice but also because he recognised it as a better method for delivering a political message. Making a comedy about Hitler was seen as highly controversial, but Chaplin's financial independence allowed him to take the risk. "I was determined to go ahead," he later wrote, "for Hitler must be laughed at."Chaplin replaced the Tramp (while wearing similar attire) with "A Jewish Barber", a reference to the Nazi party's belief that the star was a Jew. In a dual performance he also plays the dictator "Adenoid Hynkle", a parody of Hitler which Maland sees as revealing the "megalomania, narcissism, compulsion to dominate, and disregard for human life" of the German dictator.
Watching this speech reminds me about how history so often repeats itself.

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Quote that captures my love of sleep

Ever since Arianna Huffington convinced me to undertake the "sleep challenge," I have been trying to get more sleep, and I've been enjoying it more, as well as enjoying my better-rested awake time more. Yesterday, I stumbled across this quote: "Sleeping is my drug, my bed is my dealer and my alarm clock is the police."

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Not living with much

I enjoyed looking at this series of photos of Swedish students showing their modest amounts of possessions. I know that I'm no longer a student, and I do have children who have their own collections of things, but I do aspire to have a more portable existence. If I were to move to a small space, the most obvious problem is that I have thousands of paper books, many of them with my hand-written notes inside. If only there were an efficient way to scan all of those pages, to shrink all of them to the size of an external hard drive. Another problem is that I have a workshop full of tools. Last night, I reached into some spare parts and fixed the furnace, so I'm weary of giving away even the boxes of odds and ends, much less the tools that I use to repair things at the house. And what would I do with my musical instruments? I have several guitars, as well as a PA and (once again) boxes of music. Then again, I sometimes imagine the house being destroyed by fire--we all escape with nothing at all, but I do have backup hard drives off-site with all of my writings, photos, movies, financial paperwork.   It would be a disaster, of course, but in this thought experiment it would also be an opportunity to rebuild my collection of possession leaner and meaner.

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