While reading many of the threads in this year’s forum, I am reminded of some wisdom that my Daddy shared with me when I was a young’un. For what it’s worth, I’d like to share his wisdom with my fellow RAGBRAIers.
1. Never argue with a fool. Bystanders may not be able to tell who is who.
2. Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll get dirty and the pig will have a good time regardless.
3. Don’t waste your time trying to teach a mule how to dance. You’ll get frustrated and the mule doesn’t want to learn how to dance anyway.
4. Don’t criticize someone who mispronounces a word when SPEAKING. It means that they learned the word by READING.
5. All people are “Ons.” Some are Less”ons” that we can learn from, while other people are Mor”ons” (’nuff said).
6. A corollary to #5: Nobody knows everything. We can learn something from everybody and teach something to everybody (both positive and negative things).
Please share your words of wisdom. I’d like to pass them along to my grandchildren. Thanks.
See you along the I-O-Way in July.
25 Replies
Your Daddy was a wise man, T. Woo.
-“BB”-
1. Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
2. To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
3. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do.
4. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he sits in a boat and drinks beer.
5. It’s not so much the heat, it’s the stupidity -PBV
If either of you see a guy on a red trike, with a Canadian Flag on it, stop me. We’ll ride to the next town together and I’ll buy you a beer. We can talk about what kind of ons we’ve experienceed. And I shall count it as “A good day”!
And just to add, the fools will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
If you’re gonna do something half-assed be ready to do it twice
My Father told me and I told both of my boys, “you can’t drink all the beer”!!!!
The only other wisdom I can share;
There are two strategies to use when arguing with a woman…neither one works.
You can’t fix stupid.
If they ain’t bitchin’, they ain’t happy.
You were given two eyes and two ears but only one mouth. This means that should should be spending twice as much time watching and listening as you do talking.
The other thing is to remember that if you listen long enough you will hear almost anything. A good rule of thumb is to listen to about half of what you hear — and believe about a half of that.
-“BB”-
Life is like a 10 speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use
With the 8 fingers and 2 thumbs I was given, I get in plenty of trouble poking things just 1/10 of the time I was talking. Imagine what would happen if I used the full quota of 10 times the talking time for using my digits.
Neither of us could have known about the computer revolution that was about to start but if we could have known we might have guessed that my profession would use them heavily. But my dad did become a radio operator and intelligence specialist stationed in San Francisco rather than a trench soldier in Korea in no small part because he knew how to type so when I was in high school he advised me to take the last class I would have considered on my own: typing. It is amazing how such a mundane bit of advice had such an impact on my life!
My uncle was a WWII veteran who ended up driving a truck into China and back on the Burma Road.. When he learned that I was enlisting in the Army he said, “Don’t volunteer for anything!!!” So, in zero week at Fort Bliss, TX, this crusty old sarge said, “I need two volunteers who can type.” Remembering what my Uncle Carl said, I thought to myself, yeah, you bet!!! I didn’t volunteer even though I could type about 40 wpm from my high school days. Two other guys did volunteer and I ended up outside in the August heat picking up cigarette butts with about a hundred other guys who didn’t volunteer while the two “volunteers” were inside typing up a storm in an air conditioned room. “Listen to advice and but think for yourself.”
So as to end this thread, which has nothing to do with RAGBRAI and should not have started here in the first place, I give you the thought that “generalizations are generally wrong.” Such a paradox.
End it! Here’s a tip you can throw in the jar, don’t bet on fat horses…