Weekly Occurrence #131

13 Virtues, How Not to Waste Your Life, Doing the Thing, etc.

🧑‍💻 Hi! I’m Luke. Follow me anywhere you’d like.

💌 Every week, I send out links and thinks on the arts, productivity, trying to be a better person, and the intersection of those and all things. It’s free forever, but every week I also send out essays, mostly to my paid subscribers. Subscriptions are on sale for only $25, now-my birthday, March 2. Below is an assortment of links I’ve shared over the years.

✍️ Years ago I read Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s resolutions and the list has stuck with me ever since, including one resolution that has since become my motto:

“Keep hoping machine running.”

🤔 Make sure you are having a good day, every day that you can. “Did I sleep enough? Did I connect deeply with people I love? Did I get some time to myself? Did I make choices for my body that felt good—like, did I take a good walk, did I eat healthy, did I exercise? If I get those four things in place, usually my days are pretty good.”

🍻 As seen in Bilbo’s: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

🏀 Basketball-Reference is a comprehensive online database that provides detailed basketball statistics, player profiles, and advanced analytics.

⚾️ Of course there’s Baseball-Reference, too.

👏 This video of Paul Simon on Sesame Street makes me happy.

👤 ID of every person on the Sgt. Pepper album cover.

🚴 Kids jumping bikes in the ‘70s.

💻 Stickertop.art: “each laptop tells a story through its stickers and gives us a glimpse of the personality of the owners.”

🎶 Unfortunately there seems to be no references, but some fun music (supposed) facts, including:

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division was a direct response to the popular pop song “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tennille.

The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” was inspired by the dialogue (“Have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have?”) in the 1955 film Guys & Dolls.

On May 11, 1978, Guided By Voices vocalist Robert Pollard threw the first no-hitter in Wright State University history.

✉️ Kurt Vonnegut on buying envelopes.

♟ Life advice from chess hustlers: “The one thing I tell my students is that when you get to a confrontation of any type, you have to remain calm. When you remain calm, you can see the board a lot clearer. You can see the person you’re playing or arguing with a lot more clearly, for who and what they are. So you don’t even have to entertain that shit. You understand?”

📖 In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin shared his thirteen virtues. “Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.”

🧅 A history of The Onion.

☎ A family in Maine opted not for a smartphone but a landline for their 10-year-old, seeking to give her independence without intro­ducing social-media-driven anxiety and distraction. The parents rallied neighbors to adopt “landline pods,” creating a network of phone-based connection among children. Without screens, the kids focused more on conversation, listening, and empathy; they arranged playdates, checked in with sick friends, and shared real talk.

🎨 Grandma Moses began painting in her 70s. She became an icon.

🧩 “Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing… The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.”

🐶 Been waiting for this video my whole life: all the dogs, explained.

👎 For their 50th anniversary, the 50 best Siskel & Ebert reviews. No Home Alone 3? As far as I’m concerned, whatever streaming service gets this show online wins the war.

🍃 How Not to Waste Your Life: “Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.”

📈 Rapper 50 Cent, adjusted for inflation.

🥛 “The first thing you should know? The dates, as we know them, have nothing to do with safety.” The expiration dates you should actually follow.

📽️ Spike Lee’s essential cinema for aspiring filmmakers.

⚔️ From Ethan Hawke’s Rules for a Knight: “Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.”

🖼️ Over 1,000 pieces of art by Van Gogh have been cataloged, digitized and made available online.

🌈 A look at Reading Rainbow, a wonderful show and cornerstone of my childhood, created in 1983 to combat summer reading slumps. When asked if he was fine with the show defining him, host LeVar Burton replied with a resounding yes. “As a son of an English teacher, as a Black man, coming from a people for whom it was illegal to know how to read, not that long ago, I’m good with that.”

🎧 Loved this breakdown of the “most iconic” samples in electronic music year-by-year, starting in 1990.

🪷 Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that many relationship conflicts stem from wrong perceptions. To repair them, he suggests three steps: first, calm yourself and recognize your interpretation may be mistaken; second, express your hurt gently, acknowledging it might come from misperception and ask for clarity; third, practice deep, compassionate listening to the other person’s response.

🙏 Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the Meaning of Life. “When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!”

And what does “Si jeunesse savait” mean? If youth only knew!

Indeed.

⏲️ And finally, a recipe for life from Muhammad Ali:

“I would like for them to say, he took a few cups of love. He took one tablespoon of patience, one tablespoon of generosity, one pint of kindness; he took one quart of laughter, one piece of concern, and then he mixed willingness with happiness. He added lots of faith, and he stirred it up well. Then he spread it and expanded it over a lifetime. And he served each and every deserving person he met.”

❤️ Keep The Hoping Machine running.

Love,
Luke