East of Boston

It's Still July 4th In Malaysia, But I Suppose That Doesn't Count

Sort of busy this evening, but I wanted to wish everyone a happy 4th of July!

This bench is a primo spot to watch the Bourne fireworks, which will be set off on July 5th (9 PM), and will be visible along the Canal... especially in the Buzzards Bay area.

Don't park behind the vacant movie theater... that's my spot.

In other Patriotic news... the Pats cheerleaders did a clinic in China, to get everyone amped for the Olympics.

http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/articles/2008/07/03/spirit_of_new_england_pats_cheerleaders_in_china/

Big ups to Walter for the link.

 The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
--Harold Rosenberg

America is a young country with an old mentality.
--George Santayana

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
--George Santayana

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.
--Chief Seattle

American ''energy'' is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.
--Susan Sontag

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.
--Susan Sontag

In America everything's about who's number one today.
--Bruce Springsteen

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.
--Freya Stark

America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
--Ringo Starr

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
--Gertrude Stein

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
--Gertrude Stein

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
--John Steinbeck

The biggest difference between ancient Rome and the USA is that in Rome the common man was treated like a dog. In America he sets the tone. This is the first country where the common man could stand erect.
--I. F. Stone

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
--Margaret Thatcher

To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.
--Norman Thomas

America is just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
--Hunter S. Thompson

The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.
--Alexis De Tocqueville

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.
--Alexis De Tocqueville

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
--Arnold Toynbee

In Boston they ask, ''How much does he know?'' In New York, ''How much is he worth?'' In Philadelphia, ''Who were his parents?''
--Mark Twain