Tag archives: epigrams
I first “met” Ashleigh Brilliant on a family trip to Chicago in 1969. I saw a rack of his Pot-Shot postcards and bought two of them. One of them showed two iguanas on a rock with the caption: “Why are you so hard to ignore.” In the early 1980s I was at the July 4 […]
People who have some kind of religious feelings often believe that they can communicate with their Deity – and some even believe that their prayers can in some way influence human events, or even non-human, such as the weather. As practiced in most cultures today, there seems to be little harm in such beliefs. But […]
My title comes from one of the best-known parts of the Old Testament: Number 23 in the Book of Psalms. I have been familiar with it since the two years of my childhood which were spent in my mother’s hometown of Toronto, Canada. At that time (1940), it was still quite permissible for religion and […]
One of my most popular epigrams says, “When all other means of Communication fail, try Words.” And it is illustrated with an image of Shakespeare. Scholars are still debating how anyone with so provincial a background could have had such a mastery of verbal expression as Shakespeare had (or whoever wrote the vast body of […]
America has always meant Freedom (or Liberty, which means (more or less) the same thing to people all over the World. We even have a gigantic Statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” facing outward from our busiest harbor. Yet the Founders of our Nation, gathering together to draw up a Constitution, had to face the […]
“If I can survive death, I can probably survive anything.” – Ashleigh Brilliant[9 December, 1933 –24 September, 2025], Pot-Shot® # 805 A footloose former teacher with the unlikely name Ashleigh Brilliant grabs his portable microphone, bullhorn, and milk crate and bounds down the stairs. The date is May 21, 1967 – yeah, “The Summer of […]
Many people believe in many different things – yet (speaking personally), I find it hard to believe in anything at all. Of course, the primary “belief” hurdle is whatever people think of as “God.” And there is nothing new about this. There is a whole field of study concerning belief without proof, called “Theology.” But […]
One thing wars are good for (if anything) is the spawning of new words and expressions. Soldiers are particularly involved in this, especially when they’re far from home, and have chances to leave their own form of calling-card. In World War II, one of the most widely spread expressions inscribed, usually by American troops, was […]
The little glass balls we call “marbles” today were once probably made of real marble – but they were no doubt being played with by children thousands of years ago. Just when “having all one’s marbles” became a semi-humorous metaphor for being sane is probably much more recent in origin. And not having all of […]
There’s not much that has stuck with me from a course in Political Theory I once had to take (it was a requirement for getting my B.A. in History at the University of London). But one thing I remember was that it began with Plato and his book The Republic, which was all about an […]
In times past, it was more important for many things to be sharper than we now care about. This applied not only to weapons, such as swords, spears, and arrows – but also to culinary ware, when animal parts often went directly from the place of killing to the place of cooking. And, in pre-modern […]
Cultivated plants and human babies both require great care at their earliest stages – which is why the word “nursery” can apply to the facilities provided to either form of early life. But, when it comes to literature, it is our species whose nurseries have produced by far the more celebrated rhymes. And when several […]
One of the most famous poems in American literature is “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. As you probably know, it depicts a man – the narrator – reading alone in his “chamber.” He is already in a very unhappy state of mind because he has recently lost the love of his life – apparently […]
Looking back on my life, what do I regret? Quite honestly, I don’t even think in those terms. The Past is over, and there’s no point in having second thoughts about it. Did I make any wrong decisions? Should I be sorry for mistakes I’ve made, for people I’ve hurt, for exercising bad judgment (something […]
One of the most popular words in the lexicon of modern society is “care.” People in general don’t like to be handled roughly. Of course, there are exceptions, such as arranged fights or episodes of sexual passion. But we are delicate creatures, in comparison with the hard surfaces of our natural and man-made environment. When […]
A very wise person once said that you should never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes – Because at that point you’ll be a mile away – and you’ve got his shoes! Some churches sing it this way: I got shoes, you got shoes, All God’s chillun got shoes –When I […]
In the early chapters of the Old Testament, we find the story of two brothers, Jacob and Esau, one of whom (Esau) sold his entire inheritance (his “birthright”) to his brother for a single simple meal (a “mess of pottage”). That might be regarded as a very bad bargain. The more civilized method of determining […]
There is probably nothing more thrilling to the average reader than the idea of somebody being saved or rescued from something terrible. I have just seen part of a video in which a woman is apparently trapped in her car which has been swept off in the middle of a raging flood. A man, who […]
As a child, I had grown up in America, in pre-television days – and radio was a major influence on my life. Since practically all the programs were commercially “sponsored,” their primary purpose was to attract and maintain customers in the form of listeners, which they did by providing entertainment, mainly in the form of […]
Why is Love the only emotion we fall into? We don’t fall into Hate, or even into Apathy. For better or worse, there are various diseases which can cause us to fall. One of the best known is epilepsy. One of its supposed sufferers was Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare’s play, one of the people who […]
