Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
Category: Kitchen Sink
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.
— New Living Translation
I think I must have one of those faces you can’t help believing.
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).
— Alfred Hitchcock, director
If you have to choose between power and speed — and it often turns out you have to make that choice — you’ve got to go for speed.
Admiral James T Kirk (William Shatner):
You’re not exactly catching us at our best.
Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy):
That much is certain
— Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Leonard Nimoy
This question is opposite to the extreme of the more often-uttered lament that “government should do more to help folks stay married.”
In other words: Does the government have an interest in discouraging lifelong unions?
Unquestionably. It does.
Think about it. Although I’m not a lawyer (and don’t play one on TV), my understanding is that “marital privilege” is a phrase describing the right of a husband and wife not to testify against one another in court. Or, for that matter, any other legal proceeding.
Even if not universally applicable to courtrooms, we’ve gotta believe the idea instructs a lot of behavior at the ground level.
Recall an episode or two of The Sopranos where Adrianna thought this might help her out of a pickle. Or White House Counsel John Dean, who inexplicably married his girlfriend on the eve of giving testimony on “Watergate.”
The divorce process has even more potential. Issue areas need not be bounded by any pesky concern about “relevancy,” because, you know: Anything and everything is said to be by-definition relevant to matters concerning “the best interests of the minor children,” we’re told.
On top of that, the emotional stir of divorce actually seems to have an inherent knack for reaching into the sole of moviation for a lot of individuals such that they pro-actively, willingly dish the dirt on their former loves. The marketed image of legal system “equity” (meaning, this is a place to get even, if nowhere else) creates motive to provide detailed answers to questions “the system” could never have thought to ask.
Imagine:
- The inside scoop on financial records and tax returns.
- Neatly photocopied medical histories otherwise locked behind pesky HIPAA restraints.
- Candid revelations about sexual proclivities, voting histories, and attempts to circumvent handicapped parking space restrictions.
It all strikes me as a lot more efficient and a lot less time-consuming than any of that bulky data-acquisition stuff George Orwell thought would be needed to make his science-fiction world work in 1984.
Maybe no one is acting on this. But we can’t say that government has no motive to do so.
Three minutes until the biggest battle of our professional lives, all comes down to today ….
I look around, I see these young faces and I think, I mean, I made every wrong choice a middle aged man can make …. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life is this game of inches. So’s football.
Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it.
The inches we need are everywhere around us, they’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch ….
Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino).
— Oliver Stone, director
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your head.
Said shortly after he became a stepfather.