Song Lyric of the Day (Maggie Rose, on ‘Something Broken’)

“Life's full of broken things
Like hearts, homes, and dreams
We all come from something broken.”— “Broken,” composed by Patrick Russell Davis, Margaret Rose Durante (AKA Maggie Rose), and Corey Crowder, from Ms. Rose’s EP The Variety Show, Vol. 1 (2016)
 
On Sundays, I normally include a “Spiritual Quote of the Day” on this blog. But last night, while listening to several country music artists on a PBS station, I heard this song from Maggie Rose, a singer-songwriter I hadn't heard of before. 

It struck me that it is precisely “something broken”—call it original sin or just the human condition—that has sparked the need for so much religious consolation.
 
And so, I offer it here, and hope that anyone reading this finds what will mend anything broken in their own lives.

Quote of the Day (Jason Zweig, on the Charade of One-Year Market Forecasts)

“How inaccurate are one-year market forecasts? They're like a person looking in an unlit cavern at midnight for a black cat that isn't there….Over the past 20 years, according to Joachim Klement, an investment strategist at Panmure Liberum in London, the correlation between the forecasts and the market's actual returns was minimal for the [stock] analysts and zero for the [market] strategists.”—American financial journalist and “The Intelligent Investor” columnist Jason Zweig, “How To See Through Wall Street’s Annual Charade,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 11-12, 2025

Quote of the Day (John Donne, on a Time With ‘All Coherence Gone’)

“'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world's condition now.”—English poet John Donne (c. 1572-1631), “An Anatomy of the World,” originally published in 1611

TV Quote of the Day (‘Bewitched,’ As Endora Shows How to Deal With a Humorless Son-in-Law)

Endora [played by Agnes Moorehead] [casting a spell so that son-in-law Darrin laughs at inappropriate times]
“Your views of life I find quite sick.
This spell will change what makes you tick!
At serious things, you'll laugh and giggle.
The graver the note, the more it will tickle!”—Bewitched, Season 7, Episode 27, “Laugh, Clown, Laugh,” original air date Apr. 15, 1971, teleplay by Sol Saks and Ed Jurist, directed by William Asher

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on People’s Destinies)

“The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “Majesty,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post, July 13, 1929, reprinted in Taps at Reveille (1935)

Photo of the Day: Fountain, Shops at Riverside, Hackensack NJ

One of the most vivid memories of my youth in Bergen County, NJ, was the recently opened Paramus Park Mall. It wasn’t just the food court—an innovative feature of malls in the 1970s—but its fountain.

I knew I wasn’t the only one fascinated by it—shoppers not only thronged around the waterfall and accompanying vegetation, but pitched pennies into it.

That feature would soon be copied in enclosed malls across the U.S. But as many of these retail emporiums have transformed into open-air structures or even non-retail uses and maintenance became more expensive, they became less common. (Though it remains enclosed, even Paramus Park removed its waterfall a couple of decades ago, evoking considerable nostalgic mourning among area residents.)

One place where you can still see a fountain, albeit in modified form, is The Shops at Riverside, a few miles south of Paramus Park. While walking through the mall’s corridors yesterday, I heard the familiar sound of my youth, and snapped this picture.

As I discovered, what I heard didn’t come from a waterfall but more like a whirlpool. Water is pumped through an open cavity, which comes back to a lower basin before falling down a sloping surface.

(See Colum Marsh’s July 2018 tribute in Canada’s National Post on why mall fountains represent “a community oasis,” with “the tonic quality of a city park: welcoming and restorative.”)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on a Leader As ‘A Good Public Performer’)

“People do not follow a Leader because he has a demonstrably sound and workable political plan. They follow him because he is a good public performer and because he knows how to provide them with the psychological satisfactions they need. His programme may be self-contradictory and manifestly absurd; but that makes not the slightest difference. Few people are concerned with logic and not many care very much even about their own material interests. They ask for their daily bread, of course; but for very little more than their daily bread. The wealth they covet is not material, but psychological; they crave emotional satisfactions, they want, in the expressive American phrase, ‘to feel good.’” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)