The usual eclectic and eccentric mix this week …

If you can’t see the bright side of life … then polish the dull side.

Wear short sleeves … Support your right to bare arms!
Thoughts of Angel

The very concept of “average” necessarily implies variability.
Emily Nakoski, On monkeys, bullshit, and scale

I hold this truth to be self-evident, that a debt crisis cannot be resolved with more debt.
Hellasious on Quantum Economics

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
MFK Fisher quoted in Why Do People Eat Too Much?

Ponder less on what you yourself perhaps think than on what will be the thoughts of the majority of others who, carried away by your authority or your reasons, become persuaded that the terrestrial globe moves among the planets. They will conclude at first that, if the earth is doubtless one of the planets and also has inhabitants, then it is well to believe that inhabitants exist on other planets and are not lacking in the fixed stars, that they are even of a superior nature and in proportion as the other stars surpass the earth in size and perfection. This will raise doubts about Genesis, which says that the earth was made before the stars and that they were created on the fourth day to illuminate the earth … then in turn the entire economy of the Word incarnate and of scriptural truth will be rendered suspect.
17th-century Rector of the College of Dijon writing to the priest-scientist Pierre Gassendi. With thanks to Barnaby Page.