The French McDonalds, fearing lawsuits for causing obesity from fast food overindulgence, is now putting warnings on its fare. Eating too much fast good can make you fat. Now the food industry gets to share responsibility for yet another disconnect between personal freedom and responsibility.

William Safire in this Sunday’s NY Times Magazine does a piece on sprezzatura – the skillful grace of someone who can make something difficult look easy. A great addition to any list of indicators of skill mastery…beginner, intermediate, sprezzatura.

The London start-up, Shazam, has a new service. Someone dials a number on their cell phone and points the phone at a source of recorded music. For 75 cents, Shazam’s computers filter background sound and search 1.6 million tunes until it can display on the phone the artist and song title of what you’re hearing in less than a second.

Maybe in the next generation, you can point the phone at someone from IT and the phone displays what they’re saying … and then IT can point it at the bean counters, and bean counters can point it at the executives, and the executives can point it at their markets … and …

Paul Pearsall suggests, when we encounter one of life’s major or minor annoyances, that we remind ourselves that it is not permanent, pervasive, or personal.

No two people ever read the same book. Edmund Wilson

In fact, no two people ever listen to the same story, view the same art or walk the same path … and that’s what makes the dialogue so rich

Spent the afternoon plumbing. We’re talking black pipe, copper, unions, elbows … retrofitting and renovating. If you don’t understand the importance of basing all connections on data, plumbing is a patient teacher that persists until you get it. Reminding me of a great line: the oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.

As we reach the pinnacle of fall leaves, golfers here slide in and out of denial about the golf season slipping between our fingers. We’re already talking about darts and beers. Being reality-centered means living in both worlds of sharpening darts and keeping clubs in ready trunks.

Out of clutter, find Simplicity.
From discord, find Harmony.
In the middle of difficulty lies Opportunity.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

In Osho On Zen (by Osho), he makes the point that “Zen is very, very concerned with beauty–less concerned with truth, more concerned with beauty.”

The question becomes: what advantage does beauty have over truth in evoking enlightenment? On one level, many forms of beauty are more impermanent than many forms of truth, therefore beauty better represents what from a Zen perspective is more true about the essence of reality — that life is change. Or as Carl Jung put it: that which changes is true.

Freedom is possible only when you are so integrated that you can take the responsibility of being free.
Osho