Words to live by!

Don't waste time striving for perfection in things that don't matter; for these things accept the advice of experts you trust and/or take what's good enough.

From Commencement 2004 - Barry Schwartz:

QUOTE

I don't believe that society, or individuals, automatically self-correct. I think acts of will are required. And I have tried to suggest several things that you should will for yourself and for others, and work to achieve. I wish each of you a life in which good enough is good enough - a life governed by reasonable expectations, and filled with love and with work that is a calling. A life as part of a community that listens to you just as you listen to it.

UNQUOTE

Amen!

From stevenberlinjohnson.com: The Body Count:

QUOTE

To make a decision as a country to unilaterally invade and overthrow another country without confronting these images, and weighing them in the moral balance, is pure escapism of the worst kind. The fact that the US media has not had a daily tally of estimated Iraqi civilians killed is shameful; how are we to gauge whether our humanitarian ends justify the violent means if we're sheltered from the violence at every turn? It is not propaganda to be subjected to these images; it is moral accountability. Sitting in that theater, trying not to avert my eyes, I thought of all the times Jeff has invoked his first-person experience of 9/11 in debating the war on terror: seeing the violence and the suffering up close clearly colors everything he has written about our response to the attacks since then -- as well it should. But the media and the government have studiously kept us from comparable images of the violence that we've initiated in Iraq. Has the Bush administration ever released an estimate of total civilian deaths in Iraq? Is this not a relevant number? Shouldn't there be a national debate over how many innocent deaths we're willing to tolerate for the hope of planting democracy's seeds in the country? Is it appropriate, for starters, to kill more innocents than Bin Laden did on 9/11? We don't know, because even raising questions like these might undermine morale. To that I say: if we're not grownup enough as a nation to confront these questions and still support our troops, then we're not grownup enough to be starting elective wars in the first place.

UNQUOTE

The Dutch and the Germans love eating herring. And so does Barb. But I don't. It's definitely a matter of taste or Geschmacksache as the Germans say.

Here's two videos of Dutch eating the "new herring" in a Dutch stylee (raw, dipped in onions and eating in a rather graceful :-) style, oodles of fun for 1.50 Euros) and one of the Dutch vendors preparing the herring.

• Barb eats herring (16 Megabytes AVI)
• Dutch vendor prepares herring (8.9MB, AVI)