"That’s the key to comedy; allowing yourself to look stupid." Megan Mullally in Ladies’ Home Journal

"Remember that if the opportunities for great deeds should never come, the opportunities for good deeds are renewed day by day. The thing for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory." F.W. Faber

So here's a happy story. We had a great time at Universal Orlando Resort a few weeks ago but, in what I expect is an all-too-common end-of-day experience, a happily exhausted kid lost a souvenir Ollivanders wand on a shuttle bus. And now it's back. Having contacted Universal to express appreciation over an unrelated matter during our visit, I decided to ask whether anyone happened to find it and turn it in. No one had. But Universal insisted on sending a replacement free of charge anyway. (A Hermione Granger model, if you're curious. And yes, Diagon Alley is well worth a visit. So small from the outside, so big from the inside. Almost like... magic.) And yesterday a courier package arrived with the wand in it.

What great customer service, on top of excellent rides and other attractions.

Thanks, Universal. Or in the spirit of Harry Potter, vobis gratias ago.

"We can’t always be happy, but we must strive always to be cheerful." Irving Kristol

"I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." Arthur Hays Sulzberger

"The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions." Albert Camus "The Absurd Man" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

"poor as Job’s turkey" A writer whose name I failed to record in Chronicles magazine May 1994

"There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention – that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary – the sunshine, the memories, the future, - which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life." The narrator Marlow in Joseph Conrad Lord Jim